Benediction Classics

A Raisin in the Sun reflects Lorraine Hansberry's childhood experiences in segregated Chicago. This electrifying masterpiece has enthralled audiences and been festooned with critical accolades. "Never before, in the entire history of the American theatre, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage." - James Baldwin. "A Raisin in the Sun belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night " - The Washington Post. "The play that changed American theatre forever" - The New York Times.

A Raisin in the Sun reflects Lorraine Hansberry's childhood experiences in segregated Chicago. This electrifying masterpiece has enthralled audiences and been heaped with critical accolades. "Never before, in the entire history of the American theatre, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage." - James Baldwin. "A Raisin in the Sun belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night " - The Washington Post. "The play that changed American theatre forever" - The New York Times.

The Call of the Wild opens with Buck, a large powerful dog, enjoying life as a pet on a Santa Clara ranch. He is stolen and eventually and sold into service as a sled dog in the Yukon. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. Jack London spent almost a year in the Yukon collecting material for the book. The story was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published a month later in book form. The book's great popularity and success made a reputation for London. It is perhaps his most celebrated novel, and has been adapted to film numerous times.

This book contains John Milton's poetical works, with line numbers and footnotes. This includes Paradise lost, Paradise Regain'd and Sampson Agonistes as well as forty-nine other works. Most famous of these is Paradise Lost which is the Epic Poem by Milton, considered to be one of the greatest literary works in the English language. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, containing over ten thousand lines of verse. The poem brings to life the story in Genesis about the Fall of Man and subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton states that his purpose in writing the poem is to "justify the ways of God to men."

Mr. George Lawrence, C.M.G., First Class District Officer of His Majesty's Civil Service, sat at the door of his tent and viewed the African desert scene with the eye of extreme disfavour. There was beauty neither in the landscape nor in the eye of the beholder.

The landscape consisted of sand, stone, kerengia burr-grass, tafasa underbrush, yellow, long-stalked with long thin bean-pods; the whole varied by clumps of the coarse and hideous tumpafia plant.

The eye was jaundiced, thanks to the heat and foul dust of Bornu, to malaria, dysentery, inferior food, poisonous water, and rapid continuous marching in appalling heat.

Weak and ill in body, Lawrence was worried and anxious in mind, the one reacting on the other.

In the first place, there was the old standing trouble about the Shuwa Patrol; in the second, the truculent Chiboks were waxing insolent again, and their young men were regarding not the words of their elders concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley, and what happened, long, long ago, after the battle of Chibok Hill. Thirdly, the price of grain had risen to six shillings a saa, and famine threatened; fourthly, the Shehu and Shuwa sheiks were quarrelling again; and, fifthly, there was a very bad smallpox ju-ju abroad in the land (a secret society whose "secret" was to offer His Majesty's liege subjects the choice between being infected with smallpox, or paying heavy blackmail to the society). Lastly, there was acrimonious correspondence with the All-Wise Ones (of the Secretariat in "Aiki Square" at Zungeru), who, as usual, knew better than the man on the spot, and bade him do either the impossible or the disastrous.

And across all the Harmattan was blowing hard, that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea, not so much as a sand-storm, but as a mist or fog of dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches and cameras, defiling water, food and everything else; rendering life a burden and a curse.

- Taken from "Beau Geste" written by Percival Christopher Wren