As always, he has a plan to help you have a meaningful cultural experience while you're there—even with just a few hours in port.Inside you'll find one-day itineraries for sightseeing at or near the major Northern Europe ports of call, including:Southampton and Dover (London)Le Havre (Paris and Normandy)Zeebrugge (Bruges and Brussels)AmsterdamOsloCopenhagenWarnemünde/Rostock (Berlin)StockholmHelsinkiTallinnSt. PetersburgRick Steves' Northern Europe Cruise Ports explains how to get into town from the cruise terminal, shares sightseeing tips, and includes self-guided walks and tours. You'll learn which destinations are best for an excursion—and which you can confidently visit on your own. You'll also get tips on booking a cruise, plus hints for saving time and money on the ship and in port.You can count on Rick Steves to tell you what you really need to know when cruising through Northern Europe.

    After months of job hunting, Daria, a young engineer, finds a plum position at a foreign firm as a secretary. But every plum has a pit. In this case, it’s Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him is job one. Daria evades Harmon’s advances by recruiting her neighbour, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress. But soon Olga sets her sights on Daria’s job. Daria begins to moonlight as an interpreter at Soviet Unions(TM), a matchmaking agency that organizes “socials” where lonely American men can meet desperate Odessan women. Her grandmother wants Daria to leave Ukraine for good and pushes her to marry one of the men she meets, but Daria already has feelings for a local. She must choose between her world and America, between Vlad, a sexy, irresponsible mobster, and Tristan, a teacher nearly twice her age. Daria chooses security and America. Only it’s not exactly what she thought it would be… A wry, tender, and darkly funny look at marriage, the desires we don’t acknowledge, and the aftermath of communism, Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in the pursuit of love and stability.

    Along the way he talks to the people living through the conflict - mothers, soldiers, businessmen, poets, politicians - whose memories of a contested past shape their attitudes, allegiances and hopes for the future. Together, their stories paint a vivid picture of a nation trapped between powerful forces, both political and historical.'Visceral, gripping, heartbreaking' Simon Sebag Montefiore

    Now in its second edition, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends contains a new epilogue-updated to cover events since 1995-and several redesigned or updated maps. Each chapter is thematically organized around issues or events that are important in helping students develop an understanding of the region's internal dynamics. Johnson illuminates the competing religious, cultural, economic, national, and ideological interests that have driven the history of Central Europe. Thorough, objective, and focused, Johnson's work stands out as both a useful core text covering an area of growing interest and a brilliant account of a region that is only just beginning to receive the attention it deserves.

    Adolf Hitler believed this surprise attack was crucial for German success in World War II. It aimed to destroy what Hitler perceived as a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy and to ensure German economic, political and cultural prosperity. A huge percentage of German resources were allocated to the campaign against the Soviet Union, and the total percen

    But after already living under Stalin’s horrifying regime, Emil and Adeline decide they must run in retreat from their land with the wolves they despise to escape the Soviets and go in search of freedom.Caught between two warring forces and overcoming horrific trials to pursue their hope of immigrating to the West, the Martels’ story is a brutal, complex, and ultimately triumphant tale that illuminates the extraordinary power of love, faith, and one family’s incredible will to survive and see their dreams realized.

    From My Mother's Garden, the parable of an old woman who refuses to accept the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, to The Young People of Moscow, which describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling antiquated Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar, these intricately woven narratives provide unforgettable slices of a Russia that is at once both exotic and disconcertingly familiar.

    Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening pf the Cold War'd clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--inplaces as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

    Oh, and he also takes a side trip to a genuine breakaway state where he is almost beaten up in a border hut. All in the name of The Red Quest! He must try to keep the mission a secret from his wife though, otherwise she may derail his plans.Constantly berated by his friend for wanting to go to 'Turnipland', the Red Quest is a journey spanning half the world from Western Europe to the edge of China! And he is armed only with a pocket full of roubles and a turnip masher.Join Jason Smart as he travels along the Red Quest through Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Moldova. Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Poland, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and East Germany!

    Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill.In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else.Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.

    Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today.We Should All Be Feminists A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americana and Half of a Yellow Sun.I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response. Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

    Part historical epic, part love story, it recalls The English Patient in its mix of emotional intimacy and sweeping landscape.In a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old piano prodigy practices silently for fear of disturbing the neighbors.In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, trying to hide her dissident past.In the hospital, a leading surgeon buries himself deep in his work to avoid facing his failed marriage.And in a rural village in the Ukraine, a teenage boy wakes up to a sky of the deepest crimson. In the fields, the ears of the cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened.Now their lives will change forever.All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is an astonishing end-of-empire novel by a major new talent.

    Titus Quayle was the best MI6 ever had – an operative of exceptional and lethal ability. But they burned him, abandoned him, and left him for dead. Holly Morton is the daughter of the spymaster who first recognised Quayle’s potential and the key to unlocking a global conspiracy her father died trying to bring down. To uncover the truth, Quayle must keep her safe from the threat of a powerful enemy in a globetrotting race against time. Nowhere is safe. But to survive in a secret world of spies and assassins, kill orders and kingpins, there’s no one you’d rather have by your side than Titus Quayle… NOTE: THE PROTECTOR was originally titled BROKEN SQUARE.

    Features quotes gathered over the years from family, friends and the artists themselves giving the reader a personal insight into their music and world. Fully illustrated throughout with black and white photographs.

    The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies. The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.