Books in Lake Classics series

Featured title in the 2018 PBS Great American Reads“I think the reason we’re so struck by [Jane Eyre] is how Charlotte Brontë manages to relate, expertly, what it means to be a human being...and that never changes.” (Narrator Thandie Newton)Following Jane from her childhood as an orphan in Northern England through her experience as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic classic is an early exploration of women’s independence in the mid-19th century and the pervasive societal challenges women had to endure. At Thornfield, Jane meets the complex and mysterious Mr. Rochester, with whom she shares a complicated relationship that ultimately forces her to reconcile the conflicting passions of romantic love and religious piety. Performing the early Victorian novel with great care and respect, actress Thandie Newton (Crash, The Pursuit of Happyness) draws out Jane Eyre’s intimacy and depth while conveying how truly progressive Brontë was in an era of extreme restraint.

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stand more than any other man as the incarnation of the whole race', because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth'. Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master'. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoy is more plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and dramatic. But as an artist, as master of the combination of details into a harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the highest and the lowest, the novel as well as the base. But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and discordant, that he makes himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's speciality.

This is the personal narrative of the most famous cavalry leader America ever produced. My Life on the Plains is George Armstrong Custer’s first-hand account of the Indian Wars of 1867-1869, detailing the winter campaign of 1868 in which Custer led the 7th US cavalry against the Cheyenne Indians. When General Custer led his troops to annihilation in the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, he was possibly the most notorious Indian fighter the army had known. Custer's solid claim to military fame rests upon his achievements in the Civil War, yet paradoxically he is chiefly remembered by reason of his death in the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876 — "Custer's Last Stand". Much controversy still rages over Custer's career and character. Custer was an exceedingly complex man who, in life, won devoted friends and admirers as well as outspokenly bitter enemies. The collection was a document of its time and an important primary source for anyone interested in U.S. military affairs and U.S./Native American relations. Custer’s references to Indians as “bloodthirsty savages” were tempered by his empathetic understanding of their reason for fighting: “If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation…” In his own time, Custer achieved much of his fame as a daring soldier through his own published accounts of his adventures. In 1874, just two years before his death, a collection of his magazine articles was published as My Life on the Plains. George Armstrong Custer, in this intensely personal account, made a major contribution to American history. My Life On The Plains is a fascinating historical account, perfect for historians and Civil War enthusiasts alike. George Armstrong Custer (December 5, 1839 – June 25, 1876), one of the most mythologized figures in American history, was an United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. He eventually met his fate in the battle of Little Big Horn in one of the most notable defeats of American armed forces. His memoir, My Life On The Plains was first published in 1874.