It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events.The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony only available since the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of Ukrainian scholars all over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those who survived it, describing what human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly 'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the suffering.The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened at all. Census reports were falsified and memory suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly swallowed the Soviet line; others bravely rejected it, and were undermined and harassed. The Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.

    The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived.At the center of this story is the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the war as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the cultures of East and West, and the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan's former king, had been thrust into exile by the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others moved to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers returned home to help rebuild Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans.Today, with the country in shambles, they are in open conflict with one another and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow's clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the war and America's relationship with Afghanistan from optimism to despair, friendship to enmity as neatly as the story of the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.

    The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July sixteenth to seventeenth, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded. In the vivid style of a TV documentary, Helen Rappaport reveals both the atmosphere inside the family's claustrophobic prison and the political maneuverings of those who wished to save--or destroy--them. With the watching world and European monarchies proving incapable of saving the Romanovs, the narrative brings this tragic story to life in a compellingly new and dramatic way, culminating in a bloody night of horror in a cramped basement room.

     Today Lipton means tea. However, in his time Sir Thomas Lipton was known for much more. Raised in desperate poverty, he became rich beyond his wildest dreams. He built a global empire of markets, factories, plantations, and stockyards. And his colorful pursuit of the America's Cup trophy made him a beloved figure on both sides of the Atlantic. In A Full Cup, Michael D'Antonio tells the tale of this larger- than-life figure. Beginning with a journey across the United States just after the Civil War, Thomas J. Lipton developed the ambition and learned the business techniques that helped him create the first chain of grocery stores. Wealthy before the age of thirty, he set his sights on the tea trade, and soon his name became synonymous with his product. Lipton's great business success makes for a compelling story of innovation and achievement. Moreover, though, Lipton's most intriguing creation was a public persona-one of the first formed with the help of a modern mass media-that appealed to millions of ordinary people, as well as the elites in America and Europe. Concocting simple stunts like elephant parades, Lipton mastered the new art of obtaining free publicity. With shameless self-promotion, he became one of the world's most eligible bachelors, a patron of the poor, and ultimately reached legendary heights when he revived the competition for the America's Cup. With one losing attempt after another, the gallant Lipton, who didn't even know how to sail his own yacht, became ever more popular. D'Antonio's biography brings to vivid life this remarkable figure.

    She remains the head of state of the United Kingdom, and a group of 16 nations including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand call her queen, and she is the head of the British Commonwealth which includes another 37 countries, including India and South Africa. Throughout her life, she has enjoyed much happiness including a long and happy marriage to Prince Philip, four children, and Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees. Her reign has also been marked by much sadness, including the failed marriages of three of her children, the deaths of close family members and friends, and the markedly difficult death of Princess Diana, which took a toll on both the Royal Family and the nation.Now Life, in a new special edition, takes a nuanced and thoughtful look at the reign of Elizabeth at 90 and what her over-63 years on the throne have meant for her subjects and the world at large, including her early life, the years of World War Ii, her marriage and family, life ruling Great Britain, Windsor family values and much more.With dozens of stunning photos, stories, and analysis, Queen Elizabeth at 90 is a keepsake of both a life well-lived and an historical time on the throne, as well as a captivating collection for any royal watcher.

    Their showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, and farce to rival a Marx Brothers film.Thirty years later, David Edmonds and John Eidinow have set out to reexamine the story we recollect as the quintessential cold war clash between a lone American star and the Soviet chess machine - a machine that had delivered the world title to the Kremlin for decades. Drawing upon unpublished Soviet and U.S. records, the authors reconstruct the full and incredible saga, one far more poignant and layered than hitherto believed.The authors chronicle how Fischer, a manipulative, dysfunctional genius, risked all to seize control of the contest as the organizers maneuvered frantically to save it - under the eyes of the world's press. They can now tell the inside story of Moscow's response, and the bitter tensions within the Soviet camp as the anxious and frustrated apparatchiks strove to prop up Boris Spassky, the most un-Soviet of their champions - fun-loving, sensitive, and a free spirit. Edmonds and Eidinow follow this careering, behind-the-scenes confrontation to its climax: a clash that displayed the cultural differences between the dynamic, media-savvy representatives of the West and the baffled, impotent Soviets. Try as they might, even the KGB couldn't help.

    When she was married at sixteen to a German count far below her rank, it was with the understanding that her father would help her husband achieve the kingship of Bohemia. The terrible betrayal of this commitment would ruin "the Winter Queen," as Elizabeth would forever be known, imperil the lives of those she loved, and launch a war that would last for thirty years. Forced into exile, the Winter Queen and her family found refuge in Holland, where the glorious art and culture of the Dutch Golden Age indelibly shaped her daughters' lives. Her eldest, Princess Elizabeth, became a scholar who earned the respect and friendship of the philosopher René Descartes. Louisa was a gifted painter whose engaging manner and appealing looks provoked heartache and scandal. Beautiful Henrietta Maria would be the only sister to marry into royalty, although at great cost. But it was the youngest, Sophia, a heroine in the tradition of a Jane Austen novel, whose ready wit and good-natured common sense masked immense strength of character, who fulfilled the promise of her great-grandmother Mary and reshaped the British monarchy, a legacy that endures to this day.Brilliantly researched and captivatingly written, filled with danger, treachery, and adventure but also love, courage, and humor, Daughters of the Winter Queen follows the lives of five remarkable women who, by refusing to surrender to adversity, changed the course of history.

    As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution. But in contrast to the way conventional histories tell it, none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation.Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian Jay Winik masterfully illuminates how their fates combined in one extraordinary moment to change the course of civilization. A sweeping, magisterial drama featuring the richest cast of characters ever to walk upon the world stage, including Washington, Jefferson, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Catherine the Great, The Great Upheaval is a gripping, epic portrait of this tumultuous decade that will forever transform the way we see America's beginnings and our world

    “But it isn’t the end of the world.” In this smart and refreshingly hopeful book, Andersen–a brilliant analyst and synthesizer of historical and cultural trends, as well as a bestselling novelist and host of public radio’s Studio 360–shows us why the current economic crisis is actually a moment of great opportunity to get ourselves and our nation back on track.Historically, America has always shifted between wild, exuberant speculation and steady, sober hard work, as well as back and forth between economic booms and busts, and between right and left politically. This is one of the rare moments when all these cycles shift dramatically and simultaneously–a moment when complacency ends, ossified structures loosen up, and enormous positive change is possible. The shock to the system can enable each of us to rethink certain habits and focus more on the things that make us authentically happy. The present flux can enable us as a society to consolidate the enormous gains of the last several decades in areas such as technology, crime prevention, women’s and civil rights, and the democratization of the planet. We can reap the fruits of a revival of realism and pragmatism at home and abroad. As we enter a new era of post-party-line common sense, we can start to reinvent hopelessly broken systems–in health care, education, climate change, and more–and rediscover some of the old-fashioned American values of which we’ve lost sight.In Reset, Andersen explains how we’ve done it before and why we are about to do it again–and better than ever.

    Yet the two have never been seriously compared at book length. Acclaimed historian Lewis Lehrman finds that Lincoln and Churchill led their wars in remarkably similar fashion, guided by fixed principles of honor, duty, and freedom. Gifted literary stylists, both also relied on the written and spoken word to steel their nation's hearts and give meaning to war's sacrifice. And though both unexpectedly left office near the end of their wars--Lincoln by the bullet, Churchill by the ballot--they had gained victory.

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    He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    There, one man and his five brilliant sons made their fortune as court agents to a royal prince. It would take Napoleon’s earth-shattering quest to conquer Europe to scatter the five brothers to the four winds, but when the dust of war settled, there was a Rothschild brother and a Rothschild bank in five cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples, and Vienna. The era of haute finance had begun, and the legend of a banking dynasty more powerful than any royal family in history was established. In this book, you will follow the progress of the Rothschild family through the centuries. Their ranks included not only bankers and financiers but doctors, scientists, bomb experts, and collectors who amassed not only some of the finest art collections in Europe, but also one of the finest bug collections. Find out for yourself how the Rothschilds prevented wars, crowned and uncrowned kings, helped win the battle of Waterloo, looked down their noses at Nazis, and established a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

    Henri Troyat, author of acclaimed biographies of Catherine the Great, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, turns his attention to one of the most violent, demented rulers ever, Czar Ivan IV. Though this larger-than-life ruler inflicted torture on friends and enemies alike, destroyed villages and even killed his own son, he also forged what became 20th-century Russia.

    He explains how bankers worldwide created a secret trillion-dollar machine that delivered cheap mortgages to the masses and riches beyond dreams to the financial innovators.Fundamental to this saga is how “the people who hated to lose” were persuaded to accept risk by “the people who loved to win.” Why did people come to trust and respect arcane financial tools? Who were the bankers competing to assemble the basic components into increasingly intricate machines? How did this process achieve its own unstoppable momentum—ending in collapse, bailouts, and a public outcry against the giants of finance?Provocative and intriguing, The Devil’s Derivatives sheds much-needed light on the forces that fueled the most brutal economic downturn since the Great Depression.