Wastrel

Piers Plowman: The Vision of a People's Christ , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 282min

Probably written in the latter half of the 14th century in the South-West-Midlands dialect, Piers Plowman is a remarkable example of allegorical, alliterative verse that conveyed, for the first time ever, the authentic voice, spirit and character of the ordinary people of England. Very little is known about William Langland, the presumed author, but it is very much a product of the medieval mind combining Christian belief with dramatic poetry in a drama of identity. While the characters are less rounded, more-two dimensional than the fully developed protagonists of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, they comprise an illuminating sample of the English type: the ‘every-men’ and women of their time, from the plowman to the wastrel, the merchant to the priest, the high-born lady to the harlot. No-one is spared. Opening with a dream, or vision, a structural device made popular by the 13th-century French poet Guillaume de Loris in his Roman de la Rose and used most successfully by Dante in his Divine Comedy, Langland proceeds to explore his theme: namely, the world and the path the true Christian must follow through it to achieve salvation in life. In the course of the events which he goes on to describe, in a series of visions and successive awakenings, he paints a wonderfully detailed and highly critical picture of the corruption and abuses in the church and in society. Concepts become characters in the drama of life; Reason, Conscience, Recompense, Wealth, Will, Desire, “All the world’s weal, all the world’s woe,” are examined metaphorically in the context of the changing realities of the medieval economy. Piers Plowman embodies the Will. He is the good Christian who carries Jesus Christ in his heart, a good person who works hard for the benefit of the community and his own soul. His attitudes and actions are in counterpoint to those of a whole range of less edifying characters: ne’er-do-wells, layabouts, good- ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Mike Rogers. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/dhrm/000278/bk_dhrm_000278_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

In Spite of Myself, Hörbuch, Digital, 998min

A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of today’s greatest living actors. He was born a Canadian on a Friday the 13th in 1929 - the year of the Crash. His boyhood was one of privilege: an ancestor was a Governor General; his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott was Canada’s third prime minister and owned railroads. There were steam yachts, mansions, and a life of Victorian gentility and somewhat cluttered splendor. Plummer tells how "this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down," and writes of his early acting days as an 18-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by the legendary Komisarjevsky of Moscow’s Imperial Theatre. We see his glorious New York of the '50s, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer’s own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember... how the sublime Ruth Chatterton ("she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis") introduced him to the right people in New York... how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at 25 in The Starcross Story ("It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!"). He writes about Miss Katherine Cornell (the last stage star to travel by private train), who, with her husband, Guthrie McClintic, added to what experience Plummer had the necessary gloss, spit, and polish to take him to the next level. Guthrie bundled Plummer off to Paris for a production of Medea, opposite Dame Judith Anderson ("a little Tasmanian devil...who with one look could turn an audience to stone"). Plummer writes about the great producers with whom Language: English. Narrator: Christopher Plummer. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/003326/bk_rand_003326_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping