It concludes with the Mauryan Empire, which, in the 3rd century BC, united an enormous area of the Indian subcontinent. As in The Mughal Throne, Abraham Eraly provides a superb portrait of Indian life and culture.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    . . intellectual and religious history of late medieval and Reformation Europe.”—Christianity Today"A learned, humane, and expressive book."—Gerald Strauss, Renaissance Quarterly The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations—both Protestant and Catholic—of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society.

    Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied— religion, patriotism, tribalism.With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America’s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.

    Einstein said that the most incredible thing about our universe was that it was comprehensible at all. As Kitty Ferguson explains, Pythagoras had much the same idea - but 2,500 years earlier. Though known by many only for his famous Theorem, in fact the pillars of our scientific tradition - belief that the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, and that numbers and mathematics are a powerful guide to truth about nature and the cosmos - hark back to the convictions of this legendary scholar. Kitty Ferguson brilliantly evokes Pythagoras' ancient world of, showing how ideas spread in antiquity, and chronicles the incredible influence he and his followers have had on so many extraordinary people in the history of Western thought and science. 'Pythagoras' influence on the ideas, and therefore on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him' - Arthur Koestler.

    But this history of our ancestors continues to fascinate us. Even today, we have passionate discussions about the people and their actions in the epic, fervidly defending our favourites and denouncing others. The number of works on the Mahabharata-adaptations, retellings and fiction-that still get written is a testimony to its enduring relevance.While the general storyline is largely known, a lot of questions and myths prevail, such as-What was the geographical extent of the war? Did Drona actually refuse to take on Karna as his disciple? What were Draupadi's responsibilities as the queen of Indraprastha? Did she ever mock Duryodhana? Were the women in the time of the Mahabharata meek and submissive? What were the names of the war formations during the time? What role did the sons of the Pandavas play? Does the south of India feature at all in the Mahabharata? What happened after the war? These and many other intriguing questions continue to mystify the contemporary reader.Author Ami Ganatra debunks myths, quashes popular notions and offers insights into such aspects not commonly known or erroneously known, based solely on facts as narrated in Vyasa's Mahabharata from generally accepted authentic sources. For a history of such prominence and influence as the Mahabharata, it is important to get the story right. So pick this book up, sit back and unveil the lesser-known facts and truths about the great epic.

    And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood. His book is about the Russia that never was, a three-hundred-year history of empire building at the expense of national identity.Russia begins in the sixteenth century, with the inception of one of the most extensive and diverse empires in history. Hosking shows how this undertaking, the effort of conquering, defending, and administering such a huge mixture of territories and peoples, exhausted the productive powers of the common people and enfeebled their civic institutions. Neither church nor state was able to project an image of Russian-ness that could unite elites and masses in a consciousness of belonging to the same nation. Hosking depicts two Russias, that of the gentry and of the peasantry, and reveals how the gap between them, widened by the Tsarist state's repudiation of the Orthodox messianic myth, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here we see how this myth, on which the empire was originally based, returned centuries later in the form of the revolutionary movement, which eventually swept away the Tsarist Empire but replaced it with an even more universalist one. Hosking concludes his story in 1917, but shows how the conflict he describes continues to affect Russia right up to the present day.

    

    After presenting a general theory of why serious conflict emerges and how it escalates into mass murder, Michael Mann offers suggestions on how to avoid such escalation in the future. Michael Mann is the author of Fascists (Cambridge, 2004) and The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986).

    Today's view of history cannot account for ancient anomalies, such as the Pyramids and advanced knowledge contained in India's Vedas-but in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past, but for the trends of today and for our future enlightenment-the 24,000 year yuga cycle

    Historian J.E. Lendon presents a sweeping tale of pitched battles by land & sea, sieges, sacks, raids, & deeds of cruelty & guile—along with courageous acts of mercy, surprising charity, austere restraint & arrogant resistance. Recounting the rise of democratic Athens to great-power status, & the resulting fury of authoritarian Sparta, Greece’s traditional leader, Lendon portrays the causes & strategy of the war as a duel over national honor, a series of acts of revenge. A story of new pride challenging old, Song of Wrath is the 1st work of Ancient Greek history for the post-cold-war generation.

    Here for the first time is an English-language biography of the man. Morris Rossabi draws on sources from a variety of East Asian, Middle Eastern, and European languages as he focuses on the life and times of the great Mongol monarch.

    . . A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for two months of every year . . . A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death . . . The twenty-third in a centuries-old line of idol makers struggles to reconcile with his son’s wish to study computer engineering . . . An illiterate goatherd keeps alive in his memory an ancient 200,000-stanza sacred epic . . . A temple prostitute, who resisted her own initiation into sex work, pushes her daughters into the trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling.William Dalrymple tells these stories, among others, with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of remarkable circumstance, giving us a dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit

    The Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma - in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero falters, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. The epic's characters are flawed, but their incoherent experiences throw light on our familiar dilemmas. Gurcharan Das's best-selling book India Unbound examined the classical aim of artha, material well being. This, his first book in seven years, dwells on the goal of dharma, moral well being. It addresses the central problem of how to live our lives in an examined way - holding a mirror up to us and forcing us to confront the many ways in which we deceive ourselves and others. What emerges is a doctrine of dharma that we can apply to our business decisions, political strategies and interpersonal relationships - in effect, to life itself.

    The book focuses on how to save the ancient water resources which have been neglected for quite a long time in India. This book holds a place in the list of best thirty books that have been published so far. This book has been translated in almost all Indian languages and quite a few foreign languages as well. There also exists a Braille version of this book. When it got published, it attracted the attention of a huge chunk of people and around two lac copies of books are known to have reached people across various places. The book, basically a report based book talks about how every household in arid regions could have their own water harvesting facility, a technique that has been in place for centuries. His approach towards life was something we do not find easily in the modern times. Moreover, this book has no copyright and can be reprinted and republished as and when one wants to. It is intriguing as to how this book could have had such an impact on the public, and on the society as a whole.