Western Life

Brought to you by Penguin. From the eminent philosopher, an authoritative exploration of the great questions of how to live 'There is a question everyone has to ask and answer - in fact, has to keep on asking and keep on answering. It is, 'How should I live my life?' meaning, 'What values shall...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières, read by Avita Jay and David Sibley. A sweeping, heartbreaking novel following Daniel in his troubled marriage with Rosie as they navigate the unsettled time between the World Wars. Rosie and Daniel have...

For thousands of years, the greatest healers in the Himalayas have been refining a potent healing science for the treatment of physical ailments, psychological disorders, and spiritual challenges. The most effective natural healing methods were recorded on ancient scrolls. Now, in this breakthrough real-life account, many of these healing secrets are revealed by the author's encounters with legendary master healer Dr. Naram.

A monumental and exhilarating history of European thought from the end of Antiquity to the beginning of the Enlightenment—500 to 1700 AD—tracing the arc of intellectual history as it evolved, setting the stage for the modern era. Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The...

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

Confessions of a Horseshoer offers a close and personal look at the mind-set of a professional horseshoer (farrier) who also happens to be a college professor. The audiobook, an ironic and playful view of the many unusual animals (and people) Ron Tatum has encountered over thirty-seven years, is nicely balanced between straightforward presentation, self-effacing humor, and lightly seasoned wisdom. It captures the day-to-day life of a somewhat cantankerous old guy.

A favor owed. An Off-limits romance. Four Corners is in for the hottest Christmas it's ever seen. Sheena Patrick has done well, all things considered. After her father’s death, she raised her sisters and did all she could to give them the best life possible. But they’re grown and gone now...

Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential Western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and - for his day - relatively open-minded. Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.

A car accident on prom night changes everything for eighteen-year-old Maverick Harrington. In a flash, he loses two best friends: one who dies in the crash, the other who carries the blame. Finding hate easier than grief, Maverick’s heart slowly hardens. Now twelve years later, he runs Harrington Ranch, bearing the family name on his shoulders and wearing the past like a brand on his heart.

A brand new Mountain Man sequel from Charles Ray! Caleb’s new wife, Spring Flower, who now calls herself Flora in order to fit into Bear Creek society, finds a bear cub whose mother’s been killed by wolves. She takes it home and nurses it back to health, something that Caleb, uneasy about at first, comes to accept. They even give the cub the name Snuffy, and delight in how it becomes close with Dog. Later, while shopping in Bear Creek, Flora is accosted by three ruffians, and Caleb gives them a drubbing.

Billy the Kid - born Henry McCarty in 1859, and also known as William H. Bonney - emerges from this audio in all his complexity, at once a gentleman and gregarious companion and a thief and violent murderer. Tapping new depths of research, Etulain traces Billy’s short life from his mysterious origins in the East through his wanderings in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

After saving former Confederate officer Ben Winthrop from a lynch mob, black mountain man, Caleb Johnson is talked into guiding him from Colorado to Oregon. He then lets himself be talked into spending two years there helping Ben get his ranch started. But he wants to get back to his little cabin near Bear Creek, Colorado, even though he’ll miss Ben’s wife, Wenona, the Shoshone princess, and her two sons. Finally, though, Caleb puts his foot down. He saddles his horse, named Horse, and calls his dog, named Dog, and sets off for home, a journey that is anything but routine—or peaceful.

Whether intended as historical fiction or not, this tale of a California bandit in the early years of the Gold Rush by America's first Native American novelist was based on real occurrences. By early 1853, a certain "Joaquin" was being blamed for seemingly every murder and robbery in the young Golden State—a Robin Hood-like figure originally from Mexico said to be an inspiration a half a century later for the character of Zorro (who in turn was an influence on masked vigilante and avenger characters like Batman).

The six factors in Western, and particularly American, world dominance are competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Learn what you need to support or oppose this accelerating trend.

What is consciousness? This audiobook presents an understanding of life that transcends matter. More importantly, it transcends the difference between what you are and what I am. Despite its reliance on what is known through Western Science, it is a transcendence of the Western understanding of reality. It does not begin with a world and then try to figure out how life evolved within it; it begins with life and extrapolates where the world came from.

 Mark Scarbrough has been searching for something his entire life. Whether it’s his birth mother, true love, his purpose, or his sexual identity, Mark has been on a constant quest to find out who he really is, with the great Western texts as his steadfast companions. As a boy with his head constantly in a book, desperate to discover new worlds, he can hardly distinguish between their plots and his own reality. 

Tom Warren, a giant of a man in stature and physical strength, experiencing a deadly tragedy, turns to his new life as a mountain man in the largely unexplored mountain west, facing its many dangers in an attempt to forget his earlier life. Tom soon discovers new friendships among his kind at historic Fort Union, matched only by subsequent dangers and challenges from grizzly bears, renegade fur trappers, an Indian out to kill him and the rescue of an Indian maiden in distress which gains him more deadly enemies.

The Lovely Bones meets the wild, Wild West in this haunting tale inspired by a true story. Pregnant out of wedlock, 16-year-old Annie Moore is sent to live at a convent for fallen women. When the nuns take her baby, Annie escapes, determined to find a way to be reunited with her daughter. But few rights or opportunities are available to a woman in the 1860s, and after failing to find a respectable job, she resorts to prostitution in order to survive.

Sarah Clark’s family endured the hardship of a wagon train journey to pursue their dream of land ownership in Kansas. The family of four scratches out a hardscrabble life on the windswept plains. Happily expecting another child, Sarah is bereft when the baby is stillborn. When a stagecoach robbery and shoot-out take her husband’s life, Sarah must make life-altering decisions.

From monsters to witches and ancient libraries to lost islands, The Life Fantastic seeks to trace the origins of ideas, their surprising paths, and unexpected ways in which they interact and manifest throughout history. By digging around the roots of literary genres, popular stories, and ancient myths, Noa propels the listener back and forth through time, from high to popular culture, from art to politics and religion, on a journey to ever-expanding horizons. This is an invitation to explore the collective subconscious of Western culture.