This radiant translation by W.S. Kuniczak restores the original glory and richness of master storyteller Henryk Sienkiewicz's epic tale.Set at a turning point in history (A.D. 54-68), as Christianity replaces the era of corruption and immorality that marked Nero's Rome, Quo Vadis abounds with compelling characters, including:Vinicius, the proud centurion who has fallen deeply in love with a mysterious young woman who disappears the night they meet;Ligia, the elusive beauty. Vinicius will not easily win her love, for she is a Christian, one of the group of dedicated believers led by the apostle Peter. Christians are rare in pagan, hedonistic Rome, and suffer great persecution;Petronius, uncle to Vinicius, an elegant, witty courtier who scoffs at love and religion but finds his nephew's passion charming; andNero himself, enemy of all Christians, a despotic emperor who plunges Rome deeper and deeper into depravity. The decadence of his banquets is staggering; and even worse, his mad laughter is heard echoing in the amphitheater as gladiators duel to the death.As Nero's appalling plans for the Christians become ever clearer, time appears to be running out for the young lovers. Vinicius must come to understand the true meaning of Ligia's religion before it is too late.Grand in scope and ambition, Quo Vadis explores the themes of love, desire and profound moral courage. Lavish descriptions, vivid dialogue and brilliantly drawn characters make this one of the world's greatest epics. Beloved by children and adults the world over, Quo Vadis has been the subject of five films, two of them in English.

     But what about the voices of the common soldier? Frank Wilkeson, when he wrote his account of the civil war, aimed to rectify this and reassert the importance of looking at the accounts of the men who carried the muskets, served the guns, and rode their saddles into the heat of battle. As he states in his preface, “The epauleted history has been largely inspired by vanity or jealousy, saving and excepting forever the immortal record”. Wilkeson and his fellow comrades who lived on the frontlines of the conflict had no need to rescue their reputations or assert their actions and thus their accounts provide a brilliant and unbiased alternative view of this bloody war. After lying about his age Frank Wilkeson was just sixteen when he joined the Union Army in 1864. Through the course of the next year he saw some of the ferocious battles of Grant’s Overland Campaign. Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac is a wonderfully refreshing account of the American Civil War that takes the reader to the heart of what it would have been like to have served in the front ranks. “Wilkeson’s words have a robustness that remind us that colorful writing was in the American air, and contemporaries like Mark Twain didn’t come out of the blue (or the gray).” Robert Cowley, HistoryNet “deeply portrays the experience of the ordinary soldier on campaign and in battle.” Civil War Talk “[The memoir is] unlike most others by Civil War Veterans who tended to romanticize and sometimes glorify the experiences they went through . . . . His emphasis on the seamy, unheroic, horrific side of war is a healthy corrective to romanticism." James McPherson Frank Wilkeson was an American journalist, soldier, farmer and explorer. His memoir Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac was first published in 1887 and he passed away in 1913.

    A descendant of a long line of Welsh squires, Hugh Wynne is a Quaker who possesses a firm loyal character. He is the narrator of the story, supplementing it with extracts from the diary of his friend, Jack Warder. When a Tory cousin, Captain Arthur Wynne, insulted his mother, Hugh knocked him down and precipitated a bitter feud. The course of the Revolution is followed with descriptions of the Meschianza Ball given in honor of General William Howe, the siege of Yorktown, Andre's execution, and the Battle of Germantown, during which Hugh is taken prisoner. S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) was a prominent 19th Century Philadelphia physician, novelist and poet. Of this colonial history novel Mitchell wrote, "Of course Hugh Wynne is regarded as the book which is likely to have any continuous life." Mitchell was well known during his lifetime as a nerve specialist who advocated a rest cure that incorporated overfeeding and no interruptions from outside the family. Among his most famous patients was the feminist theorist, socialist and suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper about a woman driven mad by her husband who followed Mithcell's type of absolute bed rest and isolation from the stimulus of the outside world.The story of the "sometime brevet lieutenant-colonel on the staff of the excellent General Washington." . The memoirs of Hugh Wynne, lieutenant colonel on the staff of General George WashingtonS. Weir Mitchell, whose first writings were papers and popular books on science, wrote poetry, short stories, novelettes, and several other novels. The most popular was Roland Blake (1886), a story of the Civil War. "the tale of an arduous struggle by a new land against a great empire - the story of many sad spiritual struggles, or much heart-searching distress, of brave decisions, and of battle and of camp."