Helen Plum Library

" A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as...

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the darker pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry...

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness... One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three...

Leonard Bernstein's brilliant comic operetta is based on the classic Voltaire tale of an innocent young man's journey through a life filled with colorful characters and unexpected life lessons. Performed in concert-style