Audiobooks narrated by Douglas Harvey

These lectures are intended to give an outline of Yoga, in order to prepare the student to take up, for practical purposes, the Yoga sutras of Patanjali, the chief treatise on Yoga. I have on hand, with my friend Bhagavan Das as collaborateur, a translation of these Sutras, with Vyasa’s commentary, and a further commentary and elucidation written in the light of Theosophy. To prepare the student for the mastering of that more difficult task, these lectures were designed; hence the many references to Patanjali. They may, however, also serve to give to the ordinary lay reader some idea of the Science of sciences, and perhaps to allure a few towards its study.

Annie Besant (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Citizenship in a Republic: 'Man in the Arena' Address given at Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 2

“Citizenship in a Republic” is the title of a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. In the speech Roosevelt discusses the attributes required of its citizens and leaders to sustain a thriving national character, not least of which are a high moral character and energetic engagement. He has harsh words for those who act purely in self-interest, who cause division, and who sit on the sidelines while others do the heavy lifting. The address is also known as “The Man in the Arena” speech owing to a notable passage that is often quoted: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Numerous politicians, athletes, speakers and others have turned to the passage for inspiration. Incoming freshman at the U.S. Naval Academy are required to memorize the passage. NBA champion LeBron James has the “Man in the Arena” written on his shoes.

Theodore Roosevelt (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Dreams

Since the beginning of time human beings have been seeking to understand the mystifying nature of dreams. A dream is a puzzle. I see objects but there is nothing there. I see people, I speak with them, yet there is no one there and I have not actually spoken. What is going on? In Dreams, first published in 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson analyzes the phenomenon of dreaming as a product of the mind attempting to interpret what happens physiologically during sleep. Our eyes respond to light and shapes. We hear sounds. Our bodies move and we have the sensation of touch. Bergson explains that we relate these phenomena to the vast reservoir of experiences stored in our memory, which he believes stores each of our experiences in detail in perpetuity. The brain seeks to associate the perceptions in our dreams with those memories that most closely that data. The result may be disconnected, illogical, incoherent, and absurd, but that is likely because during sleep we have relaxed from the labor of making sense of connections when we are awake. In this short essay he manages to elucidate the profound metaphysics of dreaming and suggest new areas of inquiry in disciplines such as psychoanalysis that promise further understanding.

Henri Bergson (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) is a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire influential on several levels. Fellow artists were impressed and unsettled when it was published in 1857; one described the effect as “immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and some indefinable anxious fear”. Admirers included Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, who wrote “you are as unyielding as marble and as penetrating as English mist”. The general public, however, was scandalized by the themes of sex and death and frank treatment of subjects such as lesbianism, which led to a prosecution of Baudelaire, his publisher and printer for offenses against publish morals. The conviction resulted in a fine and the removal of six poems. A second edition was released in 1861 that deleted the offending poems and added 35 poems, including a new section, Parisian Scenes, which described the effects of modernization symbolized by the identical streets and buildings taking shape during the renovation of Paris and a resulting alienation and estrangement as well as a sense of loss. On a stylistic level, the collection introduced a kind of highly ordered prose poetry and the use of a cynical and ironic voice that broke with Romantic traditions by acknowledging moral complexity, urban corruption, loss of innocence, and indulging in sensual and aesthetic pleasures. The work captures the fleeting sense of life and beauty in the emerging urban industrial world for which Baudelaire coined the term modernity and has had a lasting influence that continues to be an inspiration to this day.

Charles Baudelaire (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior In Company & Conversation

George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation is a set of 110 precepts or maxims on such matters as how to dress, how to walk, how to eat in public, and how to behave correctly in the company of superiors and equals. While containing the clear guidance in propriety, the rules also address moral issues, albeit somewhat indirectly. The rules are based on a set of precepts found in a treatise “Bienseance de la Conversation” prepared by Jesuit instructors in the 16th century. They were translated into Latin and English, and eventually were translated by the precocious eight-year-old Francis Hawkins into an English version that was published in 1649 and went through eleven editions by 1672. The rules appear on ten pages at the end of the second volume of schoolboy exercises included among the hundreds of Washington manuscripts located in the Library of Congress. Washington copied out these rules at about age 16 as both an exercise in handwriting and as a means to master topics worthy of consideration in the building of character, and thus important to a young man on the verge entering into adulthood. - From the “Origin of the Rules of Civility”, by Charles Moore, 1926

George Washington (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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New Hampshire

New Hampshire is a collection of poems by Robert Frost first published in 1923 by Henry Holt. It contains a number of his best known poems, including 'Fire and Ice', 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', 'Nothing Gold Can Stay', and “For Once, Then, Something”. The collection is organized into three sections: the poem “New Hampshire”, a group of poems labeled “Notes”, and a second group labeled “Grace Notes”. New Hampshire is considered Frost’s tour de force and cemented his reputation as America’s greatest poet. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1924. If you want to understand what Frost was up to and why he is considered so highly, this is the book to start with.

Robert Frost (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Prufrock and Other Oberservations

Prufrock and Other Observations is the title of a pamphlet of twelve poems by T. S. Eliot published in 1917 by The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, an English suffragette and philosopher of language. Most of the poems had been published earlier in literary magazines, most notably the “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which was Eliot’s first published poem and appeared in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Modern Verse at the urging of Ezra Pound, overseas editor for the magazine. Prufrock is a dramatic interior monologue of a modern urban man trapped in an inertia of isolation and indecision that has been described as a “drama of literary anguish”. The poem was influenced by The Divine Comedy and is peppered with references to the Bible, Shakespeare plays, and the works of metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell and the French symbolist poets. It was considered outlandish when it first appeared. One anonymous London reviewer commented that 'The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.' As it happens, Prufrock and the companion poems in this volume helped effect a paradigm shift away from Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to what came to be called Modernism and introduced one of the most distinctive voices and recognized voices in modern literature.

T. S. Eliot (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Rothschild's Fiddle

Yakov Ivanov is an elderly coffin-maker in a small village with a population that doesn’t generate enough deaths for him to make any real money. He is also a fiddler who sometimes sits in with a Jewish klezmer orchestra in spite of his dislike of Jews and of the flutist, Rothchild, in particular. Marfa, his long-suffering and unloved wife, becomes mortally ill with a contagious illness. He struggles to recall their shared past as he builds her coffin and soon he, too, succumbs to mortal illness, provoking a self-searching meditation and a change of heart.

Anton Chekhov. Translated By Constance Garnett. (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Seven Sermons to the Dead: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos

In late 1913, Carl Jung set out on an exploration of his psyche, a quest he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious'. In doing so, he would enter an imaginative state of consciousness and experience visions, a process that continued with varying intensity for the next ten years. He recorded his visions in six black-covered journals that he referred to as the “Black Books”, which provided a chronological record of his visions and dialogues with his soul. Along the way he used this material to begin drafting the manuscript of his legendary Red Book, a red leather-bound illustrated volume that was the formal document of this journey and which he kept private during his lifetime. He maintained that the visions recorded in the Red Book represented the nucleus of all his later work. The “Seven Sermons to the Dead”, or Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, is the only portion of the Red Book manuscript that Jung shared during his lifetime. He had the Septem Sermones privately printed as a small book in 1916 and occasionally gave copies to friends and students; it was never published and was only available as a gift from Jung himself. Jung’s heirs denied access to the Red Book after his death in 1961 until 2009, when it finally published, and it was discovered that the Septem Sermones was the closing section of the book. This context, combined with the tone and content, led one Jungian scholar to consider them as the 'summary revelation of the Redbook'. The Sermones ad Mortuos was included as an appendix to Jung's autobiographical memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections when it was published in 1962.

Carl Gustav Jung (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of 45 poems by English poet William Blake. Songs of Innocence is the first part of the collection and appeared in 1789 with engraved illustrations by Blake. The second part, Songs of Experience, also illustrated, was added in 1794 when Blake published the whole under the full title of Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The categories of innocence and experience are states of mind and ways of seeing that roughly correspond to the classical model of “paradise” and “fall”, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Blake helped formulate the then contemporary Romantic notion of childhood as a state of innocence, without fear, inhibition, or corruption; and adulthood as a contrary and fallen state of original sin prey to oppression, corruption, and power. The opposition is reinforced by poems with like titles and contrasting themes in each part. The poems are short, simple, and acutely sensitive to both joys of life and the harsh realities of class and poverty in the emerging Industrial Revolution.

William Blake (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die

We all die, sooner or later. We all know it, and we wonder when, where, and how it may happen. and yet we go to extraordinary lengths to put the thought of it out of our minds. We hesitate to bring it up in conversations. Montaigne, who … essay, addressed this issue head on in “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die.” It is perhaps his best-known essay, a kind of summation of his philosophy, and considered his most stoic. There are three main themes: first, do not forget that we all die, including you; second, there’s no reason to be afraid or to worry; third, be ready when the time comes, as it inevitably will. Keeping death in mind, he argues, diminishes the shock when it happens to others and alleviates the suffering by putting things in perspective. Acceptance and understanding should, in turn, help us remember that death is a part of the natural order, and that it happens only once, after which there is nothing to worry about simply because there is nothing after the end of it all. These all help us to be prepared and to appreciate the present even more, releasing us from the enslavement of fear and anxiety. Carpe diem! The essay contains numerous quotes in Latin from the ancients that reinforce his ideas. These are followed by an English translation and citation of the source in the original.

Charles Cotton, Michel De Montaigne (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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The Art of Money-Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money

Learn The 20 Time Tested Business Rules To Attract More Money, More Prospects and More Customers To You From 'The Father Of Marketing' - PT Barnum So read the copy for advertisements for The Art of Money Getting; or, Golden Rules for Making Money, a concise guide to the principles of sound business and financial management written by P. T. Barnum and published in 1880 as a 96-page paperback at the height of his worldwide popularity. The book consists of an introduction on the general subject followed by twenty concise chapters on Barnum’s rules of success, and is considered by many as the first and possibly the manual for effectively using advertising, promotion and public relations as essential tools of getting the message to the public as a critical factor in business development. “This has all of the very same advice that today's personal finance books have, but you can see how it was implemented in the 19th century. It also contains some very interesting advice on guiding children in their education and choice of a career that I think is still valid today. If you like personal finance books, but are also curious to know history at street level, this will be a terrific book for you. And it will really change your opinion of Mr. Barnum himself.” Reviewer at manybooks.net

Phineas Taylor 'p.T. Barnum' (Author), Douglas Harvey (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Douglas Harvey