Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life, describing his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years, is one of the most influential books ever written. The bible of the environmental movement, Walden vividly portrays Thoreau's reverence for nature, and his understanding of the idea that nature is made up of crucially interrelated parts.

First published in 1949 and praised in the New York Times Book Review as "full of beauty and vigor and bite", A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Henry David Thoreau's classic essay inspired Martin Luther King, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and many other activists.

Predicting society’s present addiction to technology, our challenges with data privacy, and the dramatic increase in drug overdoses and depression that have accompanied a technology-induced lack of purpose, The Unabomber’s vision of the future has become our reality. Of course, his means were disgusting and condemnable. But his message is more important than ever. If we want to thrive in an age where automation and artificial intelligence and rapidly making humans obsolete, it is our responsibility to understand and prepare for the technological machine we are up against.

While the conflict over slavery was a factor in the Civil War, the abolition of slavery did not become a stated objective until Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863. Now, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, here is a new, unabridged audio recording of that historic document, freeing the slaves held in the still Confederate-controlled states. Heralded as one of America's most significant documents, this is a piece of history not to be missed.

Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Dunfermline, Scotland with only a grammar-school education, amassed a fortune in the steel industry the 1800’s to become the richest American in history. Yet Carnegie believed strongly that the wealthy should live modestly, without ostentation, and devote their energies after achieving wealth to finding ways to invest their “surplus wealth” in ways that benefit the public.

Old Path White Clouds presents the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha. Drawn directly from 24 Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese sources, and retold by Thich Nhat Hanh in his inimitably beautiful style, this book traces the Buddha's life slowly and gently over the course of 80 years, partly through the eyes of Svasti, the buffalo boy, and partly through the eyes of the Buddha himself. Old Path White Clouds is destined to become a classic of religious literature.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can lay claim to being the most important single work of modern philosophy, a work whose methodology, if not necessarily always its conclusions, has had a profound influence on almost all subsequent philosophical discourse. In this work Kant addresses, in a groundbreaking elucidation of the nature of reason, the age-old question of philosophy: “How do we know what we know?” and the limits of what it is that we can know with certainty.

In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused. Hags asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies and choices.

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

How had Gandhi transformed himself from an ineffective young lawyer into the Mahatma, the “great soul” who led 400 million ordinary men and women in their nonviolent struggle for independence? To find out, Easwaran visited Gandhi’s ashram and watched the Mahatma absorbed in meditation on the Bhagavad Gita – the wellspring of Gandhi’s spiritual strength.

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.