【推荐1】A very strict officer was talking to some new soldiers whom he had to train. He had never seen them before, so began, “My name is Stone, and I’m even harder than stone, so do what I tell you or there’ll be trouble. Don’t try any tricks (诡计) with me, and then we’ll get on well together.”

Then he went to each soldier one after the other and asked him his name, “Speak loudly so that everyone can hear you clearly,” he said, “and don’t forget to call me ‘sir’.”

Each soldier told him name, until he came to the last one. This man remained silent, and so Captain Stone shouted at him, “When I ask you a question, answer it! I’ll ask you again： What’s your name, soldier?”

The soldier was very unhappy, but at last he replied, “My name’s Stonebreaker, sir,” he said nervously (紧张地).

【推荐1】Sometimes a book can help change history. One book that certainly did was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was a book that spoke out against slavery.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her book, there were over 3.5 million slaves in the United States. Slaves were usually in the cotton growing states of the South. The Northern States had ended slavery. Yet, most Northerners were not strongly against slavery. They did not mind that slavery continued in the South.

Stowe decided to make people understand that slavery was very bad. Each night after putting her six children to bed, she worked on her book. She told the story of an old slave, Tom, and Simon Legree, a slave owner. She also told how the slaves tried to run away for freedom. Uncle Tom’s Cabin first came out in 1852. Over 300,000 books were sold out in a year.

People had different ideas about the book. In the North, many people finally believed that slavery must be ended after they read the book. In the South, many people were very angry at the people in the North. By 1861 the two parts of the country were at war. The Civil War, which lasted until 1865, finally brought an end to slavery at last.

Of course, there were many things that made the Civil War happen. Yet, Uncle Tom’s Cabin surely played a part. Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862. As Lincoln took her hand, he said, “So you are the little woman who started the big war.”

【推荐3】Horace was born in 65 BCE, in the town of Venusia in Apulia, an area in Southern Italy. His father was a freedman and small landowner; historians disagree on whether or not he had ever been a slave. The Roman historian Suetonius wrote that his father might have been a “dealer in salted foods”. Though not quite rich, his father spent considerable amounts of money on Horace’s schooling and sent him to the finest school in Rome. Later, the son was sent to Athens to study Greek.

It was while Horace was in Athens that he joined the army of Marcus Junius Brutus against Octavian, who was the future Augustus and first Roman emperor. Brutus’ forces eventually lost at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. As a result of the defeat, his military career was over and he lost his family’s property.

Augustus pardoned his enemies and Horace returned to Rome, where he got a position as a clerk in the government. It was at this time that he wrote his first series of poems, something that brought him into contact with Virgil and Varius Rufus. The two celebrated poets introduced him to Gaius Maecenas, a wealthy supporter of young poets, who would have a powerful effect on his life. He was not only an author himself but a personal friend and advisor to Augustus, and through him, Horace would meet the emperor. Maecenas soon recognized the young poet’s outstanding gift and gave him a farm near Rome at Tivoli, a place where Horace wrote his extraordinary poems in peace.

In 23 BCE he published three books of Odes in which poems celebrated Rome at the age of Augustus. Horace said the poems were modeled after the great Greek poets, and he believed Rome had to recognize that the Greeks were better in all intellectual (智力的) and cultural fields.

In the final years of his life, he wrote Ars Poetica, a far-reaching work on the art of writing poetry. He eventually became one of Rome’s best-loved poets. On November 27, 8 BCE Horace died, two months after his life-long friend Maecenas.