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Showing 161 - 180 of 6973 items
By Michael Maas. 2015
This book examines the age of Attila, roughly the fifth century CE, an era in which western Eurasia experienced significant…
geopolitical and cultural changes. The Roman Empire collapsed in western Europe, replaced by new 'barbarian' kingdoms, but it continued in Christian Byzantine guise in the eastern Mediterranean. New states and peoples changed the face of northern Europe, while in Iran, the Sasanian Empire developed new theories of power and government. At the same time, the great Eurasian steppe became a permanent presence in the European world. This book treats Attila, the notorious king of the Huns, as both an agent of change and a symbol of the wreck of the old world order.By Patrick Robinson, Lieutenant Commander Lay. 2012
TOPGUN on Wall Street chronicles one man's extraordinary journey from the cornfields of Ohio, to the cockpit of an F-14,…
to the boardrooms on Wall Street. Lieutenant Commander Jeffery Lay and #1 New York Times bestselling author Patrick Robinson bring a provocative, ground-breaking voice to the business landscape with a revolutionary answer for stabilizing corporate America: business--the military way. As a TOPGUN fighter pilot, Lieutenant Commander Lay perfected a tried-and-true military technique: PLAN -BRIEF - EXECUTE -DEBRIEF However, when he retired from active duty in 2006 and went to work for a subsidiary of the ill-fated Lehman Brothers, he noticed that everything about the business world was different: less efficient, awash with excuses for failure, allowance of men with tricky morals to rise to the top, self-gain overshadowing teamwork, and a devastating lack of accountability. With such deeply rooted flaws, is corporate America doomed for perpetual failure? Answer: Not if we put admirals in charge and adopt the military's tight chain of command. This game-changing thesis is interwoven with Lieutenant Commander Lay's dramatic story, including his high-intensity strike fighter aircraft landings, never-before-written details of the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN), and his heart-breaking, humbling, and inspirational battle with cancer at the peak of his military career. TOPGUN on Wall Street is written by a leader determined to show the business world that excellence is a choice and perfection is attainable.By Margery M. Heffron, David L. Michelmore. 2014
Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, wife and political partner of John Quincy Adams, became one of the most widely known women…
in America when her husband assumed office as sixth president in 1825. Shrewd, intellectual, and articulate, she was close to the center of American power over many decades, and extensive archives reveal her as an unparalleled observer of the politics, personalities, and issues of her day. Louisa left behind a trove of journals, essays, letters, and other writings, yet no biographer has mined these riches until now. Margery Heffron brings Louisa out of the shadows at last to offer the first full and nuanced portrait of an extraordinary first lady. The book begins with Louisa’s early life in London and Nantes, France, then details her excruciatingly awkward courtship and engagement to John Quincy, her famous diplomatic success in tsarist Russia, her life as a mother, years abroad as the wife of a distinguished diplomat, and finally the Washington, D. C. , era when, as a legendary hostess, she made no small contribution to her husband’s successful bid for the White House. Louisa’s sharp insights as a tireless recorder provide a fresh view of early American democratic society, presidential politics and elections, and indeed every important political and social issue of her time.By Joseph Sebarenzi, Laura Mullane. 2009
By Ellen Levine. 2007
Rachel Carson combined her love of science and writing in her award-winning and controversial book Silent Spring. Revealing the dangers…
of pesticide use, it brought readers a new awareness of humankind's contamination of the environment and ultimately led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.By Koerner, Brendan I.. 2008
An epic saga of hubris , cruelty, and redemption, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of the…
greatest manhunt of World War II. Herman Perry, besieged by the hardships of the Indo-Burmese jungle and the racism meted out by his white commanding officers, found solace in opium and marijuana. But on one fateful day, Perry shot his unarmed white lieutenant in the throes of an emotional collapse and fled into the jungle. Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry's ghost to the most remote corners of India and Burma. Along the way, he uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road's GIs, for whom Jim Crow was as powerful an enemy as the Japanese-and for whom Herman Perry, dubbed the jungle king, became an unlikely folk hero. .By Jack Hurst. 2007
Deep in the winter of 1862, on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, two extraordinary military leaders faced each other…
in an epic clash that would transform them both and change the course of American history forever. Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant had no significant military successes to his credit at the outset of the campaign. He was barely clinging to his position within the Union Army--he had been officially charged with chronic drunkenness only days earlier, and his own troops despised him. His opponent was as untested as he was: an obscure lieutenant colonel named Nathan Bedford Forrest. The two men held one thing in common: an unrelenting desire for victory at any cost. A riveting account of the making of two great military leaders, and two battles that transformed America forever, Men of Fire is destined to become a classic work of military history.By John Fabian Witt. 1960
Pulitzer Prize FinalistBancroft Prize WinnerABA Silver Gavel Award WinnerA New York Times Notable Book of the YearIn the closing days…
of 1862, just three weeks before Emancipation, the administration of Abraham Lincoln commissioned a code setting forth the laws of war for US armies. It announced standards of conduct in wartime--concerning torture, prisoners of war, civilians, spies, and slaves--that shaped the course of the Civil War. By the twentieth century, Lincoln's code would be incorporated into the Geneva Conventions and form the basis of a new international law of war. In this deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the fascinating history of the laws of war and its eminent cast of characters--Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Lincoln--as they crafted the articles that would change the course of world history. Witt's engrossing exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of the laws of war is a prehistory of our own era. Lincoln's Code reveals that the heated controversies of twenty-first-century warfare have roots going back to the beginnings of American history. It is a compelling story of ideals under pressure and a landmark contribution to our understanding of the American experience.By Ian Kelly. 2008
Giacomo Casanova was one of the most beguiling and controversial individuals of his or any age. Braggart or perfect lover?…
Conman or genius? He made and lost fortunes, founded state lotteries, wrote forty-two books and 3,600 pages of memoirs recording the tastes and smells of the years before the French Revolution - as well, of course, as his affairs and sexual encounters with dozens of women and a handful of men. His energy was dazzling. Historian Ian Kelly draws on previously unpublished documents from the Venetian Inquisition, by Casanova, his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and world. His research spans eighteenth-century Europe. This is the story if a man, but also of the book he wrote about himself. His own memoirs have brought him two centuries of notoriety. They have also changed forever the way we think and write about ourselves - and about sex. At the same time that revolutions - scientific, industrial, political and artistic - remade the world in the eighteenth century, Casanova created an intimate and exhaustive study of what he saw as the most revolutionary article of all - himself. The world, and the way we look at ourselves in it, would never be the same again.By Nathaniel Philbrick, Thomas Philbrick, Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase. 2000
The gripping first-hand narrative of the whaling ship disaster that inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick and informed Nathaniel Philbrick’s monumental history, In…
the Heart of the Sea. In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed by an angry sperm whale thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. The Essex sank, leaving twenty crew members drifting in three small open boats for ninety days. Through drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal this astonishing tale. The Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, by Owen Chase, has long been the essential account of the Essex’s doomed voyage. But in 1980, a new account of the disaster was discovered, penned late in life by Thomas Nickerson, who had been the fifteen-year-old cabin boy of the ship. This discovery has vastly expanded and clarified the history of an event as grandiose in its time as the Titanic. This edition presents Nickerson’s never-before-published chronicle alongside Chase’s version. Also included are the most important other contemporary accounts of the incident, Melville’s notes in his copy of the Chase narrative, and journal entries by Emerson and Thoreau. .By Craig Nelson. 2002
18 April 1942. Sixteen planes take off from a US Navy carrier in the mid-Pacific. A squadron of young, barely…
trained flyers under a famous daredevil, Jimmy Doolittle, they are America's first retaliation towards Japan since Pearl Harbor. Their mission: to bomb Japan's 's five main cities including Tokyo. Critically compromised by the discovery of the US fleet by Japanese spies, they are not expected to come back. Having successfully delivered their bombs, most of the squadron run out of fuel and are forced to crash land in Japan, China and the Soviet Union. The stories of their journeys home are as heroic as that of the raid itself. Incredibly of the 80 flyers who left the USS . . . 90% eventually returned alive to the US. The First Heroes tells the extraordinary story of the daring raid and shows for the first time the real story of what was to be the turning point in the war against Japan.By Paul Martin. 2014
Everyone loves a good villain! From the back pages of history, vivid, entertaining portraits of little-known scoundrels whose misdeeds range…
from the simply inept to the truly horrifying.Even if you're an avid history buff, you've probably never heard of this disreputable cast of characters: A drunken, ne'er-do-well cop who abandoned his post at Ford's Theatre, giving assassin John Wilkes Booth unchallenged access to President Lincoln; a notorious Kansas quack who made millions by implanting billy goat testicles in gullible male patients; and America's worst female serial killer ever. These are three of the memorable but little-known rogues profiled in this eye-opening and entertaining book.Dividing his profiles into three categories--villains, scoundrels, and rogues--author and former National Geographic editor Paul Martin serves up concise, colorful biographies of thirty of America's most outrageous characters. Whether readers choose to be horrified by the story of Ed Gein, Alfred Hitchcock's hideous inspiration for Psycho, or marvel at the clever duplicity of the con artist who originated the phony bookie operation portrayed in The Sting, there's something here for everyone.Brimming with audacious, unforgettable characters often overlooked by standard history books, this page-turner is a must for anyone with an interest in the varieties of human misbehavior.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Michael Penman. 2014
Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) famously defeated the English at Bannockburn and became the hero king responsible for Scottish independence. In…
this fascinating new biography of the renowned warrior, Michael Penman focuses on Robert's kingship in the fifteen years that followed his triumphant victory and establishes Robert as not only a great military leader but a great monarch. Robert faced a slow and often troubled process of legitimating his authority, restoring government, rewarding his supporters, accommodating former enemies, and controlling the various regions of his kingdom, none of which was achieved overnight. Penman investigates Robert's resettlement of lands and offices, the development of Scotland's parliaments, his handling of plots to overthrow him, his relations with his family and allies, his piety and court ethos, and his conscious development of an image of kingship through the use of ceremony and symbol. In doing so, Penman repositions Robert within the context of wider European political change, religion, culture, and national identity as well as recurrent crises of famine and disease.By Paula Weideger. 2002
Who hasn't longed to escape to the enchanting canals and mysterious alleywaysof Venice? Globetrotting writer Paula Weideger not only dreamed…
the dream, she took the leap. In Venetian Dreaming, she charts the course of her love affair with one of the world's most treasured cities. Weideger's search for a place to live eventually takes her to the Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, one of the rare Venetian palaces continuously inhabited by the family that built it. She weaves the past lives of the family Donà with her own adventures as she threads her way through the labyrinthine city. Art and architecture are a constant presence. Yet even more strongly felt is the passage of time, the panorama of the seasons as reflected in special events -- Carnival, the Film Festival, September's historic regatta, midnight mass at San Marco. We follow Weideger as she explores the Ghetto, the expatriate community, and the lives of locals from noblemen to boatmen. Along the way she encounters everyone from the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim to the Merchant Ivory crowd, and experiences some high drama with the Contessa, her landlady. The resulting memoir is a wry and illuminating, intelligent and tender account of the once grand heritage and now imperiled future of Venice.By Larry Mcmurtry. 2005
From the early 1800s to the end of his life in 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody was as famous as anyone…
could be. Annie Oakley was his most celebrated protégée, the 'slip of a girl' from Ohio who could (and did) outshoot anybody to become the most celebrated star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. In this sweeping dual biography, Larry McMurtry explores the lives, the legends and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild West show, Buffalo Bill helped invent the image of the West that still exists today -- cowboys and Indians, rodeo, rough rides, sheriffs and outlaws, trick shooting, Stetsons, and buckskin. The short, slight Annie Oakley -- born Phoebe Ann Moses -- spent sixteen years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, where she entertained Queen Victoria, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and Kaiser Wilhelm II, among others. Beloved by all who knew her, including Hunkpapa leader, Sitting Bull, Oakley became a legend in her own right and after her death, achieved a new lease of fame in Irving Berlin's musical Annie, Get Your Gun. To each other, they were always 'Missie' and 'Colonel'. To the rest of the world, they were cultural icons, setting the path for all that followed. Larry McMurtry -- a writer who understands the West better than any other -- recreates their astonishing careers and curious friendship in a fascinating history that reads like the very best of his fiction.By Carroll V. Glines, James Doolittle. 1982
After Pearl Harbor, he led America's flight to victoryGeneral Doolittle is a giant of the twentieth century. He did it…
all. As a stunt pilot, he thrilled the world with his aerial acrobatics. As a scientist, he pioneered the development of modern aviation technology. During World War II, he served his country as a fearless and innovative air warrior, organizing and leading the devastating raid against Japan immortalized in the film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Now, for the first time, here is his life story -- modest, revealing, and candid as only Doolittle himself can tell it.From the Paperback edition.By Karel Plessini. 2014
A taboo-breaker and a great provocateur, George L. Mosse (1918-99) was one of the great historians of the twentieth century,…
forging a new historiography of culture that included brilliant insights about the roles of nationalism, fascism, racism, and sexuality. Jewish, gay, and a member of a culturally elite family in Germany, Mosse came of age as the Nazis came to power, before escaping as a teenager to England and America. Mosse was innovative and interdisciplinary as a scholar, and he shattered in his groundbreaking books prevalent assumptions about the nature of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He audaciously drew a link from bourgeois respectability and the ideology of the Enlightenment--the very core of modern Western civilization--to the extermination of the European Jews. In this intellectual biography of George Mosse, Karel Plessini draws on all of Mosse's published and unpublished work to illuminate the origins and development of his groundbreaking methods of historical analysis and the close link between his life and work. He redefined the understanding of modern mass society and politics, masterfully revealing the powerful influence of conformity and political liturgies on twentieth-century history. Mosse warned against the dangers inherent in acquiescence, showing how identity creation and ideological fervor can climax in intolerance and mass murder--a message of continuing relevance.By Gilbert Claflin, Esther Claflin. 2013
In 2002, Judy Cook discovered a packet of letters written by her great-great-grandparents, Gilbert and Esther Claflin, during the American…
Civil War. An unexpected bounty, these letters from 1862-63 offer visceral witness to the war, recounting the trials of a family separated. Gilbert, an articulate and cheerful forty-year-old farmer, was drafted into the Union Army and served in the Thirty-Fourth Wisconsin Infantry garrisoned in western Kentucky along the Mississippi. Esther had married Gilbert when she was fifteen; now a woman with two teenage sons, she ran the family farm near Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in Gilbert's absence. In his letters, Gilbert writes about food, hygiene, rampant desertions by drafted men, rebel guerrilla raids, and pastimes in the daily life of a soldier. His comments on interactions with Confederate prisoners and ex-slaves before and after the Emancipation Proclamation reveal his personal views on monumental events. Esther shares in her letters the challenges and joys of maintaining the farm, accounts of their boys Elton and Price, concerns about finances and health, and news of their local community and extended family. Esther's experiences provide insight into family, farm, and village life in the wartime North, an often overlooked aspect of Civil War history. Judy Cook has made the letters accessible to a wider audience by providing historical context with notes and appendixes. The volume includes a foreword by Civil War historian Keith S. Bohannon.By Marlene Wagman-Geller. 2011
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till tonight. -Romeo and Juliet…
Antony and Cleopatra, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu, John Lennon and Yoko Ono-while we're familiar with all of these people as individuals, we also associate them with the grand, sometimes fiery passion they shared with their partners. And the Rest Is History is an intriguing look at how these iconoclastic lovers first crossed paths, whether it was through fate, setups, or blind luck. From angry sparks flying to love at first sight, the meetings shared in this book give us a look at what makes that one great love.By Jeff Wilser. 2016
The life--and lessons--of the Founding Father who mastered the arts of wit war and wealth long before…
becoming the subject of Broadway s Hamilton An American Musical Two centuries after his death Alexander Hamilton is shining once more under the world s spotlight--and we need him now more than ever Hamilton was a self-starter Scrappy Orphaned as a child he came to America with nothing but a code of honor and a hunger to work He then went on to help win the Revolutionary War and ratify the Constitution create the country s financial system charm New York s most eligible ladies and land his face on our 10 bill The ultimate underdog he combined a fearless independent spirit with a much-needed dose of American optimism Hamilton died before he could teach us the lessons he learned but Alexander Hamilton s Guide to Life unlocks his core principles--intended for anyone interested in success romance money or dueling They include Speak with Authority Even If You Have None Career Seduce with Your Strengths Romance Find Time for the Quills and the Bills Money Put the Father in Founding Father Friends Family Being Right Trumps Being Popular Leadership For history buffs and pop-culture addicts alike this mix of biography humor and advice offers a fresh take on a nearly forgotten Founding Father and will spark a revolution in your own life From the Hardcover edition