Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7 - AR Pts: 53
Description
The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of...
Author
Series
A Bantam book volume N3623
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 13
Description
From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist...
Author
Series
Ishmael trilogy volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 10
Description
The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.7 - AR Pts: 14
Formats
Description
This is a story of moral corruption. A gothic melodrama, it is full of subtle impression and epigram. It touches on many of Wilde's recurring themes, such as the nature and spirit of art, aestheticism and the dangers inherent in it.In the wealthy and vain hedonist Dorian Gray, London painter Basil Hallward has found his muse. Only when the portrait of Dorian begins to age, while the man himself remains untouched by time, do they realize they may have...
Author
Series
Description
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...
Author
Description
"For the character of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, Dickens drew on a tragedy in his own life, the death at the age of seventeen of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Five years later he wrote, 'the desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now ... and I know (for I don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish.'" "The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset...
Author
Series
Description
To those who found Ayn Rand's "Atlas shrugged" a powerful voice raised in defense of the individual, this book continues the theme. It proclaims the same philosophy, and its theme is the right of the individual to the pursuit of his own happiness. It portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. It tells of a girl's passionate love, held like a fortress against the viciousness, cruelty,...
Author
Description
A hijacked jumbo jet bound for London blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures, Indian actors of opposing sensibilities, Gibreel and Saladin, fall to Earth, and are washed up on an English beach. Soon curious changes occur -Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while Saladin grows hooves and bumps at his temples. They are transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is the initial act in an odyssey that merges...
10) Atlas Shrugged
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.2 - AR Pts: 102
Formats
Description
This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world, and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? The answers to these questions become clear when the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this remarkable...
11) Middlemarch
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10.4 - AR Pts: 64
Formats
Description
Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces reisistance from the society she inhabits.
12) Anna Karenina
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.6 - AR Pts: 69
Appears on list
Description
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing oficer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...
13) Daniel Deronda
Author
Pub. Date
2005
Description
Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for...
14) Zen shorts
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 2.9 - AR Pts: 1
Description
When Stillwater the giant panda moves into the neighborhood, the stories he tells to three siblings teach them to look at the world in new ways. Includes factual note on Zen.
Author
Formats
Description
The plot revolves around Lark Burrell, who grew up on a ranch in Idaho, her mother is a Nez Perce Indian. Lark loves wild horses. She is forced to leave there when her father dies and go live with the Wades, distant cousins. Her cousin Marigold is engaged to Stanley Weston, a college graduate like Marigold, but he soon discovers after returning home to run the ranch for his invalid father that he has more in common with Lark than he does with Marigold....
16) Evening class
Author
Formats
Description
In Dublin, an evening class of Italian language and culture changes the lives of its students. A girl finds love, a boy abandons crime, a man regains a reason for living. It is the work of the teacher, an Irish woman who followed a married man to Italy and returned to Ireland on his death. A tale of one woman's gift for helping others. By the author of The Copper Beach.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.5 - AR Pts: 23
Description
Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice...