Tudor histories are rife with "facts" about Henry VIII's life and health, but as a medical anthropologist, Kyra Kramer, author of Blood Will Tell, has learned one should never take those "facts" at face value. In Henry VIII's Health in a Nutshell, Kramer highlights the various health issues that Henry suffered throughout his life and proposes a few new theories for their causes, based on modern medical findings. Known for her readability and excellent grasp of the intricacies of modern medical diagnostics, Kyra Kramer gives the reader a new understanding of Henry VIII's health difficulties, and provides new insights into their possible causes.

     The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the definitive work on baseball’s New York Giants and their tenure in New York City. An “Editor’s Choice” of The New York Times when it was first published more than 20 years ago, the book was also a Spitball Magazine nominee for the Best Baseball Book of the year. Author Noel Hynd, a former contributor to Sports Illustrated, has now created a new edition that maintains all the previous text, but expands the work to more than 600 pages from the original 375. Included this time are more stories about McGraw, Ott, Durocher and Mays and their opponents, plus more on the men and women from other sports and various fields of entertainment who also were ‘giants’ of the Polo Grounds: from boxers Jack Dempsey and Sugar Ray Robinson to entertainers Annie Oakley and Tallulah Bankhead to football’s Red Grange and soccer’s Béla Guttmann. The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the story of a famous team, a renowned ball park, an invincible spirit and America’s most vibrant city from the 1880’s to the 1950’s. The new edition is packed with remarkable anecdotes about Broadway, New York politics, good guys and bad guys who made the Giants' era in New York unique and memorable. The new edition, practically the equivalent of two volumes, also features more than 100 photos and illustrations, most of them new, some rarely seen. Critical Praise for The Giants of The Polo Grounds “A compelling and comprehensive history of an extraordinary ball club.” -New York Times “Grandly digressive! The owners, stars like Mathewson and Mays, various eccentric players are all here in this vivid history by Sports Illustrated contributor Hynd.” - Publishers’ Weekly “Fans of all ages will treasure the crazy quilt text for its stylish recall of the game’s summer roots.” -Kirkus Library Journal “Just plain enjoyable as baseball is supposed to be.” - The Pennsylvania Gazette Think of it as a grand slam into the center field bleachers in the bottom of the 9th!

    Written by Amy Eldridge, founder and CEO of Love Without Boundaries, this poignant chronicle of LWB's life-changing work, told through the stories of individual children, offers personal insight into the complex issues surrounding orphan care, abandonment, international aid, and adoption. Both thought-provoking and inspirational, "The Heart of an Orphan" reminds us all that while the needs of vulnerable children around the world may seem overwhelming, the human heart triumphs in believing that every life has value and every child deserves love.

    As a volunteer at a local orphanage, Bratt witnessed conditions that were unfathomable to a middle-class mother of two from South Carolina.Based on Bratt's diary of her four years at the orphanage, Silent Tears offers a searing account of young lives rendered disposable. In the face of an implacable system, Bratt found ways to work within (and around) the rules to make a better future for the children, whom she came to love. The book offers no easy answers. While often painful in its clear-sightedness, Silent Tears balances the sadness and struggles of life in the orphanage with moments of joy, optimism, faith, and victory. It is the story of hundreds of children and of one woman who never planned on becoming a hero but became one anyway.

    They were not the best answer, but they were the first attempts at finding a practical system. Many children that would have died, lived to have children and grandchildren. It has been calculated that over two million descendants have come from these children. The trains gave the children a fighting chance to grow up." – D. Bruce Ayler By the middle of the 19th century, New York City’s population surpassed the unfathomable number of 1 million people, despite its obvious lack of space. This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. At first, the city itself set up its own immigration registration center in Castle Garden near the site of the original Fort Amsterdam, and naturally, many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn’t travel far and thus remained in New York. Of course, the addition of so many immigrants and others with less money put strains on the quality of life. Between 1862 and 1872, the number of tenements had risen from 12,000 to 20,000; the number of tenement residents grew from 380,000 to 600,000. One notorious tenement on the East River, Gotham Court, housed 700 people on a 20-by-200-foot lot. Another on the West Side was home, incredibly, to 3,000 residents, who made use of hundreds of privies dug into a fifteen-foot-wide inner court. Squalid, dark, crowded, and dangerous, tenement living created dreadful health and social conditions. It would take the efforts of reformers such as Jacob Riis, who documented the hellishness of tenements with shocking photographs in How the Other Half Lives, to change the way such buildings were constructed. While the Melting Pot nature of America is one of its most unique and celebrated aspects, the conditions also created a humanitarian crisis of sorts. In the 19th century, child labor was still the norm, especially for poor families, and no social welfare systems were in place to provide security for people. As a result, if a child was abandoned or orphaned, they were at the mercy of an ad hoc system of barely tolerable orphanages with little to no centralization. Minorities and immigrants were also discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity and religion. Into this issue stepped the Children’s Aid Society, led by Charles Loring Brace, who determined he could improve abandoned kids’ futures by helping relocate them further to the West, which would also help Americans settle the frontier. By coordinating with train companies, Brace was able to transport dozens of children at a time to places in the heartland of America or further out west, where they would end up in new homes, decades before the existence of foster care. Genealogist Roberta Lowrey, a descendant of one of these orphans, noted that the situations for many of those on the Orphan Trains were vastly different, but in all, the system worked: “Many were used as strictly slave farm labor, but there are stories, wonderful stories of children ending up in fine families that loved them, cherished them, [and] educated them. They were so much better off than if they had been left on the streets of New York. ... They were just not going to survive, or if they had, their fate would surely have been awful.

    Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized. Michael O’Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, here takes a comprehensive look at the feature of Camelot that remained largely under the radar during the White House years: Kennedy’s womanizing. Indeed, O’Brien writes, Kennedy’s approach to women and sex was near pathological, beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination at the time. The record makes for an astonishing piece of presidential history.---Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy. He is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

    Evocative and vivid descriptions of the early stages of the conflict populate these pages, from which the reader can gain lessons of the conditions of the stagnant front.Originally published in 1915, the set of tales within this book offer sobering accounts from various battlefields which took place during the early stages of the war. Although the war was not even halfway over by the time these stories found publication, the horrors of the conflict were already a fact of life, with casualties rapidly mounting on both sides.At that time public opinion hadn’t yet fully turned against the war, and in Britain – the nationality of all the soldiers here – the need for showing progress was essential to sustain civilian and military morale. All of the soldiers in these pages were already serving in their regiments, or had volunteered for service, when the war commenced. They were commonly professional soldiers, possessed of a natural – even ingrained - patriotism, and more accepting of the official narrative than the increasingly sceptical and fearful citizenry back home. There is however no doubt that many were already disillusioned, and that the stories here are taken from an already thinning group of soldiers still possessed of some shred of belief in the war as a noble, or even glorious, conflict.Despite the mood which underpins the pages here, one can read between the lines for a picture. The stories are honest: thing got worse between those elated first weeks wherein the French welcomed their allies so gladly, and the war that was to be over by Christmas 1914 was nowhere near ending, and it is in these stories that we witness the germinal seeds of disillusion and hatred of conflict. The majority of the illustrations which originally accompanied these accounts prioritise the heroism of their subjects, while a few offer a toned down presentation of the horrific battlefields. In this modern edition, we include a number of relevant photographic illustrations alongside the original drawings which accompanied the stories when they were first published. While the imagery of World War I is generally quite ingrained in our minds, these supplementary pictures are designed as on-the-spot reminders of how war was more than a century ago, as well as to provide demonstration of the weapons and technology of the era.

    Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague. A thirteenth century Franciscan monk, traversing the Silk Road, begins his extraordinary deathbed confession, while five hundred years earlier, a grieving Chinese poet is summoned to the Emperor's palace. In a series of delicately interlaced stories, Sam Meekings' richly poetic and gripping second novel follows the journeys of characters whose lives, separated by millennia, are all in some way touched by the mysterious Book of Crows - a mythical book in which the entire history of the world - past, present and future - is written down.

    In their long-time talks, the former eunuch told his young friend lots of inside stories about the "last emperor" and the royal family. Sun allowed Jia to record these stories with a tape-recorder and a video-tape-recorder.Jia had already published the Chinese edition of the eunuch's biography and a Japanese-language edition.So far, Jia has written six books on the royal family. Jia said he wanted to translate his books into major foreign languages to help foreign readers better understand the history of China.(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2009)http://www.china.org.cn/books&mag...Los Angeles Times Review - "Biography of last Chinese eunuch reveals a tumultuous life"http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwor...New Phoenix Intl LlcForeign Language Teaching &Foreign Language Teaching and Research P

    Golf enthusiast Mike Keiser had the dream of building this British-style "links" course on a stretch of Oregon's rugged coast, and Dream Golf is the first all-inclusive account of how he turned his passion into a reality. Now, in this updated and expanded edition, golf writer Stephen Goodwin revisits Bandon Dunes and introduces readers to Keiser's latest effort there, a new course named Old Macdonald that will present golfers with a more rugged, untamed version of the game. This "new" approach to the sport is, in fact, a return to the game's origins, with a very deep bow to Charles Blair Macdonald (1856 –1939), the father of American golf course architecture and one of the founders of the U.S. Golf Association. This highly anticipated fourth course, designed by renowned golf course architect Tom Doak along with Jim Urbina — as detailed in Dream Golf — will further enhance Bandon Dunes' reputation as a place where golf really does seem to capture the ancient magic of the game.

    Touchdown could mean that we've just won another football National Championship or it could indicate that a tornado is on the ground.  I could never be a storm chaser. I'm the one the storm chases. Funnels circle around me like shark fins as I bow my head in a school hallway, kneel down in a convent, or give birth to a newborn baby wailing in unison with the tornado sirens.  I huddle with toddlers in showers and beg for shelter in a McDonald's freezer. I remain a sitting duck in a second-floor apartment, and find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time while in the emergency room with storm victims.Life in the Rocket City is a thrill ride which is not for the faint of heart, this I know. So brace yourself for a front row seat on a ride through Tornado Valley! Alabama is the home of the world's deadliest twisters, and Huntsville is in the heart of the arena. Our space history is out of this world, but our tornado history will blow you away.Take a rollercoaster ride through the history of Alabama tornadoes before plunging into the gripping story of the Day of Devastation. Witness the stars falling on Alabama in 1833. Then get ready for the sky to fall! The plot twists as Huntsville's torrid tornado past comes alive in the 1974 Super Tornado Outbreak. The rollercoaster corkscrews as it encounters an unexpected twister in 1989 that slingshots the reader into the angry vortex on Airport Road. The ride cruises before taking another gut-wrenching dive that catapults its riders into an inverted twist from yet another Anderson Hills tornado in 1995. The town turns upside-down but Huntsville survives, revives, and thrives. But the worst is yet to come. Another tornado season is just around the corner. Beware of the month of April, especially on a Wednesday.The warning sirens wail, we're bombarded by softball-sized hail, and an EF3 tornado slams into the jail. It's just another day in Alabama, but the countdown clock is ticking. The next tornado warning could be "the one." Our voice drops to a whisper when we mention an EF5. We realize life is too short. The coaster accelerates. Can you feel the torque? We have no idea what's around the next bend. Suddenly, the nightmare comes true as the ride zooms out of control, this time in a free-fall on April 27, 2011. Alabama is bombarded by a record 62 tornadoes in one day. Abruptly, the ride comes to a screeching halt. The adrenaline rush subsides. You've just experienced Huntsville's Havoc. Immediately the passengers ask one another, "Do you want to ride again?" Some will and some swear, never again.

    The title of his most famous work, Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), expresses the scope and magnitude of Livy's undertaking. He wrote in a mixture of annual chronology and narrative. Livy claims that lack of historical data prior to the sacking of Rome in 387 BC by the Gauls made his task more difficult. He wrote the majority of his works during the reign of Augustus. However, he is often identified with an attachment to the Roman Republic and a desire for its restoration. His writing style was poetic and archaic in contrast to Caesar's and Cicero's styles. Also, he often wrote from the Romans' opponent's point of view in order to accent the Romans' virtues in their conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean.

    A writer may accomplish all this while sympathising heartily, as I do, with Ireland and her people.” A Concise History of Ireland by P. W. Joyce is a seminal work covering the history of the nation from ancient times through to the political turmoil of the nineteenth century. Joyce provides a detailed look at the customs and culture of ancient Ireland, its language, literature, art, and religion. Before the first Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169, Ireland was ruled by high kings who variously ruled all or parts of Ireland. The struggle for power between these kings resulted in many conflicts and produced such famous Irish war-kings as Brian Boru, Malachi and Dermot MacMurrogh. The book tracks the development of religion in Ireland from the pagan beliefs of ancient Ireland to the coming of St Patrick and the spread of Christianity. It also follows the religious effects of centuries of plantations and the religious divides that emerged as a result. Joyce examines the development of Anglo-Irish relations spanning from 1169, through to the Plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the rebellions of the nineteenth century. A Concise History of Ireland is a fascinating account at the complex history of this small country. P. W. Joyce was an Irish historian and writer who specialized in creating histories of localities all throughout Ireland. As a result of his efforts, he became one of the most important Irish cultural figures of the late 19th century, producing works about the languages, music, literature, folklore, and the background of the names of places all throughout Ireland. This work was published in 1893 and he passed away in 1914.

    Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.

    The dream of a railroad across America had at last come true. This book tells the story of swaggering men with big plans, of an America emerging from the Civil War and reaching its manifest destiny. The men who imagined the transcontinental railroad were impassioned profiteers, an unlikely, often ruthless band, guilty of both financial double-dealing and ferocious ingenuity. When ice delayed operations in the Sierra Nevadas, the men of the Central Pacific formed the Summit Ice Company and sold their problem to California saloons. When herds of buffalo ripped up the tracks, the men of the Union Pacific brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of them. (Thus the legend of Buffalo Bill was born.) While his partners finagled in Washington and on Wall Street, Jack Casement, a former Union general, dressed in a fur coat, a Cossack hat, and shining cavalry boots and carrying a pistol and a bullwhip, drove the workers of the Union Pacific to new track-laying records. Meanwhile, from the West, thousands of Chinese immigrants blasted, climbed, and inched their way through the perilous California mountains. The railroad transformed the country forever. It decimated the Plains Indian culture by destroying the herds of buffalo that sustained it. It augmented the timber and steel industries; it opened up the West for commerce. Farms grew up along the length of the rails. Thousands of immigrants from Asia and Europe came here to build the iron road. Most important, it united a nation. The story of the railroad is capitalist theater, starring powerful politicians and generals and con artists. Set in opulent parlor cars, well-heeled boardrooms, and rowdy frontier towns, on desolate plains and deadly gorges, it is a story of vision and corruption, of empire building at its most vulgar and glorious. John Williams combines scholarship with personalities, historical analysis with plain old tall tales, to tell a story that will appeal to readers of American history and adventure and to lovers of the American West. The Transcontinental Railroad is an epic of every sense.