Stefan Rudnicki

In seafaring literature, no fictional sailor's story can match this true, real-life adventure. Before the Wind is the memoir of early nineteenth-century sea captain Charles Tyng- from his childhood and love affair with the sea to his rise through the ranks to captain and ship owner in the tea and sugar trade. Before the Wind takes listeners on a trip around the world- from visits to Lord Byron in Italy and King Kamehameha in Hawaii to Napoleon's prison...

Today's modern, competitive business environment demands that executives conduct business operations more effectively and compassionately. Turning to the ancient wisdom of China provides insight for professionals who want to stay on the cutting edge. This program guides executives with fundamental teachings on the topics of leadership, strategy, selling, personnel, and ethics from the writings of Confucius, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, and others to present...

Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog. A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive...

"Roger Mifflin, whom we met in the author's 'Parnassus on wheels,' here keeps a secondhand bookshop in Brooklyn, N.Y. He takes in the young daughter of a friend to learn the book trade, and immediately a mystery develops." Wis Lib Bul.

Chance (1914) was the first of Conrad's novels to bring him popular success and it holds a unique place among his works. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl who is "like a beggar, without a right to anything but compassion." After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position "has no resources but in herself." Her only means of action is to be what she is. Flora's...

On April Fool's Day in 1856, a shape-shifting grifter boards a Mississippi riverboat to expose the pretenses, hypocrisies, and self-delusions of his fellow passengers. The con artist assumes numerous identities - a disabled beggar, a charity fundraiser, a successful businessman, an urbane gentleman - to win over his not-entirely-innocent dupes. The central character's shifting identities, as fluid as the river itself, reflect broader aspects of human...

This is an exciting, atmospheric work that works on several levels: partly a story of tropical adventures, partly a melodramatic novel, partly a psychological thriller, partly a criticism of the empire. Axel Heist lives on an island in present-day Indonesia with a Chinese aide Wang. Heist visits a nearby island when a women's group plays in a hotel owned by Mr. Schomberg. Schomberg tries to impose himself sexually on one of the band members, Alma,...

The curious call of an unseen bird lures a young European explorer deeper and deeper into the jungle, where he encounters the source of the siren song - a lovely, half-wild girl with mysterious powers. Thus begins the romance between Abel, a revolutionary hiding among an Indian tribe in the Venezuelan rainforest, and Rima, who speaks the languages of birds and longs to return to the land of her birth to be reunited with others of her kind. Written...

Based in part on the author's schooldays at Lancing and then Hertford College in England and subsequently as a teacher in North Wales, "Decline and Fall" is Evelyn Waugh's debut novel, first published in 1928. In the socially satirical style for which the author is known, Waugh brilliantly lampoons British society of the 1920s. The story tracks the life of Paul Pennyfeather, who following expulsion from Oxford, the result of a drunken prank, is forced...

One the eve of WWI, three American male explorers stumble onto an all-female society somewhere in the distant reaches of the earth. Unable to believe their eyes, they promptly set out to find some men, convinced that since this is a civilized country--there must be men. So begins this sparkling utopian novel, a romp through a whole world "masculine" and "feminine", as on target today as when it was written 65 years ago.