Books with title The Prophet - MP3 CD Audiobook in CD jacket

The Prophet is a highly original book of 26 fables written in prose poetry by Lebanese-American author and poet Kahlil Gibran. The prophet is Al Mustafa, who is about to board a ship to return home after a 12-year stay in the city of Orphalese when he is stopped by a group of people. They begin to discuss life and the human condition. The prophet is questioned by members of his audience on specific topics of general interest, and each prompts a discourse in which Al Mustafa delivers his thoughts in a mixture of vivid imagery, moving allegories, and philosophical insight. By the time they have finished they have covered just about every topic of importance in a deeply moving narrative that reveals mankind’s deepest longings, fears and motivations. The Prophet is one of the first examples in the genre of inspirational literature and has been immensely popular since publication, selling over nine million copies and being translated into over 100 languages.

The Prophet is a highly original book of 26 fables written in prose poetry by Lebanese-American author and poet Kahlil Gibran. The prophet is Al Mustafa, who is about to board a ship to return home after a 12-year stay in the city of Orphalese when he is stopped by a group of people. They begin to discuss life and the human condition. The prophet is questioned by members of his audience on specific topics of general interest, and each prompts a discourse in which Al Mustafa delivers his thoughts in a mixture of vivid imagery, moving allegories, and philosophical insight. By the time they have finished they have covered just about every topic of importance in a deeply moving narrative that reveals mankind’s deepest longings, fears and motivations. The Prophet is one of the first examples in the genre of inspirational literature and has been immensely popular since publication, selling over nine million copies and being translated into over 100 languages.

Before the music and the elaborate stage production, before Lon Chaney, Sr. frightened movie goers in the Roaring 20’s, The Phantom of the Opera was a book written by the French author Gaston Leroux in 1909 and 1910. Taking away nothing from the success of the musical or the movie or other less well known adaptions, it is a shame that the book proved so popular for adaptation, because it has been overshadowed by the musical and films. It’s a particular shame because the book by Leroux is a beautiful, poignant, suspenseful piece of art with a Gallic tone of love wrapped in danger, wrapped in tragedy, wrapped again in love that has seduced the English speaking world for centuries. Christine is the ingénue, who takes the stage of the Paris Opera and scores a brilliant success. Her former lover attends the performance, hears the beauty of her voice and falls in love again. The two plan to wed. On a subsequent night, as the prima donna, Carlotta, performs in Faust, the massive chandelier falls into the audience. In the ensuing confusion the Phantom, who until then was but an incorporeal presence, kidnaps Christine and takes her away to his hiding place in dark recesses deep beneath the Opera House. Having made himself known up to that time only through letters and malevolent acts, he becomes flesh and bone for Christine. He shows himself to her, and in time he will remove his mask and show her his face. The story is a love story in the deepest, most mysterious sense of the word. It portrays a love that is and is not dependent on superficial or surface gifts. Rather it portrays the many mansions within a single heart, with its consequent confusion of devotion, jealousy, possessiveness, passion, desire, and heat, mixed in their measure, contradictory and utterly human. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

Niccolo Machiavelli broke the mold when he wrote The Prince, an ostensibly traditional work in the style of books written for princes. Written in the Italian vernacular for all to read, it speaks truth to power about power: the truth about how “things really work” in the sphere of power, politics, leadership and governance. Most advances in man’s progress occur when the thinkers of their time look at the world as it is and not as they might want it to be. It’s the difference between the declarative and the subjunctive modes – the difference between “this is this” and “the would, could, shoulds” of a fantasy land. Princes obtain and retain power over their subjects using tactics with little or no consideration for ethics or the strictures of the then dominant faith. And those who argue to the contrary will be the ones without power. In saying so The Prince was and remains groundbreaking and subversive. And required reading for anyone active or interested in public life. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

“You pay us just enough so we don’t quit and we work just hard enough so you don’t fire us.” These words said by a sullen warehouse manager in 1992 struck me as a succinct definition of the class struggle first articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Commissioned and published in 1848 in London by the Communist League as a statement of its principles, the short pamphlet articulated Marx and Engels’ theories about class struggle in society and politics, the problems of capitalism, and how capitalism would eventually evolve into socialism. There are four sections. "Bourgeois and Proletarians" elucidates the materialist concept of history, in which an oppressed proletariat majority lives under the dominion of an oppressive bourgeois minority. "Proletarians and Communists" positions communists as advocates for the general will of the working class and proposes the abolition of private property and the adoption of state-owned production, universal employment, free public education, centralized banking and credit, and nationalized communication and transportation. "Socialist and Communist Literature" distinguishes communism from other socialist doctrines of the time. "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties” briefly discusses the struggles in specific countries, predicts a world revolution, and calls for unified international proletarian action. The Manifesto arose at the time of revolutions across Europe in 1848 and fell into obscurity until the Paris Commune of 1871, after which it grew in popularity along with the growth of social-democratic parties across Europe, culminating in the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The term “enemy of the people” has entered our modern lexicon, thanks to the unprecedented attacks on the press by the United States President for its stubborn insistence on reporting things as they are, not as he wishes they were in his idiosyncratic, imaginary world of “alternative facts”and fawning sycophants. This is, unfortunately,not new. The term may have first emerged in the 1882 play An Enemy of the People, written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in response to the public outcry that greeted his play Ghosts. Both the play and author were called scandalous, degenerate and immoral for daring to have an open discussion of sex outside of marriage and of syphilis. The play’s action centers on the discovery that a town’s public baths have been contaminated by syphilis. Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the protagonist and the medical officer at the baths, argues that the town be notified immediately by the town paper. The mayor, his older brother Peter,wants to lay low and handle it differently. The editor of the paper at first agrees with the doctor, and then has a change of heart, fearing damage to the town’s economy. Unbowed, the doctor calls a town meeting, at which he castigates the authorities and the cowardice of the majority of the public. Insulted and enraged, the townspeople shout repeatedly that “he is an enemy of the people”. They further react by smashing his windows, firing his schoolteacher daughter,disinheriting his wife, and evicting them from their house. Apart from its title, the play remains highly relevant today for its consideration of environmental issues, irresponsible authorities, and the moral dilemmas and perils of whistle-blowing.

A Modest Proposal is a satiric essay written by Jonathan Swift in 1729 and published anonymously as a pamphlet that suggests that the Irish might find some release from their perpetual economic troubles by selling their children as a nourishing delicacy to their wealthy English overlords. It is presented as a straightforward economic treatise that proceeds with well-reasoned deliberation to an unthinkable and absurd conclusion. In doing so it makes a blistering commentary on the merciless legal and economic exploitation of Ireland by the English as well as on rationalistic modern ways of thinking that give short shrift to human values. The work is held to be a masterpiece of satire and a worthy descendant of the great works of the Roman satirist Juvenal. The term “modest proposal” has to come to symbolize any proposition to address a problem with an efficient but ridiculous cure is used as an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.

The Sign of the Four is the second of four full-length novels featuring the brilliant Sherlock Holmes. Published in 1890 and sometimes titled The Sign of Four, the story begins with the mysterious disappearance of British Army Captain Arthur Morstan and proceeds to unravel a complex plot that centers on a stolen treasure, a secret pact among four convicts, and corrupt prison guards, with much of the action set in India beginning at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The story humanizes and deepens the character of Holmes, partly by introducing us to his use of cocaine. It also introduces Morstan’s daughter, Mary, who eventually becomes Watson’s bride. The book was originally serialized in Lippincott’s magazine before publication in book form and has been adapted for the cinema thirteen times.

Sometimes the tart nature of motivational stories can be more easily received and internalized if the message is cloaked in the sweetness of animals, anthropomorphic characters, who, sentient and capable, experience the vagaries of the world's ways and then draw and express some moral from the experience. Rudyard Kipling, the Englishman who keenly felt the burden of his privilege, wrote The Jungle Book, a series of short stories that were first published in several magazines in 1893 and 1894. There is some very recent evidence (2010) found in a poignant handwritten note, discovered in a rare first edition of the book, that Kipling wrote these beautiful and wholly entertaining stories for his daughter, Josephine, who died at the age of six in 1899. Published in book form in 1894, the stories that comprise The Jungle Book enjoy great popularity due to Disney's 1967 animated film version that was followed by a second Disney adaptation in 2003. Several other film and stage adaptations have also contributed to the work's popularity. The stories contain nearly everything Kipling knew and had learned about the Indian Jungle during his childhood in India. The best known of the stories are the three that concern the man-cub "Mowglii," who is raised by wolves. The stories and their accompanying verses offer helpful safety tips for persons, families and communities. Many have looked deeper into these stories, and, as with Orwell, have interpreted the work as being a sophisticated commentary on the politics and society of the time.

The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century. First published in 1922, The Waste Land is Eliot’s best known work and marked a significant turning point for modern poetry. On the macro level, the poem conveys a sense of a disjointed, unreal world devastated by the Great War and populated by damaged people numbed by violence, heartbreak and trauma. The poem loosely follows the legends of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, interwoven with vignettes of modern society. The five sections treat the overarching themes of disillusionment, despair and death from a variety of perspectives that are populated with allusions, quotations, and references to a vast range of eastern and western cultures, languages and literature. It is deliberately obtuse and difficult to follow. Frequent and abrupt shifts in time, place, character and tone add to the sense of discomfort and dissonance that underscore the themes. Eliot had experienced a breakdown in 1921 and was treated for what we would now call depression. He was advised to take three months off from work and first went to the seaside resort of Margate, where he began the poem, and then to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he undertook therapies to help rewire his thinking. These practices corresponded with the tenets of Buddhism and Hindu philosophy he had studied at Harvard that eventually found their way into the poem, especially the last section, which Eliot said he wrote “in a trance”.

Description Specification Reviews (0) Contents Links Credits Siddhartha, published in 1922, tells the story of a young man who undertakes a journey of self-discovery in ancient Nepal during the time of the Gautama Buddha. He leaves home to seek enlightenment in the ascetic life of a beggar and eventually meets with Gautama, the Buddha, but chooses to follow his individual path instead of joining the order. Crossing a river to the city, he settles and becomes a rich businessman and the lover of the beautiful courtesan Kamala. Finding his luxurious life empty in middle-age, he returns to the river, where he adopts a humble way of life and gradually finds peace and enlightenment. He crosses paths with former friends and lovers over the years in ways that deepen his (and our) understanding of the mysterious connectedness of all things in the cyclical unity of nature. Hesse wrote Siddhartha to cope with his ‘sickness of life’. In doing so he lived a reclusive life and immersed himself in Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. The book’s structure reflects the three stages of life for Hindu men, the four noble truths, and the eight-fold path. The result is a mesmerizing mixture of religious legend and modern novel, written in a simple, graceful style that harmonizes the tensions in the contrasting forces of life.