His poetry, influenced by Whitman and Verhaeren and strangely akin to modern rock poetry in its erotic thrust, bluesy complaints and cries of pain, not to mention its sardonic humour, is at once aggressive, mocking and tender, and often fantastic or grotesque. Pro Eto - That's What is a long love poem detailing the pain and suffering inflicted on the poet by his lover and her final rejection of him. But as well as being an agonising parable of separation and betrayal, it is also a political work, highly critical of Lenin's reforms of Soviet Socialism. The publication of That's What is something of a landmark for not only is this the first time that this seminal work has appeared in its entirety in translation, but it is illustrated with the 11 inspired photomontages that Alexander Rodchenko designed to interleave and illuminate the text, illustrations which inaugurate a world of new possibilities in combining verbal and visual forms of expression and which are reproduced in colour (as originally conceived) for the first time.

    Valentina Ivanova is the darling of St. Petersburg's elite aristocracy-until her romance with a Danish engineer creates a terrible scandal and her parents push her into a loveless engagement with a Russian count. Meanwhile, Russia itself is bound for rebellion. With the Tsar and the Duma at each other's throats, and the Bolsheviks drawing their battle lines, the elegance and opulence of Tsarist rule are in their last days. And Valentina will be forced to make a choice that will change not only her own life, but the lives of those around her forever...

    They included the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, and his sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, Prince Felix Youssupov, the murderer of Rasputin and a man once mooted as a future leader of Russia, and Grand Duke Nicholas, former Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies.As the ship prepared to set sail, a British sloop carrying 170 White Russian soldiers drew up alongside. The soldiers stood on deck and sang the Russian National Anthem. It was the last time the anthem was sung to members of the Imperial Family within Russian territory for over 70 years. The Dowager Empress stood on deck alone. Nobody dared to approach her.The Russian Court at Sea vividly recreates this unlikely voyage, with its bizarre assortment of warring characters and its priceless cargo of treasures, including rolled-up Rembrandts and Faberge eggs. It is a story, by turns exotic, comic and doomed, of an extraordinary group of people caught up in an extraordinary moment in history when their lives were in every way at sea.

    But they’re single-minded and very, very hungry. On land, they take the form of bosses, businesspeople, colleagues, family, and sociopathic neighbors. In the world of former governor of New Mexico and US ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, they have taken the form of the most powerful people in the world. He’s engaged in high-stakes, face-to-face negotiations with Castro, Saddam, the Taliban, two generations of North Korean leadership, and many more of the world’s most infamous dictators—and done it so well he was known as the "Undersecretary of Thugs" while with the Clinton administration. Now the 5-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee tells these stories—from Washington, DC, to the Middle East to Pyongyang—in all their intense and sometimes absurd glory.How to Sweet-Talk a Shark is a rare, candid, and entertaining glimpse into an insider’s world of high-stakes negotiation – showing Richardson’s successes and failures in some of the world’s least friendly places. Meanwhile, readers get frank lessons in the art of negotiation: how to prepare, how to size up your opponent, how to understand the nature of power in a standoff, how to give up only what is necessary while getting what you want, and many other strategies Richardson has mastered through at-the-table experience – and from working with other master negotiators like Presidents Obama and Clinton, and Nelson Mandela. These are takeawayas that anyone can use to negotiate with the power brokers, dealmakers, and, yes, the hungry sharks in their own lives.

    owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered--politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.

    Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a "diary, the story of his soul." The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.

     Here, from award-winning historian Ian Grey, is its dramatic story - from the establishment of the first ruling dynasty by a Viking prince to the invasions of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan to the rise of the tsars, whose domination of their country stretched nearly four centuries until the violent overthrow of Nicholas II in 1918.

    Yet as her intimacy with the charismatic inventor, Nikita Slavkin, deepens, she's inspired by his belief in a future free of bourgeois clutter, alight with creativity and sleek as a machine.In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led by Slavkin. In the white-washed modernist rooms of the commune the members may be cold and hungry, but their overwhelming feeling is of exhilaration. They abolish private property and hand over everything, even their clothes, to the collective; they swear celibacy for the cause.Yet the chaos and violence of the outside world cannot be withstood for ever. Nikita Slavkin's sudden disappearance inspires the Soviet cult of the Vanishing Futurist, the scientist who sacrificed himself for the Communist ideal. Gerty, alone and vulnerable, must now discover where that ideal will ultimately lead.Strikingly vivid, this debut novel by award-winning writer Charlotte Hobson pierces the heart with a story of fleeting, but infinite possibility.

    Dr. Gorka knows Donald Trump and the threats we face. Buy and read Why We Fight to find how we win and what it means to be an American hero." — RUSH LIMBAUGH WAR. It will happen again. We must be ready. Sober words from Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a man who has made the unvarnished truth his specialty. And there’s one eternal truth that Americans are in danger of forgetting: the most important weapon in any geopolitical conflict is the will to win. And we must win.  In this powerful manifesto, Dr. Gorka explains the basic principles that have guided strategists since Sun Tzu penned The Art of War in the sixth century B.C. To defeat your enemy, you must know him. But that’s the last thing liberal elites are interested in. Willful ignorance about our adversary—whether it’s Russia, China, or the global jihadi movement—has been crippling. Tearing off America’s politically correct blindfold, Dr. Gorka clarifies who our foes are and what makes them tick. An eight-year vacation from geopolitical reality under Obama left our country dangerously weakened. Dr. Gorka addresses the pressing questions we face as we rebuild under President Trump’s leadership: - What are the most serious threats to American security? - How are they different from the threats of the past? - What can we do to counter these threats? - How can we achieve the “perfect victory” of vanquishing our enemies without mortal combat? All the money and weapons in the world cannot substitute for the will to fight for our precious country and what she represents. To remind us of what the will to win looks like, Dr. Gorka intersperses the stories of four American heroes—Stephen Decatur, Chesty Puller, “Red” McDaniel, and a warrior who never took up arms, Whittaker Chambers—men who believed in their country and put everything on the line for her.

    Alon's sixteen-year-old neighbor, Fred Burton, was deeply shocked by this crime that rocked his sleepy suburban neighborhood. As it turned out, Alon wasn't just a pilot he was a high-ranking military official and with intelligence ties. The assassin was never found and the case was closed. In 2007, Fred Burton who had since become a State Department counterterrorism special agent reopened the case. Here, in Chasing Shadows, Burton spins a gripping tale of the secret agents, double dealings, terrorists and heroes he encounters he chases leads around the globe in an effort to solve this decades-old murder. From swirling dogfights over Egypt and Hanoi to gun battles on the streets of Beirut, this action-packed thriller looks in the dark heart of the Cold War to show power is uses, misused, and sold to the most convenient bidder."

    This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility and perhaps won't take place at all"--

    I remember a young girl no more than ten who gave me a glass of buttermilk just outside of Chancellorsville. I still remember that. I guess that's all my life is. Some pictures fading out behind me, and there's not much before me. Reisa listened as he spoke. She knew that he was a man who longed for goodness, and longed for friends, and perhaps even a wife and family. Finally she said, I hope you find your way, Ben. God is real, and love is real. Fleeing a bloody pogrom that threatens their tiny Russian village, Reisa Dimitri and her grandfather, Jacob, sail the ocean to a new life in America. They are swiftly embraced by New York's Jewish community. But God has other plans that will call them far from the familiar warmth and ways of their culture. make their living as traveling merchants in the post-Civil-War South. There, as new and unexpected friendships unfold, the aged Jacob searches for answers concerning the nature of the Messiah he has spent a lifetime looking and longing for. And there, the beautiful Reisa finds herself strangely drawn to Ben Driver--a man with a checkered past, a painful present, and a deadly enemy who will stop at nothing to destroy him. human love, divine faithfulness, and the restoration of things that had seemed broken beyond repair.

    . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb." —Steven Hoch" . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry." —Samuel C. RamerVillage Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, Semyonova's ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.

    Here, over more than a thousand years, the history and destiny of Russia have unfolded. In a sweeping narrative, one of the English-speaking world's leading historians of Russia follows this story from the first emergence of the Slavs in the historical record in the sixth century C.E. to the Russians' persistent appearances in today's headlines. Hosking's is a monumental story of competing legacies, of an enormous power uneasily balanced between the ideas and realities of Asian empire, European culture, and Byzantine religion; of a constantly shifting identity, from Kievan Rus to Muscovy to Russian Empire to Soviet Union to Russian Federation, and of Tsars and leaders struggling to articulate that identity over the centuries.With particular attention to non-Russian regions and ethnic groups and to Russia's relations with neighboring polities, Hosking lays out the links between political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena that have made Russia what it is--a world at once familiar and mysterious to Western observers. In a clear and engaging style, he conducts us through the Mongol invasions, the rise of autocracy, the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the battle against Napoleon, the emancipation of the serfs, the Crimean War, the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's reign of terror, the two World Wars, the end of the USSR, to today's war against Chechnya. Hosking's history is shot through with the understanding that becoming an empire has prevented Russia from becoming a nation and has perpetuated archaic personal forms of power. This book is the most penetrating and comprehensive account yet of what such a legacy has meant--to Russia, and to the world.

    It's the year 2000. Newly elected President Putin is embattled after the Kursk submarine explodes and spirals into the abyss. 118 submariners are trapped. Outwardly, Putin seems not to care, but behind the scenes is another story. Meanwhile, the Russian people yearn for a response from their leader. Mass protests ignite across Russia. Does Putin save the sailors and unite his beloved motherland, or does he lose everything?Discover what motivates the man behind Russia. Is he the cold, ruthless leader you know, or is he...human?