Captured by the Nazis, she was sent to Auschwitz, and later, Bergen-Belsen. With unnerving clarity and an astonishing ability to find humor where only despair should prevail, the author charts her eleven months as one of "the orchestra girls"; writes of the loves, the laughter, hatreds, jealousies, and tensions that racked this privileged group whose only hope of survival was to make music.

    Yet the real man was a mesmerizing figure who inspired Machiavelli's classic The Prince. During the brief space of time when he occupied the stage, he shocked and stunned his contemporaries with his lofty ambitions and daring, becoming the most feared, hated, and envied man of his day. By 31 he was dead: his story assumes the proportions of Greek tragedy.

    The beauty, grace and charm of Prince Christian's daughter had prevailed over the Queen's intense dislike of the Danish royal house, and had even persuaded the embarrassingly difficult Bertie to agree to the match. Thus began the fairy-tale saga of a family that handed on its good looks, unaffectedness, and democratic manners to almost every royal house of modern Europe. For, in the year that Alexandra became Princess of Wales, her brother Willie was elected King of the Hellenes ; her father at last succeeded to the Danish throne; her sister Dagmar was soon to become wife of the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia; and her youngest sister Thyra later married the de jure King of Hanover. A Family of Kings is the story of the crowned children and grandchildren of Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark, focusing on the half-century before the First World War. It is an intimate, domestic study of a close-knit family, the individual personalities, and the courts to which they came. Without doubt, the chic and beautiful Alexandra epitomized the spectacular flowering of the Danish dynasty; and just as she brought an unprecedented popularity to the sobriety of the English court, so her brothers and sisters helped enliven the staid European scene. The outstanding success of Theo Aronson's previous book, Grandmama of Europe, confirms his reputation as a chronicler of the fortunes of Europe's ruling houses. A Family of Kings bears the hallmark of the author's remarkable talent, and provides a fascinating evocation of the splendour and extravagance, and not infrequent tragedy, of nineteenth and twentieth century royalty.

    For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them.The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

    In Munich as Chamberlain abandoned the Czechs, in Vienna during the Anschluss, in Berlin when Germany blitzed Poland...Shirer was there.If ever a journalist was at the right place at the right time, it was Shirer. In this second volume of his memoirs, he provides an eyewitness and intensely personal interpretation of Hitler.Shirer knew Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Heydrich and Eichmann, and with them often observed Hitler at first hand...close enough, he noted, "to kill him."

    . . a truly valuable source for the serious student of military history.”—Military History

    and attributes this success to the imperial military strategy.At the height of its power, the Roman Empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin, extending much beyond it from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Black Sea. Rome prospered for centuries while successfully resisting attack, fending off everything from overnight robbery raids to full-scale invasion attempts by entire nations on the move. How were troops able to defend the Empire’s vast territories from constant attacks? And how did they do so at such moderate cost that their treasury could pay for an immensity of highways, aqueducts, amphitheaters, city baths, and magnificent temples? In The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, seasoned defense analyst Edward N. Luttwak reveals how the Romans were able to combine military strength, diplomacy, and fortifications to effectively respond to changing threats. Rome’s secret was not ceaseless fighting, but comprehensive strategies that unified force, diplomacy, and an immense infrastructure of roads, forts, walls, and barriers. Initially relying on client states to buffer attacks, Rome moved to a permanent frontier defense around 117 CE. Finally, as barbarians began to penetrate the empire, Rome filed large armies in a strategy of "defense-in-depth," allowing invaders to pierce Rome’s borders. This updated edition has been extensively revised to incorporate recent scholarship and archeological findings. A new preface explores Roman imperial statecraft. This illuminating book remains essential to both ancient historians and students of modern strategy"A fascinating book, well written and forcefully argued... Luttwak's formulations are as refreshing as they are convincing... He has done for Roman historians what they have not done for themselves." - Z. Yavetz, New Republic

    Peter Paret combines social and military history and psychological interpretation with a study of Clausewitz's military theories and of his unduly neglected historical and political writing.This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.Peter Paret is Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of many books and coeditor of Clausewitz's On War (Princeton).

    Also examined is the longbow as a sporting and hunting weapon, and its status in Britain today.

    Eminent historian John Lukacs presents an extraordinary narrative of these two years, followed by a detailed sequential analysis of the lives of the peoples and then of the political, military, and intellectual relations and events. “Lukacs’s book is consistently interesting, surprising, and provocative.”—James Joll, New York Times Book Review“This dispassionate, humorous, serious, and brilliantly written book marks an important step forward in our understanding of a past that is still within living memory.”—Economist“An excellent, valuable, and highly readable book. . . . It makes both fascinating and extraordinarily valuable reading. It is a major contribution to historical scholarship.”—Joseph G. Harrison, Christian Science Monitor“A brilliant, original study of what this era meant--socially, politically, artistically, intellectually--in the lives of the peoples of Europe. . . . [Lukacs’s] grasp of emotional as well as intellectual history is commanding.”—New Yorker“Deserves to be widely read, seriously considered, and vigorously debated.”—Gordon Wright, American Historical Review

    The work shows the history of Islamic science through beautiful illustrations.

    Building on the theories of the first edition, Marks argues that the Allied failure to bring defeat home to the German people, and the consequences of this oversight, were partly to blame, and reassesses Europe's leaders and the policies of the powers. Thoroughly revised and updated in the light of recent scholarly and documentary research, the second edition of this highly successful text also includes new material, maps, and an extended bibliography.

    He analyzes the characters, ideologies, and events behind one of the longest and most bitter civil wars of modern times. With an Introduction by Richard Clogg.

    The meeting signaled the beginning of Imperial Germany's astonishing state and naval policies toward the United States--a volatile relationship shaken from the first by misunderstanding, later poisoned by jealousy, and twice culminating in total war.Indeed, almost from its outset in the Pacific, German-American rivalry generated such antagonism that the Kaiser's strategists had prepared detailed contingency plans for the invasion of the United States as early as the turn of the century.In Politics of Frustration, Holger H, Herwig, whose recent discovery of the invasion plan made front-page headlines in the New York Times and around the world, reveals the formation of this plan--and others like it--as part of his searching examination of three periods in German-American naval relations: the er of colonial competition from 1889 to 1905; the German-American conflict during World War I, 1917-1918; and the National Socialist period to 1941, ending in Hitler's declaration of war against the United States. Throughout his fully documented narrative, Herwig shows how German naval strategy was based on exaggerated notions of American incompetence, compounded by an alarming lack of information concerning U.S. industrial and military potential, and distorted further under the Third Reich by crude racial and economic arguments. From the rise of the "Father" of the Imperial German Navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, through the career of the commander in chief of Hitler's Kriegsmarine, Admiral Ernst Raeder, the image of the United States that prevailed was a Germany's ultimate world rival and chief co-conspirator with England in preventing German expansion outside Europe.How this image affected German strategy and objectives through the years is brilliantly explored in Politics of Frustration. Judiciously balancing economic and sociopolitical factors, historical circumstances, and incisive characterizations of the participants, Herwig's account addresses itself to a succession of important questions. Why did Germany and the United States enter the naval race at almost identical moments in 1890? What were Germany's intentions in the Western hemisphere? Why did the Reich opt for unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917, knowing full well that such a policy would put her squarely on a collision course with America? Why did U.S. naval officers--led by Admiral George Dewey--regard Germany as their most probable enemy? And finally, what prompted Hitler in December 1941 to repeat what he considered had been one of the cardinal errors of the First World War: conflict with the United States?In the author's answers to these questions, and in his dramatic treatment of his subject--from the German admiralty's barely thwarted "Armageddon" at sea in late 1918 that would have pitted the Kaiser's fleet against the British and U.S. navies to Hitler's dreamed destruction of America through long-range bomber attacks from the Azores--Politics of Frustration combines exciting reading with a fine achievement in historical writing.