Amy's Gold |
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| Jedediah packed the grain mules by first fashioning a barrel sling on the sawbuck packsaddle. He found the middle of the sling rope, threw a half hitch over the front sawbuck with half the rope on each side of the mule, and next formed a loop in the front by passing the end down the center of the crossbuck and through the rear crossbuck where he formed a second loop and continued the rope back through the rear buck and out at the center of the packsaddle. Jimmy lifted up a large sack of grain and he pulled both the forward and rear loops tight around the load with the center rope pulled up under and then passed over to the off side. Howie formed the sling on his side and balanced the second sack of grain in a like manner. Jimmy threw a diamond hitch over the load.
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From Comes A Pale Horse by Robert O. Burgess
Illustration by Brenda Helm
200 Distinguished Novels, Plays, Poems, Songs and Non-fiction Works for the Lifelong Student
Selected by Robert O. Burgess, M. D.
I have had the opportunity to counsel a good many students who wanted to go to medical school and who, at the time, were unsuccessful gaining admission. I suggested to each candidate that they carefully read each work from the following list of great works from the world's literature and re-apply. There is a misconception that admission to a medical school (or for that matter, any college, university, or post graduate program in any field) is simply to have completed the required courses with good grades received, fill out a few forms and wait. To be educated one must be well read and one does not have to go to any school to be educated. To paraphrase Matthew Arnold we ought to study the best that has been said and done in the world with disinterestedness. That disinterestedness means to read without bias, and I will add, to read avidly everyday of ones life. Robert Heinlein reminded us that specialization is for insects.
One might easily add another 200 titles to this list just from the authors included here, and I am sure, many hundreds more from authors I have left out.
The Iliad; The Odyssey - Homer
Ode on a Grecian Urn; On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer - John Keats
The Portrait of a Lady; Sir Edmund Orme; The Art of the Novel - Henry James
A Farewell to Arms; Big Two Hearted River; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber; The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby; Winter Dreams - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
From The People, Yes - Carl Sandburg
Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; The Gambler; Notes from Underground; TheIdiot- FeodorDostoevsky
The Cherry Orchard; The Sea Gull; On the Road; The Three Sisters; The Duel - Anton Chekhov
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Battle of Blenheim - Robert Southey
Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow; Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt? Jolly Good Ale and Old; Beowulf; Frankie and Johnny; On Top of Old Smoky; The Wabash Cannon Ball; Barbara Allen - Anonymous
Heart of Darkness; Preface from The Nigger of the “Narcissus”; The Lagoon; Typhoon; Lord Jim -Joseph Conrad
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
Hedda Gabler; A Doll’s House; The Wild Duck; Ghosts; Uncle Vanya - Henrik Ibsen
Finnegans Wake; Ulysses - James Joyce
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
To Celia - Ben Jonson
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Razor’s Edge; Of Human Bondage; The Colonel’s Lady - W. Somerset Maugham
The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk
Fathers and Sons; The Torrents of Spring; The Hunting Sketches; First Love - Ivan Turgenev
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg; A Cub Pilot’s Experience; What Stumped the Bluejays; Life on the Mississippi; The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - Samuel L. Clemens
I’m a Fool; The Untold Lie - Sherwood Anderson
Horse Thief; Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell
On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes - Thomas Gray
I Asked a Thief - William Blake
The Red Badge of Courage; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Open Boat; The Blue Hotel; The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky - Stephen Crane
The Power and the Glory; The Heart of the Matter; Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene
The Shield of Achilles - W. H. Auden
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Plato Told; Pity This Busy Monster; Among Crumbling People; Manunkind - e. e. cummings
Of Mice and Men; Cannery Row; Sweet Thursday; The Chrysanthemums; The Grapes
of Wrath;
The Wayward Bus - John Steinbeck
Résumé - Dorothy Parker
The Sound of Silence - Paul Simon
The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
Gentle on My Mind - Johnny Hartford
The Mansion; A Rose for Emily; Barn Burning; A Bear Hunt; The Sound and the Fury; Go Down, Moses - William Faulkner
The Hanging Tree; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence - Dorothy Johnson
The Ballad of East and West; Kim - Rudyard Kipling
Faust - Goethe
The Furnished Roon - O. Henry
The Outcasts of Poker Flat - Bret Harte
Pere Goriot - Honore De Balzac
I, The Jury; My Gun is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine - Mickey Spillane
The Way of all Flesh -Samuel Butler
The Devil and Daniel Webster - Stephen Vincent Benet
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
The Big Sky - A. B. Guthrie
Les Miserables; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - Victor Hugo
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Divina Commedia - Dante Alighieri
Oedipus; Antigone; Electra - Sophocles
My Antonia; The Enchanted Bluff - Willa Cather
The Count of Monte Christo; The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Thin Man; The Glass Key; The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
The Last of the Mohicans; The Pathfinder - James Fenimore Cooper
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay
The Professionals - Frank O’Rourke
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
The Virginian - Owen Wister
A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 vols.; The Second World War,
6 vols. -
Winston S. Churchill
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant - Ulysses S. Grant
Man and Superman; Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Valdez is Coming; Hombre; 3:10 to Yuma - Elmore Leonard
The Republic; Euthyphro; The Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Symposium; Alcibiades - Plato
Ethics - Aristotle
The Boarded Window - Ambrose Bierce
The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
Shane; Monte Walsh - Jack Schaefer
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time; Sweetness and Light; The Study of Poetry, Literature and Science - Matthew Arnold
Something of Value; Grenadine Etching; The Old Man and the Boy - Robert Ruark
Romeo and Juliet; Macbeth; Hamlet; Othello; Much Ado About Nothing; Richard III; King Lear -William Shakespeare
To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church; My Love Is
Like A Red, Red Rose –
Robert Burns
Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe
To Lucasta Going to the War - Richard Lovelace
War and Peace; The Death of Ivan Ilych; Three Deaths; Master and Man; How Much Land Does a Man Need? Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down; Me and Bobby McGee - Kris Kristofferson
Meditations on Quixote - Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Wall - Jean-Paul Sartre
A Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
Of the Education of Children - Michel Eyquem Sieur de Montaigne
Because I Could Not Stop for Death - Emily Dickinson
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Road Not Taken; Neither Out Far nor In Deep; Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening -
Robert Frost
Terence, This is Stupid Stuff - A. E. Housman
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
The Courage To Be - Paul Tillich
To Build a Fire - Jack London
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
Tartuffe; The Misanthrope - Jean Baptiste Poquelin – Moliere
The Exodus; The Rockpile - James Baldwin
I Can't Breathe - Ring Lardner
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot
One of the many knives I have made and engraved.
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