Study guides: popular books - Page 15 | Just Great DataBase

“A Man for all Seasons” is a play written by an English playwright Robert Bolt. The historical drama of the highest emotional tension tells about great English humanist Thomas More, a statesman, an outstanding lawyer, and philosopher, who gave life for his convictions. History of Thomas More perhaps the most famous and memorable episode of the relationship between humanist and...

Barbara Kingsolver is an American writer and poet. Her first novel “The Bean Trees” was published in 1988. The book denotes multiple symbolic meanings about shared motherhood, life and death, and beauty. The narrator Taylor Greer, who is also the main character of the novel grew up among the tobacco fields of Kentucky and suddenly realized that she had no choice, no future. It is not...

“The Age of Innocence” is a romantic novel about duty, independence and unrequited love, that brought to its author fame and the unofficial title of “The First Lady of the Letters”. It is a beautiful story that lets us immerse into the radiance of Gilded Age and face the conflict between rigid morals and social expectations and the human desire to be happy no matter what...

Pilgrim Progress by John Bunyan is one of the most famous religious allegories in the Christian world. Once its popularity was second only to the Bible. The book is written in two parts, the first one was finished in 1678 and it took the author several years to finish the second part in 1684. The book is dedicated to the metaphorical journey of a person throughout their life. The symbolic...

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is the novel that is often classified as social satire. It tells the readers the story of a well-educated, beautiful and virtuous woman of upper class, named Lily Bart and her downfall from the upper class to the very social bottom. The problem of Lily is simple and very common for the noble women with proper upbringing of that times: she is twenty-nine already...

Not everybody likes historical novels. And not every story makes a good inspiration source for a book. But some events are best to learn about from the literary genre. The Afghan war is one of them. An American author of Afghan origins wrote “The Kite Runner” where he talks about the Soviet intervention, a fallen regime, and the establishment of a Taliban movement. The novel is fine...

The Killer Angels is a novel about war. Though it is a fiction one, the events of the novel are depicted so realistically that for a long time the book was one of the essential literary pieces to read in many military institutions, like US Army Officer Candidate School, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina and many others. It is also one of the two fictional novels recommended in...

One of the most scandalous novels of its age, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” couldn’t be published openly without censorship. The author was blamed for graphically depicting sex scenes and disrupting the morals of the society. Unexpurgated version wasn’t printed in the United Kingdom until 1960, when the norms were loosened a bit. Was it really so obscene and vulgar...

The story, despite taking place in the mundane and bleak Harlem district, is very Biblical by its nature. The tale of John Grimes and his search for himself, establishing his relationship with God and desperate attempts to fix at least some relationships with his family is very close to Earth. But if we look closely, we see a lot of allusions to the Biblical story of Ham, the unfortunate son of...

The play by Thornton Wilder is very interesting because it is literally a play within a play. The events of the book are happening on stage in a theater of the small town of Grover’s Corners. The best way to get acquainted to this play is to actually watch it in the theater - this will give you the authentic feeling of presence inside the plot and completely break the fourth wall between...

One of the short stories by Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog” is considered one of the most famous and most brilliant. Like the majority of Chekhov’s works, this one tells us the story about relationships between the people, shortly but very precisely showing us the typical personalities and situations from the new angle. The plot of it seems trivial: the adultery...

This story is a rare example of non-fiction that can be read exactly like a fiction book - so unlikely are the events described in it. The author of the book, the journalist John Howard Griffin makes a brave experiment (totally discarding his instinct of self-preservation, because this experiment would have been greatly disapproved by both black and white people). He darkens his skin and...

If you think that nothing new can be said about King Arthur, try this book by T. H. White. More than six thousand pages are dedicated to carefully dismantling everything you knew before about the King Arthur and his knights and rebuilding this knowledge in the new, unusual but brilliant shape. To fully understand the book, we should know the time when it was written - right after the World War...

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a great summery comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1596. The text reads quite differently from typical author’s creations. It is very light and airy-fairy to the point that it’s hard to tell where is the reality and where is a dream. Get ready, put on your fancy clothes, turn on the music – we are going to the wedding! The...

Henry James wrote “The Turn of the Screw” in 1898. James is a well-known author of the world’s classic literature. He is a fine psychologist, very attentive and thorough in his observations of life. He masterfully implements these skills in the process of writing gothic stories. “The Turn of the Screw” is a mystical novel about the ghosts, written in the style of...

Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville has a complicated story of publishing. After the death of the author, his widow discovered the manuscript of the novel, but it was still a draft. Trying to preserve the last work of her deceased husband, she started to transcript and edit it, but sometimes it was very complicated to choose the right variant from the many drafts and understand which plot turn...

The brilliant piece of historical fiction, this is the story about the Revolutionary War and the rite of passage for the young Tim. The families are torn apart by the conflict of political interests and his own one isn’t spared. Tim’s older brother, who is only sixteen years old, joins the resistance to fight the British government, while his father stays loyal to the crown. Tim has...

Even great literature lovers don’t start their Shakespeare experience with “Much Ado About Nothing”. His other plays, such as “Romeo and Juliette” or “ Othello” are much more typical for the first encounter with the greatest poet of all times. But sooner or later readers come to experience “Much Ado About Nothing” and it instantly becomes...

The deeply touching novel by Potok tells us the story of the two boys, their friendship, family issues and their coming of age they go through together. Danny and Reuven are both boys from Jewish families, but while Danny is the son of an ultra-orthodoxical rabbi, Reuven is a descendent of the more modern family. The boys befriend each other on the baseball match between their schools and this...