by Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. This edition places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.
A. B. Guthrie
A hundred-odd men, women, and children gathered at the rendezvous a few miles outside of Independence. They were solid, established folk, most of them, and they were leaving behind prosperous farms and businesses because they shared a dream about the rich lands in the West, where a man, his wife, and their young ones might make a better life and a new world more desirable than any Americans before them had ever known.
Caroline Miller
The backwoods of Georgia during the antebellum era provides the setting for a family saga.
Stark Young
Young’s novel of war coming to the Natchez region of Mississippi has long been considered one of the best of Civil War novels. “If you would understand what was best in the Old South, its attitude toward life, you will find them here, glowing with that same vitality which was theirs in life.”—New York Times. Southern Classics Series.
John Hersey
A story about an Italian-American army officer in Sicily during World War II, who tries to help the people of the town of Adano get a new town bell after the Fascists had the old one melted down.