Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

In this, the 15th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, brings his storytelling skills to a subject famous at the time but less so now: Joachim Murat, the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonapart, who established him as King Joachim the First of Naples. Joachim is nothing if not an attractive, indeed romantic hero.

The story of Nisida is worthy of an Italian opera in the great romantic tradition, and indeed Donizetti attempted it, but without success. It is the story of an attempt by a womanizing nobleman to seduce and ruin the daughter of a poor but admirable fisherman, an attempt that ends in his death at the hands of her brother, who is then sentenced to die and is executed, but not by the hands of the law. The story is told in lush and melodramatic style, tending in places to comedy.

In 1910, when Edwin Arlington Robinson published The Town Down the River, he included what has become one of his most famous poems: "Miniver Cheevy". His portrait of this man, a "child of scorn" who "wept that he was ever born," who "sighed for what was not", who "scratched his head and kept on thinking", captures Arlington's sense of life in 32 immortal lines. The other poems in the book, though not as famous as "Miniver Cheevy", amplify and explore Arlington's sense of the fate of humankind in ways both serious and comic.

In this, the 18th of the series, Dumas explores the history of a famous French aristocratic family: that of Marie de Rossan, also known as Diane de Joannis de Roussan and as Anne-Elisabeth De Rossan, but in any case the Marquise de Ganges and La Belle Belle Provençale - often described as the most beautiful woman of her time. It was, indeed, her beauty that undid her.

In this, the 17th of the series, Dumas, in this case more a novelist than a historian, turns his attention to a story from Russia: that of Vaninka. Her father was a Russian count and a general in the Russian Imperial army under Paul I. She falls in love with one of her father's officers, whose tragic but accidental death leads her to a savage crime. Ironically, bringing her to justice requires a great perversion of justice itself.

The marquise was tried, convicted, and executed for poisoning her father and two of her brothers. It appears that she learned the art of the poisoner from her lover, Godin de Sainte-Croix. She also targeted but did not kill her sister, a Carmelite nun. Her case launched what is known in French history as the Affair of the Poisons, a long-running judicial scandal that led to the execution or imprisonment of dozens of people, many of the highest rank in French society, including prominent members of the court of Louis XIV.

The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the 14th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, brings his storytelling skills to a famous subject: the background of one of the most famous of French lawsuits, centering around the secret abduction of Bernard de la Guiche, later count of Saint-Geran, from his mother, Suzanne de Longaunay, by the marquis de Saint-Maixant.

Ever since the time of Louis XIV, the story has been told of a man mysteriously snatched out of the world and buried for life not merely in a prison cell but also in an mask of iron: an imprisonment designed to ensure no one would ever know his name or even see his face. Dumas asks: Who was the man in the iron mask? Why was he imprisoned? Why were such strange precautions taken, and why was he treated with such respect and care, given everything he asked for--except his freedom and his name?

In this, the 10th of the series, Dumas places us at the court of Joan of Naples, a beautiful, emotional, highly capable woman at the center of 30 years of plotting, betrayal, intrigue, war, beauty, love, and death. Hers is a world at war between both secular and ecclesiastical centers of power: the Pope at Avignon, the king in France, the emperor in Germany, and most importantly for her story, the kings of Hungary, so far away in culture and temperament, so close across the Adriatic Sea.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, the Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times.In this, the ninth of the series, Dumas uses the lives of two women, Angelique-Louise de Guerchi and Josephine-Charlotte Boullenois, and the men who, to put it bluntly, control their lives.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas pere was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the eighth of the series, Dumas explores the depths of a soul, that of Antonin Derues, a man capable of the most amazing hypocrisy, perfidy, and cruelty.

In Avon's Harvest, Edwin Arlington Robinson devotes the majority of the audiobook to one long narrative poem of the same title, which tells the story of how a man's life was destroyed by the slow canker of an unreasoning hatred he formed as a young man, and of a sudden act of violence that flared out of it. Robinson's wields his sparse, simple, yet brilliantly polished verse like a scalpel, dissecting layer after layer of Avon's mind until the whole is laid bare as if on an operating table.

In this collection of dramatic narratives, Robinson explores his key interests: character and man's confrontation with the rocks and hard places of human existence. He gives us a fascinating piece of alternate history: a dialogue between Alexander Hamlton and Aaron Burr, testing who will betray and who will resist. He gives that bitter old man, John Brown, full scope to vent his deep-seated anger, and lets Rahel Varnhagen, in her old age, touch us with her memories of love.

In 1921, Edwin Arlington Robinson was only 52 and many of the pieces in his Collected Poems were written long before that. Yet he shows gifted understanding of old age, the passage of time, the slow decline that everyone must suffer, and the final cease and release of death. Isaac, in Isaac and Archibald, puts it very well to the poet's twelve-year-old alter ego.

Unlike most ghost story writers, Mary Louisa Molesworth does not want to make you wake up screaming in the middle of the night. You may wake up with a shiver, but you'll also wake wake up feeling thoughtful, musing on how the mysteries of love, compassion, and memory can extend themselves into the realm of the supernatural.

Conrad Aiken was fascinated throughout his early work with the image of a tempestuous, romantic young man who tears himself away from his wife, his first love, and from a pastoral, peaceful life in a rural setting, to pursue what he hopes will be a richer, fuller, more rewarding life in a great city. In this book, Aiken explores this theme in full, especially in the final long poem, "Dust in Starlight", which also forms Part III of his trilogy, Earth Triumphant.

For those who love Byron’s poetry, the value of this work is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come, it is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself.What sort of poems are these? They are the work of an enormously talented young man, whose skills as a poet are still developing.

Here are three stories that will make you chuckle and shiver at the same time. Spirits can be funny when they turn out to have issues and problems of their own, and the authors of these stories, John Kendrick Bangs and H. G. Wells, have a fine time putting smiles on our faces - and wiping them off again!

Stephen Crane's second book of poetry followed up the success of his first book, Black Riders. His search for love, his lonely, bitter struggle to make his peace with God, the war in his heart between cynicism and an unshakeable longing for truth and beauty in the world--these all continue in his second book. Sadly, this second book was also his last, for he died tragically young.

In this, the fourth volume of this series, we hear the poetry in which Byron began to make his mark on the world. Though his major breakthrough with Childe Harold is yet to come, his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was a definite hit in its time, establishing Byron as a known poet and ensuring that his reputation as a literary bad-boy was off to a good start.