Michael Prichard

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from...

Detective genius Nero Wolfe and his assistant, Archie Goodwin, are private investigators based in New York. With Wolfe's unmatchable wits and Archie's tireless legwork, no mystery is unsolvable. After a million-dollar contest judge is murdered and his contest answers stolen, Nero Wolfe and right-hand man Archie Goodwin take the case in an attempt to find the guilty party. As if the case wasn't difficult enough, the company that sponsored the contest...

Two frontiersmen venture into the unknown wilderness to save a kidnapped woman in this historical novel by "the greatest Western writer of all time" (Jackson Cain, author of Hellbreak Country). In the late eighteenth century, Wheeling, West Virginia, was an untamed land where brave settlers relied on the protection of a lonely outpost known as Fort Henry. But when a band of renegades and Ohio Valley Indians kidnap a woman from the fort, justice rests...

P.J. O'Rourke reads and interprets Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. .

The insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the past look back at critical pivots in history and then look forward at the evolving global scene.

A classic historical western of the eighteenth-century American frontier by the celebrated author of Riders of the Purple Sage. First published in 1906, The Spirit of the Border is a vivid and brutal tale based on true events as chronicled in the journals of Zane Grey's ancestor Col. Ebenezer Zane. It tells the story of Moravian Church missionaries and their efforts to bring peace to the Ohio Valley-efforts that met a tragic end in the destruction...

No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey-with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods-are familiar to most people because they are so pervasive. They have fed our imaginations for over two and a half millennia,...

Composed of ten books and based upon Aristotle's own notes from his lectures at the Lyceum, "Nicomachean Ethics" holds a pre-eminent place amongst the ancient treatises on moral philosophy. As opposed to other pre-Socratic works, "Nicomachean Ethics" moves beyond the purely theoretical analysis of moral philosophy by examining its practical application. Aristotelian ethics is concerned with how an individual should best live their life and at its...

As zealots in Washington intensify their preparations for an American attack on Iran, the story of the CIA's 1953 coup-with its many cautionary lessons-is more urgently relevant than ever. All the Shah's Men brings to life the cloak-and-dagger operation that deposed the only democratic regime Iran ever had. The coup ushered in a quarter-century of repressive rule under the Shah, stimulated the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and anti-Americanism throughout...