The Hare and the Tortoise

 Once a hare was roaming near a lake in a forest. Suddenly he saw a tortoise and mocked at him saying - "Hurry up, you slow coach! Don't you find life very dull taking so long to cover a few yards? I could have run to the other side of the lake by now."

                       The tortoise felt teased and dared the hare to a race. The race was to be through the wood to a fixed goal. The hare agreed laughingly. In a few minutes he was away and out of sight.
                      

                        "What a funny race it is!" he said to himself , "I am already half -way through. But it is too-too cold; why not have a nap in the warm sunshine?"
The tortoise walked steadily on and on. In a short time, he passed by the sleeping hare.
The hare slept far longer then he had intended. When he woke up at last, he looked around in surprise and said to himself," Not even a sigh of the poor tortoise anywhere so far; I had better trot along and finish the race."
                           The hare ran to the goal. He was amazed to see all the animals cheering the tortoise who had arrived just a minute earlier. how ashamed he felt indeed!

MORAL : Slow and steady wins the race.

The little girl and the wolf

The story is about a lovely sweet girl who is loved by one and all. Everyone calls the girl Little Red Riding Hood as she always wears a riding hood made of red velvet, which was gifted to her by her grandmother.
One fine day, Little Red Riding Hood's mother packs a bottle of wine and a cake in a basket and asks her to take them to her sick grandmother. Before she leaves, her mother warns her not to talk to anyone on the way. Little Red Riding Hood promises her that she wouldn't and sets off to her grandmother's place, which was put up in the forest, half an hours walk from the village.
When Little Red Riding Hood enters the forest, she comes across a wolf, who plans to eat her up. So when the wolf asks her where she is off to, she answers him that she is on her way to see her grandmother, without suspecting the wolf. When the wolf asks her where her grandmother lives, Little Red Riding Hood innocently answers that too.
The wolf trots along with Little Red Riding Hood for sometime and tempts her to make a slow journey, asking her to enjoy the scenery. Little Red Riding Hood leaves the path and starts picking flowers and as she does so, she goes deeper and deeper into the forest. Meanwhile, the big bad wolf reaches grandmothers house and knocks the door. He enters the house and gobbles Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. Then, he puts on the grandmothers clothes and night cap and lies down in her bed.
Little Red Riding Hood soon realizes that she is late and hurries to her grandmother's house. She reaches the house and finds the front door wide open. She makes her way towards the bed, to see her grandmother looking very strange.
"Grandmother, what big ears you have!" she asks.
"All the better to hear you with," the wolf replies.
"Grandmother, what big eyes you have!" she asks.
"All the better to see you with," the wolf replies.
"Grandmother, what big hands you have!" she asks.
"All the better to hold you with," the wolf replies.
"But grandmother, what big teeth you have!" she asks.
"All the better to eat you with," the wolf replies, and leaps out of the bed and swallows Little Red Riding Hood. After that, the wolf gets back to the bed and starts sleeping. After a while, a passing huntsman hears the loud snores and goes inside the house, to find a wolf sleeping on the bed. He immediately cuts open the wolf's stomach with a pair of scissors. Little Red Riding Hood pops out of the wolf's stomach, followed by her grandmother. They then fill the wolf's stomach with stones and sew it. The wolf wakes up and tries to run, but falls down dead instead.
The grandmother drinks the wine and eats the cake and feels much better and the story ends with Little Red Riding Hood promising her grandmother that she would never again leave the path when her mother has forbidden it.

 

The Baron of Grogzwig

Grogzwig was a baron who lived in an old castle in Germany. Strange sounds and light effects within the castle were blamed on the ghost of a traveler who had been murdered by one of the baron’s ancestors.

 

Grogzwig lived a life of pleasure, happily hunting and drinking with his friends every day. However, in time he grew weary of his companions and yearned for excitement. He decides to marry a fellow baron’s daughter. The daughter offers no resistance.

No sooner is he married than his wife demands that he send away his friends. This is the first of many demands, and gradually the baron becomes a hen-pecked husband. They have twelve children. One of the daughters is sickly, which is a source of constant anxiety to her mother.

Grogzwig’s wealth diminishes, and he has no money left when his wife brings their thirteenth child into the world. He decides to commit suicide.

He is reflecting upon his life while smoking his pipe for the last time. Suddenly, a wrinkled creature appears before him, identifying himself as the Genius of Despair and Suicide. This creature uses a stake that is driven through its heart as a cane. He is in a hurry for the baron to off himself, for there are many people who want to commit suicide in these times—and so the creature’s schedule is rather busy. In fact, there is a man who wants to kill himself because he has too much money. The baron thinks this is stupid, and the creature says that it is no more stupid that killing yourself for having a lack of money.

The baron suddenly realizes that the creature is right. He decides he doesn’t want to kill himself. Though he doesn’t die a rich man years later, he dies happy.

When the story concludes, the new coach has arrived.

Henry: Virtuous Prince -- David Starkey

David Starkey has produced an unforgettable biography of a Renaissance prince who turned tyrant—to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession on 21 April 1509. His reign altered the course of British history and a lasting legacy.

Henry VIII was born a second son: the “spare” and not the “heir” as long as his elder brother, Arthur, lived. Rarely did his parents feel secure, since pretenders to the throne won support at home and abroad. Starkey shows more vividly than any previous historian that Bosworth's victor could never be reconciled to the Yorkist rump whatever he tried to do, and that Henry's doting mother, Elizabeth of York, saw her younger son as a crucial piece on the chessboard. From the moment he was created Duke of York at the age of three, she conditioned him to be a peacemaker. Court protocol, on which Starkey excels, required the queens of England to keep separate establishments, and until Arthur's death in 1502, Henry lived in Elizabeth's household with his two sisters. He became a mother's boy: spoilt, extrovert, competitive, over- defensive, overshadowed in every way by his elder brother and father, whose achievements he would later try to beat.

Starkey investigates Henry's education and religious beliefs, and whether he'd been earmarked by his father to be archbishop of Canterbury, which is possible, but unlikely. There was, however, a revolution in Henry's education when he became Prince of Wales after Arthur's death. His fussy, old-fashioned tutor, John Skelton, was sacked and fresh ones hired with connections to Erasmus of Rotterdam, the literary genius of the European Renaissance. Thereafter, Henry could be found carefully annotating his Latin copy of Cicero, jotting down the meanings of significant words and absorbing definitions of “virtue” rooted in moral and philosophical values. For a while, it seemed as if the next king of England might be a scholar. But Erasmus's hopes would be dashed, for although Henry was capable of prodigious bursts of enthusiasm for history, mathematics, music and astronomy, he turned out to be a wayward and opinion- ated student, with a short attention span.

Henry, meanwhile, had married Catherine of Aragon, although the ceremony wasn't binding on a 13-year-old and had to be repeated as soon as he became king. Starkey knows he will divide opinion over Catherine: he says she was a liar, accepting long-disputed evidence that her previous marriage to Arthur had been consummated, which she denied. This evidence, all hearsay with one exception, first emerged 20 years later when Henry wanted a divorce. The best of it came from William Thomas, a former groom of Arthur's privy chamber, who said he'd often escorted Arthur in his nightshirt as far as Catherine's bedroom door. Does that prove they had sex? Starkey thinks they did, but nobody really knows. After her marriage to Henry, Catherine lied in a letter to her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, about a miscarriage. Starkey makes hay with this, but he's too good a historian not to tell us that the two cases aren't alike. When she wrote to Ferdinand, Catherine was following an official government communiqué to spare her husband (and herself) embarrassment. When, however, she said that she was still a virgin when she married Henry, she took a solemn oath.In 1506, Henry met the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Stylish, handsome and gregarious, a brilliant jouster (and sexual predator) who loved to join in everything, Philip was the very model of the young Henry's hero: his grandfather, Edward IV. Starkey describes their encounters in eye-catching detail: Henry wanted to be like Philip, and from then onwards he dreamt of Camelot, not Cicero. Jousting (or more accurately until he was king, a junior version known as “running at the ring”) became a craze.

Henry became king two months before his 18th birthday. His father's death was kept secret for two days while his councillors, Kremlin-style, fought each other over the corpse. Empson and Dudley, those most closely associated with Henry VII's reign of terror in his final years, were sent to the Tower. The young Henry began his reign with a flurry of grand gestures designed to win popularity. Money flowed liked water as he showered gifts on his friends, esp-ecially his Yorkist relations. Intoxicated with his power, he soon found that his more sober and experienced ministers stepped in to curtail his spending. A stalemate resulted, until the young king, using his crony, the upstart William Compton, to do his dirty work, attempted to break free.

Compton, whom Starkey unmasks for the first time as Henry's backstairs fixer and pimp, was partly successful at liberating Henry, but not successful enough. Then, at 19, Henry was introduced to Thomas Wolsey, the butcher's son who became his chief policy guru and hatchet man for the next 18 years. Wolsey began as he meant to go on, teaching Henry how to overrule the lord chancellor. And that was that. Once Henry had been freed of conciliar supervision, says Starkey, his days as a “virtuous prince” are over, and his mature years begin.

That, of course, departs radically from convention, which takes the watershed to be Wolsey's dismissal in 1529 and replacement by the blacksmith's son, Thomas Cromwell. Starkey's decision is bold: there are 36 action-packed years of Henry's life to be crammed into volume two. For its extraordinary insights into the smouldering embers of the Wars of the Roses, Henry: Virtuous Prince is masterly. As a biography of England's most celebrated king, it's an outstanding overture. The main performance is still to come.

Warsaw 1920 -- Adam Zamoyski

  

     The story told here is a straightforward account of a short, sharp war which took place from April to October 1920 between two infant states, Polish and Soviet.     
       Poland in 1980 was when communism was peacefully pushed into history's bottomless dustbin by the workers of the union, Solidarity. Poland in 1940 was when 20,000 of Europe's intellectuals, doctors, teachers and army officers were taken out and shot on Stalin's orders - a mini-Holocaust not matched by Hitler until the following years. Poland in 1920 was where Lenin's attempt to convert Europe to Bolshevism at the end of machine guns and bayonets came to a dead end.

       Now we have a thorough, beautifully written account of one of the great turning-points in Europe's history. Adam Zamoyski knows Polish, Russian and European archives as few others do, and writes with the dash of a Polish cavalry officer.

        In 1920, Lenin ordered the invasion and occupation of Poland as a prelude to exporting the Russian revolution into the heart of Europe, Germany. In a desperate war in the spring and summer, the Poles held off much greater Russian armies, culminating in the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Lenin's military ambitions were defeated and Europe was saved from the full-scale dictatorships that arrived in Germany after 1933 and the eastern half of Europe after 1945.

     Lenin thought the huge numbers he could muster would be enough to see off the Poles. Giant cavalry armies raced for Warsaw. The Russians invented a new weapon - a machine gun mounted on a horse-drawn pram. These raced across battle-fields with scything effect. But as the lines of communication got longer and longer, the Poles were able to cut off and mash up the various red armies.

        The Poles broke all the Russian codes and were able to listen to all communications. The training proved vital two decades later as Polish code-breakers and the Polish underground's capture of the Wehrmacht's Enigma coding machine let London read German war plans. The Red Army had no time for hearts-and-minds campaigns. Women were raped, peasants slaughtered and the Jews blamed as the capitalist paymasters of the hardly philo-Semitic Poles under Pilsudski. Trotsky ordered leaflets to be printed in German as he believed fondly that first Polish, then German workers and peasants would rise up to embrace their Russian liberators.

        London was caught up in its own crises in Ireland and Palestine. British unions tried to block trade to Poland in the name of workers' solidarity with Sovietism. No one in Poland noticed. The French took events more seriously. General Weygand, later responsible for France's defeat in 1940, worked with the Poles, as did a young major, Charles de Gaulle. He never forgot that, between attachment to an ideology and attachment to the nation, the latter always wins. Zamoyski is indulgent to his beloved Poland in arguing that the 1920 war gave Poland two decades of freedom. Yes, in the sense of autonomous rule, but the record of authoritarianism, Jew-hatred and politics that defied all common sense is hardly noble. 1920 prevented Soviet dictatorship but Europe was unable to rise to the challenge of constructing something different. That had to wait until after 1945 and the arrival of Nato and the EU.

       Today, again, Poland and Britain are linked as hundred of thousands of Poles and Brits live in each other's nations, commute, settle and form households. The Poles know and cherish Britain's history as do few other European nations. Now Zamoyski is repaying the compliment as he rightly insists on the centrality of the Polish narrative to understanding Europe

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee -- Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by American writer Dee Brown is a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century, and their displacement and slaughter by the United States federal government.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee expresses the American Indian perspective of the injustices and betrayals of the US government--in its dealings with the Indians, which seemed to be engaged in continued efforts to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American people.

The book begins with the statement that Christopher Columbus had named the Native Americans "Indios" and with the differing dialects and accents of the Europeans to come, the word became known as Indians. Life as known to the indigenous people of the Americas would never be the same from the point of Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1492.

Chapter by chapter, the book describes differing tribes of Native Americans and their relations to the US federal government during the years 1860-1890. It begins with the Navajos, the Apaches, and the other tribes of the Southwest US who were displaced as California and the surrounding areas were colonized. Brown chronicles the changing and sometimes conflicting attitudes both of US authorities, such as General Custer, and Indian chiefs, particularly Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, and the Indian chiefs' attempts to save their peoples, by peace, war, or retreat.

The later part of the book focuses primarily on the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes of the North American Plains. They were among the last to be moved onto Indian reservations, under perhaps the most violent circumstances. It culminates with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the deaths of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and the US slaughter of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an event generally considered to mark the end of the Indian Wars.

Empires of the Sea -- Roger Crowley

In Empires of the Sea, acclaimed historian Roger Crowley has written his most mesmerizing work to date – a thrilling account of this brutal decades-long battle between Christendom and Islam for the soul of Europe, a fast-paced tale of spiraling intensity that ranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar and features a cast of extraordinary characters: Barbarossa, “The King of Evil,” the pirate who terrified Europe; the risk-taking Emperor Charles V; the Knights of St. John, the last crusading order after the passing of the Templars; the messianic Pope Pius V; and the brilliant Christian admiral Don Juan of Austria.

This struggle’s brutal climax came between 1565 and 1571, seven years that witnessed a fight to the finish decided in a series of bloody set pieces: the epic siege of Malta, in which a tiny band of Christian defenders defied the might of the Ottoman army; the savage battle for Cyprus; and the apocalyptic last-ditch defense of southern Europe at Lepanto – one of the single most shocking days in world history. At the close of this cataclysmic naval encounter, the carnage was so great that the victors could barely sail away "because of the countless corpses floating in the sea." Lepanto fixed the frontiers of the Mediterranean world that we know today.

Roger Crowley conjures up a wild cast of pirates, crusaders, and religious warriors struggling for supremacy and survival in a tale of slavery and galley warfare, desperate bravery and utter brutality, technology and Inca gold. Empires of the Sea is page-turning narrative history at its best–a story of extraordinary color and incident, rich in detail, full of surprises, and backed by a wealth of eyewitness accounts. It provides a crucial context for our own clash of civilizations.