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Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) is a book by the American journalist and socialist John Reed about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, which Reed experienced firsthand. Reed followed many of the prominent Bolshevik leaders closely during his time in Russia. John Reed died in 1920, shortly after the book was finished, and he is one of the few Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow, a site normally reserved only for the most prominent Soviet leaders.THIS book is a slice of intensified; history as I saw it. It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets. John Reed John Reed was on an assignment for The Masses, a magazine of socialist politics, when he was reporting the Russian Revolution. Although Reed states that he had "tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth" during the time of the event, he stated in the preface that "in the struggle my sympathies were not neutral" (since the book leans towards the Bolsheviks and their viewpoints) Before John Reed left for Russia, the Espionage Act was passed on June 15, 1917, which fined and imprisoned anyone who interfered with the recruiting of soldiers and prohibited the mailing of any newspaper or magazine that promoted such sentiments. The U. S. Post Office was also given leave to deny any mailing that fitted these standards from further postal delivery, and then to disqualify a magazine because it had missed a mailing (due to the ban) and hence was no longer considered a "regular publication."

A Confession or My Confession, is a classic Leo Tolstoy book and a short work on the subject of melancholia, philosophy and religion. It was written in 1879 to 1880, when Tolstoy was in his early fifties.The book is a brief autobiographical story of the author's struggle with a mid-life existential crisis. It describes his search for the answer to the ultimate philosophical question: "If God does not exist, since death is inevitable, what is the meaning of life?." Without the answer to this, for him, life had become "impossible".The story begins with the Eastern fable of the dragon in the well. A man is chased by a beast into a well, at the bottom of which is a dragon. The man clings to a branch that is being gnawed on by two mice (one black, one white, representing night and day and the relentless march of time). The man is able to lick two drops of honey (representing Tolstoy's love of his family and his writing), but because death is inevitable, he no longer finds the honey sweet.Tolstoy goes on to describe four possible attitudes towards this dilemma. The first is ignorance. If one is oblivious to the fact that death is approaching, life becomes bearable. The problem with this for him personally is that he is not ignorant. Having become conscious of the reality of death, there is no going back.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a mystery story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been recognized as the first modern detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". The story opens with a lengthy explanation of ratiocination. Dupin demonstrates his prowess by deducing his companion's thoughts as if through apparent supernatural power. The story then turns to the baffling double murder of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter at their home in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. According to newspaper accounts, the mother was found in a yard behind the house, with multiple broken bones and her throat so deeply cut that her head fell off when the body was moved. The daughter was found strangled to death and stuffed upside down into a chimney. The murders occurred in a fourth-floor room that was locked from the inside; on the floor were found a bloody straight razor, several bloody tufts of gray hair, and two bags of gold coins. Several witnesses reported hearing two voices at the time of the murder, one male and French, but disagreed on the language spoken by the other. The speech was unclear, and every witness admits that he does not know the language he claims to have heard.Paris natives Dupin and his friend, the unnamed narrator of the story, read these newspaper accounts with interest. The two live in seclusion and allow no visitors. They have cut off contact with "former associates" and venture outside only at night.

The Power of Concentration is a top self-help book on the subject of concentration by Theron Q. Dumont that contains this excerpt:It is of the utmost value to learn how to concentrate. To make the greatest success of anything you must be able to concentrate your entire thought upon the idea you are working on. The person that is able to concentrate utilizes all constructive thoughts and shuts out all destructive ones. The greatest man would accomplish nothing if he lacked concentration. It is of the utmost value to learn how to concentrate. To make the greatest success of anything you must be able to concentrate your entire thought upon the idea you are working on. The person that is able to concentrate utilizes all constructive thoughts and shuts out all destructive ones. The greatest man would accomplish nothing if he lacked concentration. We all know that in order to accomplish a certain thing we must concentrate. It is of the utmost value to learn how to concentrate. To make a success of anything you must be able to concentrate your entire thought upon the idea you are working out.Do not become discouraged, if you are unable to hold your thought on the subject very long at first. There are very few that can. It seems a peculiar fact that it is easier to concentrate on something that is not good for us, than on something that is beneficial. This tendency is overcome when we learn to concentrate consciously.

Sadhana, literally "a means of accomplishing something", is an ego-transcending spiritual practice. It includes a variety of disciplines in Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Muslim traditions that are followed in order to achieve various spiritual or ritual objectives.

Spiritual meditation is the pathway to Divinity. It is the mystic ladder which reaches from earth to heaven, from error to Truth, from pain to peace. Every saint has climbed it; every sinner must sooner or later come to it, and every weary pilgrim that turns his back upon self and the world, and sets his face resolutely toward the Father's Home, must plant his feet upon its golden rounds. Without its aid you cannot grow into the divine state, the divine likeness, the divine peace, and the fadeless glories and unpolluting joys of Truth will remain hidden from you. Meditation is the intense dwelling, in thought, upon an idea or theme, with the object of thoroughly comprehending it, and whatsoever you constantly meditate upon you will not only come to understand, but will grow more and more into its likeness, for it will become incorporated into your very being, will become, in fact, your very self. If, therefore, you constantly dwell upon that which is selfish and debasing, you will ultimately become selfish and debased; if you ceaselessly think upon that which is pure and unselfish you will surely become pure and unselfish. Tell me what that is upon which you most frequently and intensely think, that to which, in your silent hours, your soul most naturally turns, and I will tell you to what place of pain or peace you are traveling, and whether you are growing into the likeness of the divine or the bestial.There is an unavoidable tendency to become literally the embodiment of that quality upon which one most constantly thinks. Let, therefore, the object of your meditation be above and not below, so that every time you revert to it in thought you will be lifted up; let it be pure and unmixed with any selfish element; so shall your heart become purified and drawn nearer to Truth, and not defiled and dragged more hopelessly into error.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman after reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women should only receive domestic education. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, especially morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the sexes have made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern feminist; the word itself did not emerge until decades after her death.

Socialism is a classic political science/political philosophy essay by John Stuart Mill. This venerable political science book contains the following excerpt from the introduction:It was in the year 1869 that, impressed with the degree in which, even during the last twenty years, when the world seemed so wholly occupied with other matters, the socialist ideas of speculative thinkers had spread among the workers in every civilized country, Mr. Mill formed the design of writing a book on Socialism. Convinced that the inevitable tendencies of modern society must be to bring the questions involved in it always more and more to the front, he thought it of great practical consequence that they should be thoroughly and impartially considered, and the lines pointed out by which the best speculatively-tested theories might, without prolongation of suffering on the one hand, or unnecessary disturbance on the other, be applied to the existing order of things. He therefore planned a work which should go exhaustively through the whole subject, point by point; and the chapters now printed are the first rough drafts thrown down towards the foundation of that work. These chapters might not, when the work came to be completely written out and then re-written, according to the author's habit, have appeared in the present order; they might have been incorporated into different parts of the work. It has not been without hesitation that I have yielded to the urgent wish of the editor of this Review to give these chapters to the world; but I have complied with his request because, while they appear to me to possess great intrinsic value as well as special application to the problems now forcing themselves on public attention, they will not, I believe, detract even from the mere literary reputation of their author, but will rather form an example of the patient labor with which good work is done.

The Key to Success is a classic self-help book on the subject of success by the great American writer and minister, Russell Conwell. This top self-help book is a must for anyone who wishes to achieve success and obtain the inspiration to do so. This great self-help book is succinct and to the point and contains the following passage by the author: "People are thinking, but they can think much more. The housewife is thinking about the chemical changes caused by heat in meats, vegetables, and liquids. The sailor thinks about the gold in sea-water, the soldier thinks of smokeless powder and muffled guns; the puddler meditates on iron squeezers and electric furnaces; the farmer admires Luther Burbank's magical combinations in plant life; the school-girl examines the composition of her pencil and analyses the writing-paper; the teacher studies psychology at first hand; the preacher understands more of the life that now is; the merchant and manufacturer give more attention to the demand. Yes, we are all thinking. But we are still thinking too far away; even the prism through which we see the stars is near the eyes. The dentist is thinking too much about other people's teeth."This book is sent out to induce people to look at their own eyes, to pick up the gold in their laps, to study anatomy under the tutorship of their own hearts. One could accumulate great wisdom and secure fortunes by studying his own finger-nails. This lesson seems the very easiest to learn, and for that reason is the most difficult.

The Conquest of Bread is an 1892 book by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is an American philosophy classic by the great American writer and philosopher, William James.Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that seeks to both define truth and resolve metaphysical issues. William James demonstrates an application of his method in the form of a simple story:A live squirrel supposed to be clinging on one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?James solves the issue by making a distinction between practical meaning. That is, the distinction between meanings of "round." Round in the sense that the man occupies the space north, east, south, and west of the squirrel; and round in the sense that the man occupies the space facing the squirrel's belly, back and sides. Depending on what the debaters meant by "going round," the answer would be clear. From this example James derives the definition of the pragmatic method: to settle metaphysical disputes, one must simply make a distinction of practical consequences between notions, then, the answer is either clear, or the "dispute is idle."Both James and his colleague, Charles Sanders Peirce, coined the term "cash value.

The Pilgrim's Progress is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of theological fiction in English literature and a progenitor of the narrative aspect of Christian media. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and never been out of print. It appeared in Dutch in 1681, in German in 1703 and in Swedish in 1727. The first North American edition was issued in 1681. It has also been cited as the first novel written in English. According to literary editor Robert McCrum, "there's no book in English, apart from the Bible, to equal Bunyan's masterpiece for the range of its readership, or its influence on writers as diverse as William Hogarth, C. S. Lewis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, George Bernard Shaw, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Enid Blyton. The words on which the hymn "To be a Pilgrim" is based, come from the novel.Bunyan began his work while in the Bedfordshire county prison for violations of the Conventicle Act of 1664, which prohibited the holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Early Bunyan scholars such as John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in Bunyan's second, shorter imprisonment for six months in 1675, but more recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock believe that it was begun during Bunyan's initial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672 right after he had written his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Considerations on Representative Government is a political science book by John Stuart Mill published in 1861.¿¿Mill argues for representative government, the ideal form of government in his opinion. One of the more notable ideas Mill puts forth in the book is that the business of government representatives is not to make legislation. Instead Mill suggests that representative bodies such as parliaments and senates are best suited to be places of public debate on the various opinions held by the population and to act as watchdogs of the professionals who create and administer laws and policy. In his words:

The Acquisitive Society was written by R. H. Tawney and published in 1920. Tawney herein criticizes the selfish individualism of modern industrial societies. He argues that capitalism corrupts via the promotion of economic self-interest, leading to aimless production in response to greed and insatiable acquisitiveness, and hence to perversions of industrialism. He attests further that, by extension, nationalism leads to the perversion of imperialism and to a necessarily failed balance of power strategy, resulting in unnecessary wars. It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles. They are incurious as to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on the map. And it might fairly be argued that in ordinary times that combination of intellectual tameness with practical energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not to justify, the equanimity with which its possessors bear the criticism of more mentally adventurous nations. It is the mood of those who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without re-opening the deal. It leaves the mind free to concentrate undisturbed upon profitable activities, because it is not distracted by a taste for unprofitable speculations. Most generations, it might be said, walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept; the main thing is that they should march. The blinkers worn by Englishmen enable them to trot all the more steadily along the beaten {2} road, without being disturbed by curiosity as to their destination.

Poems of Nature is an extensive collection of nature poetry by the great American naturalist and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. This classic American poetry collection includes a diverse set of nature poems, including the following: NATURE, INSPIRATION, SIC VITA, THE FISHER'S BOY, THE ATLANTIDES, THE AURORA OF GUIDO, SYMPATHY, FRIENDSHIP, TRUE KINDNESS, TO THE MAIDEN IN THE EAST, FREE LOVERUMOURS FROM AN ÆOLIAN HARP, LINES, STANZAS, A RIVER SCENE, RIVER SONG, SOME TUMULTUOUS LITTLE RILL, BOAT SONG, TO MY BROTHER, STANZAS, THE INWARD MORNING, GREECE, THE FUNERAL BELL, and many many others.This classic collection of Henry David Thoreau poems touches on the themes of love and loss in addition to the power and wonder of the natural world.Poems of nature includes this snippet from the introduction: The fifty poems here brought together under the title 'Poems of Nature' are perhaps two-thirds of those which Thoreau preserved. Many of them were printed by him, in whole or in part, among his early contributions to Emerson's Dial, or in his own two volumes, The Week and Walden, which were all that were issued in his lifetime. Others were given to Mr. Sanborn for publication, by Sophia Thoreau, the year after her brother's death (several appeared in the Boston Commonwealth in 1863); or have been furnished from time to time by Mr. Blake, his literary executor."

This Henry David Thoreau classic is called Wild Apples. It is a venerable Henry David Thoreau work, subtitled "The History of the Apple Tree," and it stands as a classic among natural history essays. This Thoreau essay contains the following excerpt:"It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of the Rosaceae, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatae, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and shrivelled Crab-Apple has been recovered from their stores."

Walking, or sometimes referred to as "The Wild", is classic Henry David Thoreau essay based on a lecture first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. It was written between 1851 and 1860, but parts were extracted from his earlier journals. Thoreau read the piece a total of ten times, more than any other of his lectures. "Walking" was first published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly after his death in 1862. It's considered it one of his seminal works, so much so, that he once wrote of the lecture, "I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter." Walking is a Transcendental essay in which Thoreau talks about the importance of nature to mankind, and how people cannot survive without nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, yet we seem to be spending more and more time entrenched by society. For Thoreau walking is a self-reflective spiritual act that occurs only when you are away from society, that allows you to learn about who you are, and find other aspects of yourself that have been chipped away by society. "Walking" is an important canon in the transcendental movement that would lay the foundation for his best known work, Walden. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, and George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, it has become one of the most important essays in the Transcendentalist movement.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is a book by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). It is ostensibly the narrative of a boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, that Thoreau took with his brother John in 1839. John died of tetanus in 1842 and Thoreau wrote the book, in part, as a tribute to his memory. The book's first draft was completed while Thoreau was living at Walden Pond (1845-47). He was unable to find a publisher, however, and therefore had it published at his own expense. Few copies sold and he was left with several hundred extras and went into debt. A slightly revised version of A Week, based on corrections Thoreau had made himself, was published in 1868, six years after his death.While the book may appear to be a travel journal, broken up into chapters for each day, this is deceptive. The actual trip took two weeks and while given passages are a literal description of the journey - from Concord, Massachusetts, down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, to the Merrimack River, up to Concord, New Hampshire, and back - much of the text is in the form of digressions by the Harvard-educated author on diverse topics such as religion, poetry, and history. Thoreau relates these topics to his own life experiences, often in the context of the rapid changes taking place in his native New England during the Industrial Revolution, changes that Thoreau often laments.

The Compleat Angler (the spelling is sometimes modernised to The Complete Angler, though this spelling also occurs in first editions) is a book by Izaak Walton, first published in 1653 by Richard Marriot in London. Walton continued to add to it for a quarter of a century. It is a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in prose and verseWalton was born in Stafford and moved to London when he was in his teens in order to learn a trade. The Compleat Angler reflects the author's connections with these two locations, especially on the River Dove, central England, that forms the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire in the Peak District. The book was dedicated to John Offley of Madeley, Staffordshire, and there are references in it to fishing in the English Midlands. However, the work begins with Londoners making a fishing trip up the Lea Valley in Hertfordshire, starting at Tottenham.Walton was not sympathetic to the Puritan regime of the 1650s and the work has been seen as a reaction to the turbulence of the English Civil War and its aftermath; "the disorder of the present times received muted comment in the work's scenes of harmony", is the view of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.[2] "Study to be Quiet" was one of Walton's favourite mottos.

Society and Solitude is a classic essay collection by the great American philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This essay collection compiles twelve of Emerson's finest essays and includes the following works: Society and solitude -- Civilization -- Art -- Eloquence -- Domestic life -- Farming -- Works and days -- Books -- Clubs -- Courage -- Success -- Old age.This great American essays collection contains the following excerpt: I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. 'Do you not see,' he said, 'the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-----, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?' He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted

The Majesty of Calmness is a classic and top-rated self-help book by the great American lecturer and essayist, William George Jordan. This famous self-help book contains the following lines:Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals. It is the moral atmosphere of a life self-centred, self-reliant, and self-controlled. Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence, and conscious power,--ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis.The Sphinx is not a true type of calmness,--petrifaction is not calmness; it is death, the silencing of all the energies; while no one lives his life more fully, more intensely and more consciously than the man who is calm.The Fatalist is not calm. He is the coward slave of his environment, hopelessly surrendering to his present condition, recklessly indifferent to his future. He accepts his life as a rudderless ship, drifting on the ocean of time. He has no compass, no chart, no known port to which he is sailing. His self-confessed inferiority to all nature is shown in his existence of constant surrender. It is not,-- calmness.