Brandy Vencel

In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

Hard Times is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind, and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston. Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided ‘Utilitarian’ values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon James Mill (the Utilitarian leader). He directs his own children, Louisa and Tom, in this same way: enforcing an artless existence upon them.

The Puritan poet John Milton is most famous for his massive theological epic Paradise Lost. He was also known as perhaps the greatest genius of the English Renaissance possibly the best-educated man of his day and also a major theorist of classical learning for Christians. The man who wrote the seminal words 'The end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him . . . ' (Of Education, 1644) argues across all his voluminous writings that the purpose of education is soul work for virtue as opposed to information gathering for profit. In this book, Milton scholar Professor Grant Horner from The Master's College examines the poet's powerful vision of a Christian and classical education. Trained at Duke University by Stanley Fish, the world's most influential Miltonist, Horner approaches the text as a Christian educator himself, bringing the complex seventeenth-century texts into modern light for practical application. Addressing questions such as how to handle pagan texts, how to develop a theology of aesthetics, and why we must grapple with the relationship between pagan wisdom and scripture, this book will serve as a thorough and readable introduction to the complex thought of one of the Puritan intellectual giants.

This is the complete unabridged and authorized edition of the works of turn-of-the-century British educator Charlotte Mason, with a forward by Dr. John Thorley of The Charlotte Mason College. This six-volume set includes over 2400 pages on education, child training and parenting. Recognized as a pioneer in home education and major school reforms, Charlotte Mason's practical methods are as revolutionary today as when they were first written. These books were out of print for over 80 years until Dean & Karen Andreola brought them to America in while returning from a mission s trip in the spring of 1987. A Charlotte Mason educational revival soon followed. Charlotte Mason s writings reflect a lifetime of experience teaching children and training teachers. Her topics are meaty. Her ideas radiate brilliantly in the thoughts of those who take the time to ponder them. With each idea comes a practical how-to "for bringing up children within the educational life." The power of attention, moral character, the discipline of habit, safeguarding a child s curiosity, is a tiny peek at the topics presented. Although Miss Mason began writing in the 1880s, her principles still apply. Today's homeschool parents are seeing first-hand how wonderfully they work. After ten years of intense study and application of Miss Mason s principles with her own children, Karen Andreola wrote A Charlotte Mason Companion: Personal Reflections on the Gentle Art of Learning. Now today's parents can see what a Charlotte Mason education looks like in a contemporary setting while gleaning from its many benefits.

Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good and evil, and carries them to the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a breathtaking realism that is unsurpassed in modern prose.

Within his dramatic story are themes that capture the intellect and the emotions: crime and punishment, the relentless persecution of Valjean by Inspector Javert, the desperation of the prostitute Fantine, the amorality of the rogue Thénardier, and the universal desire to escape the prisons of our own minds. Les Misérables gave Victor Hugo a canvas upon which he portrayed his criticism of the French political and judicial systems, but the portrait that resulted is larger than life, epic in scope—an extravagant spectacle that dazzles the senses even as it touches the heart.

Understood Betsy is a work by Dorothy Canfield Fisher now brought to you in this new edition of the timeless classic.

J.R.R. Tolkien completed his translation of Beowulf in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication. This edition includes an illuminating written commentary on the poem by the translator himself, drawn from a series of lectures he gave at Oxford in the 1930s.

His creative attention to detail in these lectures gives rise to a sense of the immediacy and clarity of his vision. It is as if Tolkien entered into the imagined past: standing beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they beach their ship on the coast of Denmark, listening to Beowulf’s rising anger at Unferth’s taunting, or looking up in amazement at Grendel’s terrible hand set under the roof of Heorot.

“Essential for students of the Old English poem—and the ideal gift for devotees of the One Ring.” —Kirkus

In To the Far Blue Mountains, Louis L’Amour weaves the unforgettable tale of a man who, after returning to his homeland, discovers that finding his way back to America may be impossible.

Barnabas Sackett was leaving England to make his fortune in the New World. But as he settled his affairs, he learned that a royal warrant had been sworn out against him and that men were searching for him in every port. At issue were some rare gold coins Sackett had sold to finance his first trip to the Americas—coins believed to be part of a great treasure lost by King John years before.

Believing that Sackett possesses the rest of the treasure, Queen Bess will stop at nothing to find him. If he’s caught, not only will his dream of a life in America be lost, but he will be brutally tortured and put to death on the gallows.

How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.

Most of us don't want to think, writes the American essayist Alan Jacobs. Thinking is trouble. It can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the echo chamber of social media, where speed and factionalism trump accuracy and nuance.

Reveals the neglected mode of knowing and learning, from Socrates to the middle ages and beyond, that relies more on the integrated powers of sensory experience and intuition, rather than on modern narrow scientific models of education.

In his masterful work, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis observed how modern education was changing our conception of what it means to be human. By cutting off students from the transcendent values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, modern schools ceased cultivating virtue in students and instead communicated a mechanistic vision of the world that viewed students as products to be engineered. Lewis believed that in seeking to control nature, modern conditioners would also seek to control humans and remake them according to the preference of the conditioners, since any appeal to Truth, Goodness, or Beauty had been rejected. Lewis argued that we must recover these transcendent values in order to prevent the dehumanizing tendency in modern education and renew the cultivation of virtue in our students.
With Awakening Wonder, Steve Turley demonstrates that it is precisely such a recovery that is at the heart of the current classical education renewal. Once again, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are celebrated as those objective values that are essential for cultivating students as flourishing human beings. In these pages you will discover the history and development of these transcendent values and how they redeem our senses and sanctify our imaginations. Teachers will also learn how to incorporate these values into their teaching to awaken awe and wonder in both themselves and their students.