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Pride and Prejudice (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen)

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' With this famous declaration Jane Austen launches into the story of the five Bennet sisters. It is a story that on first reading is full of suspense, surprise and, ultimately, satisfaction, and which on re-reading commands, in addition, admiration for the author's supreme skill in managing a deceptively complex plot to its triumphant conclusion. First published in 1813, and Austen's most popular novel in her own lifetime, Pride and Prejudice has since been widely recognised as one of the finest novels in the English language. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.

Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber

SMART SCHOOL TIME RECIPES: The Breakfast, Snack, and Lunchbox Cookbook for Healthy Kids and Adults

This e-cookbook was created to encourage whole foods living for families, while offering ample alternatives to prepackaged meals and snacks.

Within you will discover 125 healthy recipes and over 100 full color photos for quick breakfasts, on-the-go snacks, and portable lunch items. And of course, the recipes are kid-friendly (and adult-friendly!), easy, and delicious. The chapters include:

Morning Muffin Mania
Sensational Smoothies
Easy Freezin’ Waffles, Pancakes, and French Toast
More Smart Starts
Dips, Fillings, and Spreads
Soups and Stews
Salad-Style
More Lunchbox Love
Sweet Snackin’
Craving Cookies
Essential Extras

Please download and enjoy, and let others know about this fabulous eCookbook! Share it, Tweet it, Buzz it, and Email it to help spread the word about the easy and delicious world of whole foods for the entire family.

This e-cookbook was created to encourage whole foods living for families, while offering ample alternatives to prepackaged meals and snacks.

Within you will discover 125 healthy recipes and over 100 full color photos for quick breakfasts, on-the-go snacks, and portable lunch items. And of course, the recipes are kid-friendly (and adult-friendly!), easy, and delicious. The chapters include:

Morning Muffin Mania
Sensational Smoothies
Easy Freezin’ Waffles, Pancakes, and French Toast
More Smart Starts
Dips, Fillings, and Spreads
Soups and Stews
Salad-Style
More Lunchbox Love
Sweet Snackin’
Craving Cookies
Essential Extras

Please download and enjoy, and let others know about this fabulous eCookbook! Share it, Tweet it, Buzz it, and Email it to help spread the word about the easy and delicious world of whole foods for the entire family.

Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (Scholastic Classics)

A Tale of Two Cities ("Read Along")

Written at a point of crisis in his life, A Tale of Two Cities is the embodiment of Dickens' own passions and fears: the revolution which engulfs the characters symbolizes his own psychological revolution, and the three main characters become projections of Dickens himself.

Dracula (Townsend Library Edition)

This Townsend Library classic has been carefully edited to be more accessible to today's students. It includes a background note about the book, an author's biography, and a lively afterword. Acclaimed by educators nationwide, the Townsend Library is helping millions of young adults discover the pleasure and power of reading.

The Scarlet Letter (Classic Retelling)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1871 Original Publisher: Fields, Osgood,

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cliffs Notes)

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also feature glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format.

With help from CliffsNotes on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, you explore the first book-length narrative by an ex-slave that reveals the unique brutalities inflicted on enslaved African women in the South.

The chapter summaries and commentaries in this study guide expose you to a harrowing story of degradation and sexual exploitation; the struggle for freedom and self-definition; community and family; and writing as a means of freedom. Other features that help you study include

• An in-depth look at the life of the author, Harriet A. Jacobs
• Character analyses of major players
• A character map that graphically illustrates the relationships among the characters
• Critical essays
• Glossaries of key words and terms
• A review section that tests your knowledge

Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

Water for Elephants

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Water for Elephants is a historical novel by Sara Gruen. Gruen originally wrote the novel as part of National Novel Writing Month.The story is told as a series of memories by Jacob Jankowski, a "ninety or ninety-three year-old" man who lives in a nursing home. Jacob is told what to eat and what to do.As the memories begin, Jacob Jankowski is a twenty-three year old Polish American preparing for his final exams as a Cornell University veterinary student when he receives the news that his parents were killed in a car accident. Jacob’s father was a veterinarian and Jacob had planned to join his practice. When Jacob learns that his father was deeply in debt because he had been treating animals for free and had mortgaged the family home to provide Jacob an Ivy League education, he has a breakdown and leaves school just short of graduation.

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan

The Secret Garden [Illustrated]

A Timeless Children’s Classic

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is one of the great classics of children’s literature, although now much more admired than when it was first published in 1910 as it is now. One of the central themes of the novel, that good health comes from healthy food, physical exercise, and a positive attitude towards life, is increasingly obvious to many of us, and has now, or is being, being confirmed by medical research. ‘Organic’ foods, ‘free-range’ chickens, and growing concern for our physical and community environments are becoming common wisdom now, and many diseases – as seemingly unrelated as childhood myopia and rickets (both associated with lack of time spent in the open air and sun) – have been found to be more closely-related to how gracefully we live than to "germs." What we do is sometimes as important as what happens to us, and ‘being brave’ in the face of adversity sometimes turns out to be a life-saver, just as it does in the book.

This edition includes the original four color plates and a color reproduction of the 1911 hardcover edition and is fully-linked to make navigation easy. Select any chapter title to link to the table of contents, which is functional, unlike many inexpensive e-books one sees. Although today’s Kindle doesn’t display color, many Kindle apps on other devices do, and who knows what the future holds for the Kindle itself?

Mistress Mary is quite contrary until she helps her garden grow. Along the way, she manages to cure her sickly cousin Colin, who is every bit as imperious as she. These two are sullen little peas in a pod, closed up in a gloomy old manor on the Yorkshire moors of England, until a locked-up garden captures their imaginations and puts the blush of a wild rose in their cheeks; "It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of roses which were so thick, that they matted together.... 'No wonder it is still,' Mary whispered. 'I am the first person who has spoken here for ten years.'" As new life sprouts from the earth, Mary and Colin's sour natures begin to sweeten. For anyone who has ever felt afraid to live and love, The Secret Garden's portrayal of reawakening spirits will thrill and rejuvenate. Frances Hodgson Burnett creates characters so strong and distinct, young readers continue to identify with them even 85 years after they were conceived. (Ages 9 to 12)

A Timeless Children’s Classic

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is one of the great classics of children’s literature, although now much more admired than when it was first published in 1910 as it is now. One of the central themes of the novel, that good health comes from healthy food, physical exercise, and a positive attitude towards life, is increasingly obvious to many of us, and has now, or is being, being confirmed by medical research. ‘Organic’ foods, ‘free-range’ chickens, and growing concern for our physical and community environments are becoming common wisdom now, and many diseases – as seemingly unrelated as childhood myopia and rickets (both associated with lack of time spent in the open air and sun) – have been found to be more closely-related to how gracefully we live than to "germs." What we do is sometimes as important as what happens to us, and ‘being brave’ in the face of adversity sometimes turns out to be a life-saver, just as it does in the book.

This edition includes the original four color plates and a color reproduction of the 1911 hardcover edition and is fully-linked to make navigation easy. Select any chapter title to link to the table of contents, which is functional, unlike many inexpensive e-books one sees. Although today’s Kindle doesn’t display color, many Kindle apps on other devices do, and who knows what the future holds for the Kindle itself?

Ultimate Leadership: Winning Execution Strategies for Your Situation

To succeed, leaders must understand and apply the core principles of leadership--but that’s not enough. You need to shape your approach for any unique situation. Too many leaders don’t know how to do that--and that’s why they fail. Ultimate Leadership shows how to adapt the principles of leadership to different challenges, contexts, and organizations.

Russell E. Palmer--who has had three very different, highly successful careers as head of one of the world’s largest accounting firms, Dean of the Wharton School, and an entrepreneur--helps you identify the leadership model most appropriate for your environment, and how to lead accordingly. You’ll learn better ways to lead your equals, help an organization weather crises, transform its culture, lead entrepreneurial organizations, lead global organizations...even lead non-profit and academic institutions.

Then, drawing on interviews with an extraordinary spectrum of outstanding leaders, Palmer helps you master the attribute every leader must have: the ability to inspire your unique organization, even in the face

of the most daunting challenges.

Exercising strong authority without falling victim to ego or closed-mindedness

Driving changes in a strategic direction when key power centers disagree

Mastering the art of rapid, focused, hands-on execution for organizations in crisis

Reconnecting structures, processes, and strategies with the new realities you face

Succeeding in an environment with widely diverse, highly influential stakeholders