He is remembered widely as the astute general under whose leadership the Nationalist cause was victorious in the Spanish Civil War and the Communist threat exterminated, and as the head of state who skillfully negotiated safe passage for Spain through World War II, played Hitler off against the Allies, modernized his country, and orchestrated the Spanish economic miracle of the 1960s. By the time of his death in 1975, he had steered a unified Spain to worldwide respectability and envy and deftly schooled the young prince Juan Carlos to be his successor. To many, Franco was Spain incarnate—a heroic figure to match his illustrious—a heroic figure to match his illustrious predecessors El Cid, Charles V, and Philip II.This idealized portrait—still widely accepted today—is now subjected to Paul Preston's penetrating scrutiny. He has written a magnificent, monumental biography that vividly recreates the man and sets before us, unclouded by the prejudices or simplifications of apologists or adversaries, a definitive portrayal of this complex, elusive figure.The controversy about Franco's achievements has raged since his death. Just how good a general was he? Would he have won the civil war without German and Italian help? Can he be blamed for the bombing of Guernica and other atrocities? Did he dupe Hitler during World War II? Were his self-sufficient economic policies directly responsible for ushering in Spain's economic boom? Did he deliberately seek to liberalize the regime in his later years, or was he perhaps losing his grip on the controls? Did Franco preside over another Spanish golden age or did he merely stall and stifle his country's natural growth? How, in the final reckoning, are his achievements to be judged? Preston addresses and resolves, often to startling effect, these pivotal questions, deploying an enormous quantity of new evidence and fresh insights culled from previously inaccessible sources and unexamined witnesses, colleagues, and enemies alike.Paul Preston's credentials as the biographer of France are incomparable. His many books on modern Spain have been acclaimed for their seriousness and their stylishness, and this gloriously engaging biography is, in many ways, the culmination of his work of an intellectual odyssey of twenty-five years' duration, spent in the company of the Caudillo. Paul Preston sits in judgment on this enigmatic dictator, and his verdict will be compelling to anyone interested in the history of modern Spain or, indeed, in the formation of modern Europe.

    It was also the basis for the movie, The Lost Command, starring Anthony Quinn. In his autobiography, Larteguy writes that he got the name of the book from when he was traveling with the Foreign Legion in the Sahara and came across an old Roman column at an oasis. Inscribed on the column from 2000 years before was "Titus Caius Germanicus, centurion of the Xth Legion" and underneath it from a more recent time, "Friedrich Germanicus, of the 1st R.E.P. (French Paratroop Regiment)."The story begins in May 1954 with the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu. The Vietnamese victors march their French prisoners into communist re-education camps. During their time in captivity, the French paratroop officers who survive the ordeal to be repatriated, bond together and try to utilize communist "revolutionary war" tactics in order to win their next war in Algeria. The book ends with the French centurions fighting the Battle of Algiers with propaganda, torture, terror and any tactic in order to win so that the last remnants of their empire could survive. -http://www.geocities.com/jean_lartegu...

    Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.

    There have been other books on Dr Morell's cocktail of treatments for Hitler and Goering's reliance on drugs, but Ohler's book is the first to show how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940. Ohler is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants. This chemical euphoria changes how we should think about the Nazi high command and its ability to understand the situation it found itself in by 1944-45. As such Blitzed will force a wider reinterpretation of several key events during the Second World War.

    But for many teens, and even many adults, God's message can be lost in the Bible's often confusing terminology, dry language, or lengthy history lessons. Who begat who-and why should I care? The Bible: Enter Here opens the door to God's Word by breathing new life into key Bible stories, retelling them in a fresh, fun, and relatable way. You'll discover that the Bible is packed with drama, suspense, and even humor. You'll see that the Bible's main characters were real people, with the same flaws, fears, and dreams you have. And most important, you'll learn how Jesus' teachings are vital to your life today.Here are a few of the characters you'll meet:- JACOB: The guy who wrestled God-and got a nation named after him- PHARAOH: Ten plagues, and still didn't learn his lesson- DELILAH: Irresistible ... and dangerous- SHADRACH, MESHACH, and ABEDNEGO: The ultimate trial by fire- VIRGIN MARY: On parenting the Son of God- PETER: His agony and triumph, in his own wordsLearn how one man's life, death, and resurrection changed the world forever, and what that could mean for you-if you're ready to knock on the door and enter.

    Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

    In 'Bad Science', Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In 'Bad Pharma', he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wittiest, most indignant and most fearless commentators on the worlds of medicine and science is collected in one volume.

    Its success "might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic." In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society."Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole." -- The Economist

    Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends. All brilliant minds, full of wit, courage, and insight, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, reason, and truly humanist thinking. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.

    The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching.From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

    In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.

    Focusing on key Bible strategies, John Ramirez teaches you how to shore up your defenses after winning a battle and how to put your life back in order so that when the next attack comes, you are stronger, wiser and more knowledgeable than ever.

    She does not try to fool herself that the boys will be anything, but hustlers. Hustling is in their blood from both ends hers and her father s, Rapheal s, who was Black Girl s pimp before drugs knocked them both on their asses and destroyed Rapheal s stable of top-notch hos. In Khalil, Black Girl sees the making of a boss mack, much like his pops. In B-Man, her middle son, she sees a fierce jack boy and a heartless killa. In her baby boy, Q, Black Girl prophesizes a major drug king pin. Together, she knows her sons can rape the game from all angles and put ATL in a chokehold. But to do so, they must never let money, hos, jealousy or envy come between them. They must remain bonded by blood, which she makes them promise at her deathbed. Black Girl also makes them promise to forgive Rapheal, and not hold her demise against him. But some promises are hard to keep, especially when hate, jealousy, and envy run deep. When fast money, dimed up chicks, unspoken grudges and unforgivable violations are tossed into the mix, will a deathbed promise to their mother be enough to stop the bloodshed once it begins? Which brother will remain standing in the end?

    His staunch patriotism, tenacity, appetite for a fight, and, above all, his towering rhetoric inspired the British people to mount a gallant defense of their island nation. Having set a new bar for national heroism, he earned a place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest leaders. Churchill, a fearless soldier, was a veteran of countless battles and a rider in one of Britain’s last cavalry charges. He was also a gifted writer, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose war reporting made his name and whose books outlived him. A bon vivant who loved his brandy and cigars, he was also a devoted husband whose marriage was a lifelong love affair. By any measure, Churchill was a giant. But the man was far from perfect. He was a hero, yes, but a human one. He could be petty, irascible, and self-centered; it was bred in his bone that white Englishmen were born to lead the world and all others to be led. His mistakes cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, but he had courage and a born politician’s sense of the public stage. In the end, Churchill became a regal figure whose life came to symbolize defiance of tyranny in the face of impossible odds. Here is his story.

    Psychology is the study of the human brain, but it’s so much more than a mere dissection of the gooey gray mass trapped in our skulls; it’s a study of what makes us tick as individuals and as a species.Human Psychology 101: Understanding the Human Mind and What Makes People Tick is meant to show you the facets of a human being and how they work together to make a person tick. It’s not a psychological treatise or a DSM-V. It’s a collection of my own research of psychology and stories from my life and those of my friends and acquaintances that help illustrate the principles I’m going to be telling you about.I will be dividing this book into seven aspects of human psychology: emotions, personality, decision-making, morality, perception, behavior, and relationships.To understand what makes someone tick is to have mastered a sort of psychological sleight of hand, and I hope that this book serves as a useful step on your way to mastery over that brand of magic trick. How human beings think and behave is an unendingly fascinating study, one that reveals how simple and elegant and, on the other hand, complex and mysterious we all are. I hope you are as pumped as I am to think about the inner workings of how people tick.