The lives of the artists in this book illustrate the struggle of living in this world and point to the beauty of the redemption available to us in Christ. Each story is different. Some conclude with resounding triumph while others end in struggle. But all of them raise important questions about humanity's hunger and capacity for glory, and all of them teach us to love and see beauty.

    But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders—from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists—Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes.Meticulously researched and deeply humane, Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained from this principle—and how much we stand to lose without it.

    But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all. Everything about them is extreme, including the reactions they evoke. However, for every truism about viruses, the opposite is also often true. So complex and diverse is the world of viruses that it merits being labelled an empire unto itself. And whether we see them as alive or dead, as life-threatening or life-affirming, there is an ineluctable beauty, even a certain elegance, in the way viruses go about their lives-or so Pranay Lal tells us in Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses.This is a book that defies categorisation. It brings together science, history and great storytelling to paint a fascinating picture of viruses as a major actor, not just in human civilisation but also in the human body. With rare photographs, paintings, illustrations and anecdotes, it is a magnificent and an extremely relevant book for our times, when we are attempting to understand viruses and examining their role in the lives of humans.

    Through the story of her progress from terrified beginner to confident lead climber she shows us how placing hand and foot on rock becomes a profound new way into the landscape.Anna takes us from the gritstone rocks of the Peak District and Yorkshire to the gabbro pinnacles of the Cullin, the slate of North Wales and the high plateau of the Cairngorms. Each landscape, and each type of rock, brings its own challenges and unique pleasures. She also shows us how climbing invites us into the history of a place: geologically, of course, but also culturally.This book is Anna's journey of self-discovery, but it is also a guide to losing oneself in the greater majesty of the natural world. With great lyricism she explores how it feels to climb as a woman, about the pleasures of the physical demands of climbing, about fear and challenge, but more than anything it is about a joyful connection to the mountains.

    A century ago, life expectancy was about 50 and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents.Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why is this? Why don’t we die from plague, scurvy or smallpox any more? And why are heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and cancer so prevalent today?This Mortal Coil explains why we died in the past, the reasons we die now and how causes of death are about to profoundly change. University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening, global portrait of death throughout time, looking at particular causes of death – from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet – who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them.

    Maurice "Footsie" Britt, a former professional football player, became the very first American to receive every award for valor in a single war. Michael Daly was a West Point dropout who risked his neck over and over to keep his men alive. Keith Ware would one day become the first and only draftee in history to attain the rank of general before serving in Vietnam. In WWII, Ware owed his life to the finest soldier he ever commanded, a baby-faced Texan named Audie Murphy. In the campaign to liberate Europe, each would gain the ultimate accolade, the Congressional Medal of Honor.Tapping into personal interviews and a wealth of primary source material, Alex Kershaw has delivered his most gripping account yet of American courage, spanning more than six hundred days of increasingly merciless combat, from the deserts of North Africa to the dark heart of Nazi Germany. Once the guns fell silent, these four exceptional warriors would discover just how heavy the Medal of Honor could be--and how great the expectations associated with it. Having survived against all odds, who among them would finally find peace?

    Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria’s England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship’s diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron. Now, author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a brilliant, lively narrative of the history of Britain’s suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have. Harrowing and heartbreaking, The Black Joke is a crucial and deeply compelling work of history, both as a reckoning with slavery and abolition and as a lesson about the power of political will—or the lack thereof.

    Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable.Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last Go champion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism”; and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white Go stones.Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language itself.Throughout, Roeder tells the compelling story of how humans, pursuing scientific glory and competitive advantage, have invented AI programs better than any human player, and what that means for the games—and for us. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human.

    

    Only a rusty cargo ship connects Pitcairn with the rest of the world, just four times a year.   In 2018, Brandon Presser rode the freighter to live among its present-day families; two clans bound by circumstance and secrets. While on the island, he pieced together Pitcairn’s full story: an operatic saga that holds all who have visited in its mortal clutch—even the author.  Told through vivid historical and personal narrative, The Far Land goes beyond the infamous mutiny on the Bounty, offering an unprecedented glimpse at life on the fringes of civilization, and how, perhaps, it’s not so different from our own.

    . . offers many lessons for Western policy makers today.”—Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal   "The lessons are sobering.”—The Economist  “Original and persuasive. . . . For those who see economic sanctions as a relatively mild way of expressing displeasure at a country’s behavior, this book . . . will come as something of a revelation.”—Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs   Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.     Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

    Yet, in America, tens-of-millions of major surgical procedures are performed annually but few of us pause to consider the magnitude of these figures because we have such inherent confidence in surgeons. And, despite passionate debates about healthcare and the endless fascination with surgical procedures, most of us have no idea how surgeons came to be because the story of surgery has never been fully told. Now, Empire of the Scalpel elegantly reveals the fascinating history of surgery’s evolution from its earliest roots in Europe through its rise to scientific and social dominance in the United States. From the 16th-century saga of Andreas Vesalius and his crusade to accurately describe human anatomy while appeasing the conservative clergy who clamored for his burning at the stake, to the hard-to-believe story of late-19th century surgeons’ apathy to Joseph Lister’s innovation of antisepsis and how this indifference led to thousands of unnecessary surgical deaths, Empire of the Scalpel is both a global history and a uniquely American tale. You’ll discover how in the 20th century the US achieved surgical world supremacy heralded by the Nobel Prize–winning, seemingly impossible feat of transplanting a kidney and how the heart-lung machine was developed, along with much more. Today, the list of possible operations is almost infinite—from knee and hip replacement to heart bypass and transplants to fat reduction and rhinoplasty—and Rutkow draws on his five-decade career to show us how we got here. Authoritative, captivating, and comprehensive, Empire of the Scalpel portrays the evolution of surgery in all its dramatic and life-enhancing complexity and shows that its history is truly one awe-inspiring triumph after another.

    Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home.The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state.Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives―including more than a hundred memoirs and survivor interviews―to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs.

    But everyone who migrates does it to seek a brighter future.A World Full of Journeys tells some of the most fascinating stories of migration throughout history. From the very first humans who left Africa almost 70,000 years ago and moved around the world, to immigrants welcomed to America at Ellis Island, this book is packed with fascinating tales of human triumph. Beautifully illustrated with bright pictures and maps detailing these migrants' journeys bring these stories to life. From Viking sea traders and Roman armies marching through Europe to Huegenot refugees fleeing persecution from the Catholic church and migrants travelling from the Caribbean to Britain as part of the Windrush Generation, this book explores the fascinating stories of the people who have crossed the world.With chapters including Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas, this book looks all across the world to tell the full story of our journeys throughout history. You'll discover that every single journey has the capacity to change the world.The World Full of… series is a collection of beautiful hardback story treasuries. Discover folktales from all around the world or be introduced to some of the world’s best-loved writers with these stunning gift books, the perfection addition to any child’s library.