"By a mile, the best new play of the season>"--John Heilpern, New York Observer.

    Why are there wars? Why do countries have a hard time cooperating to prevent genocides or global environmental problems? Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Organized around the puzzles that draw scholars and students alike to the study of world politics, this book gives students the tools they need to think analytically about compelling questions like these.World Politics introduces a contemporary analytical framework based on interests, interactions, and institutions. Drawing extensively on recent research, the authors use this flexible framework throughout the text to get students thinking like political scientists as they explore the major topics in international relations. .

    The thirst for blood and cry for deadly vengeance lie deep in humankind, as criminologist Colin Wilson authoritatively illustrates in this millennial history of the most heinous of human crimes. Analyzing the tangle of motives behind murder and examining an astonishing variety of homicidal methods over the past twenty centuries, Wilson not only profiles infamous historical figures like Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Gilles de Rais, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Marquis de Sade, and Jack the Ripper, but also studies particular categories of homicide and such phenomena as the Jacobean witch hunts and gangland killings of America's Jazz Age. Wilson's chronicle includes, too, the serial killings, random shooting sprees, and cult murders that have troubled more recent times. The comprehensive history and illuminating analysis of how humans kill, and why, make crime-expert Wilson's volume one that no true-crime fan or student of criminology will want to miss.

    By examining six key summits which shaped the course of the 20th century, this book assesses whether such a belief has any validity.

    Five months later, an underage U.S. Army volunteer, he found himself thrust into a war of an unimaginable brutality and became a hero of the defense of Bataan, a survivor of the brutal Death March and of three harrowing years in a Japanese prisoner or war camp. This is his story.

    It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post Book World said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances -- new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

    Focusing on art before 1520, this edition organizes the material chronologically. It now incorporates considerable new material on the history of music and theatre, and updates scholarship on ancient art.

    This comprehensive survey is the first to provide a view of African history in the wider context of World History. The text illustrates how Africans have influenced regions beyond the continent's borders, how they have been influenced from outside, and how internal African developments can be compared and contrasted to those elsewhere in the world. Identifying and presenting key debates within the field of African history, this volume encourages students to address the many oversimplified myths regarding the continent and its people. This remains the most accessible, digestible, and relevant text on the subject. Compact and concise, it generates creative knowledge for students to appreciate the nature and essence of the formation of our global community. -- Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin

    The textbook's lively prose and clear organization help students make the connection that transform facts into an exiting, comprehensive story.Hardcover, 984 Pages.

    It emphasizes the ways in which the study of sedimentary rocks is used to interpret depositional environments, changes in ancient sea level, and other intriguing aspects of Earth’s history.

    Representing 40 years of research that Gilbert began in Poland in 1959, this comprehensive, illustrated volume traces the history of the Jewish people in Europe before, during, and after the Holocaust. Gilbert brilliantly blends this great swath of history with fresh, detailed accounts of individual drama: the rise of Nazism in Germany, the Jewish children who found refuge in Britain, the rejected refugees of the U.S.S. St Louis, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, the stories of Anne Frank, Oscar Schindler, and the children of Izieu, as well as the reflections of survivors today. Never Again paints a deeply personal and cultural portrait of the Holocaust. Gilbert's sharp historical knowledge makes this work on the Holocaust enormously informative and tangibly real.

    With his humorous writing style and hands-on "Try It Yourself" exercises, Kalat puts you at ease and gets you involved with what you are studying so that you can succeed in your course.

    Powerful in war, Rome was magnificent in peace, so that even today her poets, artists, philosophers and historians exert their influence over Western thought and civilisation.Michael Grant, the renowned classical historian, recreates the evolution of this astonishing city and community. He describes the individuals and events that made Rome a political and cultural conqueror, and defines the dramatic circumstances of her eventual decline and fall.

    Churchill was already recognized as the most diversely gifted man in British politics before, at the ripe old age of 66, he suddenly emerged as a figure of world importance. Becoming Prime Minister on the very day in 1940 that Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries, he braced the British people to continue fighting and even to counterattack the, up to that point, all-victorious Germans. A clever and confident statesman, with an obvious love for the people he served, for years Churchill's character went unchallenged and his inspiring leadership left him above criticism. Recently, however, his record has come under attack. In Churchill: A Study in Greatness, one of Britain's most distinguished historians makes sense of this extraordinary man, and his long, controversial, colorful, contradictory and heroic career.Geoffrey Best illuminates both his strengths and his weaknesses, looking past the many received versions of Churchill, in a biography that balances the private and the public man and offers a clear insight into what made him truly great.

    Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors -- from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity.