Books with author Sir Burton Richard Francis

This was written by Sir Richard Burton under the pseudonym of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî after his return from Mecca in 1854. It contains references to 19th Century scientific and philosophical concepts. Nonetheless, it is a Sufi text to the core, and one of the few instances of Burton writing in the first person about his belief system, even if it is under the cloak of a different name. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a Kasidah is a classical Arabic or Persian panegyric, which must begin with a reference to a forsaken campground, followed by a lament, and a prayer to ones comrades to halt while the memory of the departed dwellers is invoked. The same rhyme has to run through the entire composition, no matter how long the poem is.

"The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî" by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

This volume and its successor (Nos. i. and ii.) contain Mr. John Payne’s Tales from the Arabic; his three tomes, being included in my two. The stories are taken from the Breslau Edition where they are distributed among the volumes between Nos. iv. and xii., and from the Calcutta fragment of 1814. I can say little for the style of the story-stuff contained in this Breslau text, which has been edited with phenomenal incuriousness. Many parts are hopelessly corrupted, whilst at present we have no means of amending the commissions and of supplying the omissions by comparison with other manuscripts. The Arabic is not only faulty, but dry and jejune, comparing badly with that of the “Thousand Nights and a Night,” as it appears in the Macnaghten and the abridged Bulak Texts. Sundry of the tales are futile; the majority has little to recommend it, and not a few require a diviner rather than a translator. Yet they are valuable to students as showing the different sources and the heterogeneous materials from and of which the great Saga-book has been compounded. Some are, moreover, striking and novel, especially parts of the series entitled King Shah Bakht and his Wazir Al-Rahwan (pp. 191–355). Interesting also is the Tale of the “Ten Wazirs” (pp. 55–155), marking the transition of the Persian Bakhtiyár-Námeh into Arabic. In this text also and in this only is found Galland’s popular tale “Abou-Hassan; or, the Sleeper Awakened,” which I have entitled “The Sleeper and the Waker.”

‘The genius of Eastern nations;’ says an established and respectable authority; ‘was; from the earliest times; much turned towards invention and the love of fiction. The Indians; the Persians; and the Arabians; were all famous for their fables. Amongst the ancient Greeks we hear of the Ionian and Milesian tales; but they have now perished; and; from every account that we hear of them; appear to have been loose and indelicate.’ Similarly; the classical dictionaries define ‘Milesiæ fabulæ’ to be ‘licentious themes;’ ‘stories of an amatory or mirthful nature;’ or ‘ludicrous and indecent plays.’ M. Deriége seems indeed to confound them with the ‘Mœurs du Temps’ illustrated with artistic gouaches; when he says; ‘une de ces fables milésiennes; rehaussées de peintures; que la corruption romaine recherchait alors avec une folle ardeur.’

This novel of the Salem Witch Trials from the point of view of a judge is “leavened with wit [and] finely crafted” (Kirkus Reviews). In a colony struggling for survival, in a mysterious new world where infant mortality is high and sin is to blame, Samuel Sewall is committed to being a loving family man, a good citizen, and a fair-minded judge. Like any believing Puritan, he agonizes over what others think of him, while striving to act morally correct, keep the peace, and, when possible, enjoy a hefty slice of pie. His one regret is that months earlier, he didn’t sentence a group of pirates to death. What begins as a touching story of a bumbling man tasked with making judgments in a society where reason is often ephemeral quickly becomes the chilling narrative we know too well. And when public opinion wavers, Sewall learns that what has been done cannot be undone. Crane Pond explores the inner life of a well-meaning man who compromised with evil and went on to regret it. At once a searing view of the Trials, an empathetic portrait of one of the period’s most tragic figures, and an indictment of the malevolent power of idealism, it is a thrilling new telling of one of America’s founding stories. “[Crane Pond] goes straight on to my (small) list of historical novels that draw out the capacities of the form and allow readers to brush against the pleasures and terrors of the past.” —Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall “Deftly crafted . . . perfectly balances issues of religion, faith, and law.” —Library Journal

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was a preeminent British explorer of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. His famed disguised pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 made his name known. Burton helped demystify this exotic Eastern world to the West. In "Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah", we are gifted with his personal account of his Haj. Full of insightful anthropological observations, Burton describes his encounters with Arab cultures and customs. This exciting tale revolves around his disguising as an Afghan doctor in order to not be noticed in his religious pilgrimage. Burton was more than an explorer, though; he was a translator, soldier, cartographer, and spy. His fascinating character comes through brilliantly in this travel account as we discover the East through the eyes of an outsider. Burton's "Narrative" is as much an adventure story as it is a study in cultural anthropology—a true classic of travel writing that helped define the genre.

Verily the works and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befell other folk and may therefrom take warning; and that they may peruse the annals of antique peoples and all that hath betided them, and be thereby ruled and restrained. Praise, therefore, be to Him who hath made the histories of the past an admonition unto the present! Now of such instances are the tales called "A Thousand Nights and a Night," together with their far-famed legends and wonders.

How is this book unique? Formatted for E-Readers, Unabridged & Original version. You will find it much more comfortable to read on your device/app. Easy on your eyes.Includes: Illustrations and BiographyOne Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: أَلْف لَيْلَة وَلَيْلَة‎, translit. ʾAlf layla wa-layla) is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (c. 1706 – c. 1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Greek, Indian, Jewish and Turkish folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎, lit. A Thousand Tales), which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.Some of the stories commonly associated with The Nights, in particular "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", were not part of The Nights in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.