Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success, and is now available in seventeen languages across the world. Toward the end of his long life, Gombrich embarked upon a revision and, at last, an English translation. A Little History of the World presents his lively and involving history to English-language readers for the first time. Superbly designed and freshly illustrated, this is a book to be savored and collected. In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind's experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements and an acute witness to its frailties. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history.

    Two years later, Srebrenica fell after UN commanders turned down repeated requests for NATO air strikes to halt attacking Bosnian Serbs. As many as 7,000 Muslim men perished in mass executions or ambushes along a harrowing forty-mile flight one survivor called “The Marathon of Death.”In Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Rohde follows the experiences of seven central characters—three Muslims in Srebrenica, two Dutch peacekeepers charged with defending the surrounded town, and two Serb Army soldiers attacking it—through the ten-day period that changed the course of the war in Bosnia and was arguably the darkest hour in United Nations history.Rohde exposes how the United States, France, Great Britain, the United Nations and the Bosnian government—out of incompetence or cynicism—allowed 40,000 Muslims to fall into the hands of their potential executioners. Part of an apparent Serb endgame to win the war, Srebrenica's fall ended up playing a crucial role in the Clinton administration's “endgame strategy” that halted the conflict. A new afterword by the author updates recent efforts to find the missing victims of Srebrenica and to apprehend and prosecute the executioners.The most comprehensive book to date on the subject, Endgame is a tale of cynical power politics in the post–Cold War era, a case study in genocide, and a disturbing testament to the power of propaganda and self-delusion.

    It was built on the twentieth-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950's, the magic seemed to be working.Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, it give the tyranny its happy ending. It's history, it's fiction. It's a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.By award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

    Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel lingers over reading as seduction, as rebellion, as obsession, and goes on to trace the never-before-told story of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.

    Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian period, Morris recreates an era when woman set the cultural tone. Focusing on the world of the emperor's court-the world so admired by Virginia Woolf and others-he describes the politics, society, religious life, and superstitions of the times, providing detailed portrayals of the daily life of courtiers, the cult of beauty they espoused, and the intricate relations between the men and women of this milieu.

    Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.James W. Loewen, a sociology professor and distinguished critic of history education, puts 12 popular textbooks under the microscope-and what he discovers will surprise you. In his opinion, every one of these texts fails to make its subject interesting or memorable. Worse still is the proliferation of blind patriotism, mindless optimism and misinformation filling the pages.From the truth about Christopher Columbus to the harsh reality of the Vietnam War, Loewen picks apart the lies we've been told. This audiobook, narrated by Brian Keeler (The Hurricane, "All My Children") will forever change your view of the past.

    Walters examines the difficulties and inequities that women still face, more than forty years after the new wave of 1960s feminism--difficulties, particularly, in combining domesticity, motherhood and work outside the home. How much have women's lives really changed? In the West, women still come up against the glass ceiling at work, with most earning considerably less than their male counterparts. What are we to make of the now commonplace insistence that feminism deprives men of their rights and dignities? And how does one tackle the issue of female emancipation in different cultural and economic environments--in, for example, Islam, Hinduism, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent?

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    How to Lose a War chronicles some of the most remarkable strategic catastrophes and doomed military adventures of overreaching invaders and clueless defenders—whether the failure was a result of poor planning, miscalculations, monumental ego, or failed intelligence . . . or just a really stupid idea to begin with.Alexander invades India—and ends up in deep vindaloo.Sacre bleu! The French are humiliated by Prussia in 1870.spain's "invincible navy" breaks up off the coast of britain while attempting an invasion.the mau mau rebellion against the british in kenya shows us how not to run an insurgency.Chiang Kai-Shek's pathetic army fails to keep Mao's Communists from grabbing China.

    The author sets out not to give us the history of academic discipline but a history of choices: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as they have changed according to political, religious, cultural, and (often most important) partisan and patriotic circumstances. Burrow aims, as well, to change our perceptions of the crucial turning points in the history of history, allowing the ideas that historians have had about both their own times and their founding civilizations to emerge with unexpected freshness.Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the most interesting ways we have to understand the past. Certainly, this volume stands alone in its ambition, scale and fascination.

    1 begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, and Antietam, but so are the smaller ones: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, and Monitor versus Merrimac. The word "narrative" is the key to this extraordinary book's incandescence and its truth. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the people involved in it. One learns not only what was happening on all fronts but also how the author discovered it during his years of exhaustive research. This first volume in Shelby Foote's comprehensive history is a must-listen for anyone interested in one of the bloodiest wars in America's history.

    It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

    Suleiman became besotted with her, and forsook all other mistresses. Then, in an unprecedented step, he made her the first and only queen in the Ottoman court. Although shrouded in scandal, the canny and sophisticated Roxelana became a shrewd diplomat and administrator, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women - from Queen Elizabeth to Catherine de Medici - increasingly held the reins of power.In Empress of the East, Pierce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who pushed the Ottoman Empire towards modernity.

    In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f*ck things up.From Chairman Mao's Four Pests Campaign, to the American Dustbowl; from the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the world's leading superpower electing a reality TV mogul as President... it's pretty safe to say that, as a species, we haven't exactly grown wiser with age. So, next time you think you've really f*cked up, this book will remind you: it could be so much worse

    “Fascinating, brave & sometimes infuriating” (Time), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It's the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create “a deeply felt work” (San Francisco Chronicle) as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife & tragedy to reach a courageous & affecting reckoning with difficult truths.