Recounts how the author, an Austrian, escaped from an English internment camp in India in 1943 and spent the next seven years in Tibet, observing its social practices, religion, politics, and people.

    As audacious as it is edifying, here is a hilarious and irreverent—yet always historically accurate—overview of the ascent (or descent) of humankind, courtesy of the same rebel geniuses who brought you Mental Floss presents Condensed Knowledge and Mental Floss Presents Forbidden Knowledge. Updated with all the hot topics and events of the past few years, The Mental Floss History of the World is proof positive that just because something’s true doesn’t mean it’s boring.

    The worlds of Milan and Rome through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, prayer and violence. Graham-Dixon puts the murder of a pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, at the centre of his story. It occurred at the height of Caravaggio’s fame in Rome and probably brought about his flight through Malta and Sicily, which led to his death in suspicious circumstances off the coast of Naples. Graham-Dixon shows how Caravaggio’s paintings emerged from this extraordinarily wild and troubled life: his detailed readings of them explain their originality and Caravaggio’s mentality better than any of his predecessors.

    In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev.As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

    Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The beautiful widow, Rose O’Neale Greenhow, engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians to gather intelligence for the Confederacy, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring, right under the noses of suspicious rebel detectives.Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war. With a cast of real-life characters including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Stonewall Jackson, detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Emperor Napoleon III, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy draws you into the war as these daring women lived it.Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy contains 39 black & white photos and 3 maps.

    Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal. Did it come from a worm, a berry, a seed? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their own colonies? Pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies—all joined the chase for cochineal, a chase that lasted more than three centuries. A Perfect Red tells their stories—true-life tales of mystery, empire, and adventure, in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.

    Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives--and how we really want to live.

    Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it?In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible.The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.

    For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.In her late thirties, after twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child and young adult. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier in Italy. Her quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation.

    Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

    He kept it with him on the way to church that day and nearly every day after. It was a fixture as he grew up, tucked in jeans or wrapped around his head as he played lacrosse for Boston College. The bandanna was a signature, long before it became a symbol.   Welles was like a lot of us, if just a bit better - an honors student, but not the valedictorian; a Division I athlete, but not a star; kindhearted but not saintly. He wanted the stuff of a good life and was willing to work for it. Fresh from college, he came to New York City for a job on Wall Street. His office was on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center.   But Welles wasn't entirely fulfilled by his desk job. He'd grown up volunteering at the local fire department in Nyack and loved the necessity and camaraderie, the meaning of the role. And so, shortly before 9/11, he called his father to say he was thinking of quitting finance and applying to be a firefighter with the FDNY. His father, a fellow banker and volunteer firefighter, was stunned.   When the World Trade Center fell, Welles' parents, like the families of so many who were lost in the attacks, had no idea what happened to him. In the unbearable days and weeks that followed, they came to accept that he would never come home. But the mystery of his final hours lingered painfully.   Eight months after the attacks, however, Welles' mother would read another news account that would yet again change the family's lives. A survivor from the attacks, who'd been badly hurt on the 78th floor of the South Tower, said she and others had been led to safety by a stranger, carrying a woman on his back, down nearly twenty flights of stairs. When they emerged from the stairwell, firefighters took them the rest of the way out. But the young man turned around and went back up the stairs. He would make the trip up and down again and again, taking a group with him each time. The survivor never asked his name and couldn't see his face. But she remembered one detail clearly: he was wearing a red bandanna.   Welles' parents knew they'd found their son. They sent the woman a picture of Welles, and she confirmed: it was him. The story spread. Welles was honored as an FDNY fireman, the first time in its history the New York City Fire Department had named a civilian to its ranks as an officially recognized member. Year after year, first at Boston College and now around the country, there are Red Bandanna days and races to honor Welles' sacrifice. When President Barack Obama spoke at the opening of the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero, he chose to tell the story of one life lost: Welles Crowther.   Tom Rinaldi's The Red Bandanna is about a fearless choice, about the crucible of terror and the indomitable spirit to answer it. It travels Crowther's path to purpose and the journey his family has been on in the days and years since. Examining one decision in the gravest situation, it celebrates the difference one life can make. It is the story of a new symbol for strength, and how a bandanna has become the red badge of courage for a new time.

     Nothing could have prepared him for the reality he ended up facing. Placing his focus on the day to day existence of the soldiers in the trenches, Adams presents a grim picture of mud-coated billets, relentless artillery barrages, working parties, training and the art of military sniping. Just as it would have been for the soldiers’ lives, Adams heightens his work with an emotive account of his first night patrol, the detonation of mines, battlefield duels and being wounded whilst out wiring in No Man’s Land. Understated and striving for truth over melodrama, Nothing of Importance is the original memoir of the First World War — the only record published while the conflict was still being fought — and the definitive account of trench warfare. Bernard Adams (1890-1917) was a British Army officer, joining 1 Royal Welsh Fusiliers as a Lieutenant in November 1914. He was the first of a triumvirate of authors who, for a time, served simultaneously in the same battalion: the second was Siegfried Sassoon, the third Robert Graves. Written whilst convalescing in 1916, he did not live to see it published.

    But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? And why, during this period, did Europeans begin to build churches in a new style, at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic?Universe of Stone shows that the Gothic cathedrals encode a far-reaching shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. For the first time, they began to believe in an orderly, rational world that could be investigated and understood. This change marked the beginning of Western science and also the start of a long and, indeed, unfinished struggle to reconcile faith and reason.By embedding the cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres. Beautifully illustrated and written, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone argues that Chartres is a sublime expression of the originality and vitality of a true "first renaissance," one that occurred long before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Francis Bacon.

    When Michael Crichton -- a Harvard-trained physician, bestselling novelist, and successful movie director -- began to feel isolated in his own life, he decided to widen his horizons. He tracked wild animals in the jungles of Rwanda. He climbed Kilimanjaro and Mayan pyramids. He trekked across a landslide in Pakistan. He swam amid sharks in Tahiti. Fueled by a powerful curiosity and the need to see, feel, and hear firsthand and close-up, Michael Crichton has experienced adventures as compelling as those he created in his books and films. These adventures -- both physical and spiritual -- are recorded here in Travels, Crichton's most astonishing and personal work.

    Beyond the Sky and the Earth is an autobiographical work that details her experiences and transformations after spending three years in Bhutan. It is as much a book about Zeppa's day-to-day life in Bhutan as it is about the personal awakenings and realizations that she had while living there. Visitors to Bhutan, an increasingly hot tourist destination, are still few and far between, largely because of tight government restrictions on entry, visa requirements, and a law requiring tourists to spend at least $200 a day there. There aren't many books on Bhutan, and even fewer first-hand accounts of life there. Beyond the Sky and the Earth stands out as both an informative introduction to the people and culture of Bhutan and as a beautiful piece of travel literature set against the backdrop of one of the most remote and unspoiled places on earth. Zeppa recounts her experiences living abroad, such as learning to live without electricity and carrying on a forbidden affair with one of her students, in such a compelling way that even someone who has never left home will become entranced by her story and captivated by her unique experiences. Naturally, Zeppa experienced culture shock when she arrived in Bhutan. The hardships she encountered seemed insurmountable, and at first she thought she couldn't bear it and fantasized about returning to Canada. She had to learn a new language in order to communicate with her students, she had to learn to live on her own, and she had to learn to deal with homesickness. Perhaps her biggest challenge was learning how to reconcile her growing love for Bhutan with her nostalgia for her life in Canada, her family, and her fiancé. But after living among Bhutan's Himalayan peaks, lush valleys, colorful villages, and friendly people, and after gaining an appreciation for life in a place frozen in time, Zeppa realizes that she feels at home in Bhutan and wants to stay.Although to Zeppa Bhutan is a magical land, she cautions herself and the reader not to deem it "the last Shangri-La," as is often done by the lucky travelers who make their way through the red tape required for entry into the kingdom. Bhutan is not without its problems: it is an underdeveloped country plagued by the problems that affect many places cut off from modernity. There is infant mortality, illness, and poverty. There are also domestic and international tensions that stem from the government's stringent regulations intended to preserve the national culture. Among them are the prohibition of foreign television and a requirement that people wear the national dress, a kira for women and a gho for men.Few of us will ever get to see the place that was Zeppa's home. But her narrative is so clear and insightful that you easily feel as though you are sharing this portion of her life with her. Even if you haven't had the experience of living abroad, or if the prospect of a trip to the furthest reaches of Asia is not in your cards, Zeppa's book is a worthy read on many levels. From her powerful use of language to describe the superb beauty of Bhutan's landscape to her passionate description of her spellbinding relationship with her future husband, Beyond the Sky and the Earth draws readers in and takes them on her rocky ride to self-realization. When trying to explain to a friend what she finds appealing about Bhutan, Zeppa writes: "It takes a long time to find the true words, to put them in order, to tell the whole story. It is not just this or that, the mountains, the people, it is me and the way I can be here, the freedom to walk unafraid into the great dark night. It is a hundred thousand things and I could never trace or tell all the connections and reflections, the shadows and echoes and secret relations between them."But, in fact, Zeppa does tell the reader about these connections and reflections in a lyrical way. After reading the book, you will have a deep understanding, appreciation, and respect for Zeppa's strength of character and for the wonders of Bhutan.Beyond the Sky and the Earth is a delight to read in every way. Zeppa's beautiful prose, peppered alternately with funny observations and profound soul-searching, is a truly special and unique work that will leave you craving an adventure of your own.