For centuries, war was Europe's defining narrative, affecting every aspect of political, social, and cultural life. But afterWorldWar II, Europe began to reimagine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth.Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America and the rest of the world.With remarkable insight and clarity, Sheehan covers the major intellectual and political events in Europe over the past one hundred years, from the pacifist and militarist movements of the early twentieth century and two catastrophic world wars to the fall of the BerlinWall and the heated debate over Iraq.This authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.we live.

    For over six cruel centuries, tens of thousands died in the blood soaked arenas of Rome and its colonies, watched by enthralled crowds screaming for violence. Professor Fik Meijer has ingeniously pieced together their true stories from contemporary evidence, describing the gladiators' origins, daily life, training, and the odds of their survival pitted against their legions of fans' lust for blood and spectacle.

    Jacques Le Goff has written a book which will not only be read by generations of students and historians, but which will delight and inform all those interested in the history of medieval Europe. Part one, Historical Evolution, is a narrative account of the entire period, from the barbarian settlement of Roman Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries to the war-torn crises of Christian Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Part two, Medieval Civilization, is analytical, concerned with the origins of early medieval ideas of culture and religion, the constraints of time and space in a pre-industrial world and the reconstruction of the lives and sensibilities of the people during this long period. Medieval Civilization combines the narrative and descriptive power characteristic of Anglo-Saxon scholarship with the sensitivity and insight of the French historical tradition.

    Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector ever from the Eastern bloc, published RED HORIZONS, his expose of the unchecked power and corruption of Nicolae Ceausecu, then the Romanian President and Romanian Communist Party General Secretary, and his wife, Elena. Pacepa’s intention was to bring down the Ceausescu regime and liberate his daughter, whom he had to leave behind in Romania. When Ceausescu was told of Pacepa’s defection, he suffered a nervous breakdown and ordered Pacepa killed. Ceausescu’s murder squads never succeeded in tracking down Pacepa, who remained in hiding in the U.S. Not long after the publication of RED HORIZONS, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty began their campaigns to broadcast the book into Romania. On Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed by military forces who had joined the Romanian people in a spontaneous revolt against one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, bringing an abrupt end to 24 years of Communist tyranny. On December 26, 1989, Truth, the Romanian daily newspaper which had declared itself free, began printing excerpts from RED HORIZONS. The editors’ preface to these excerpts said: “What can be read in the pages of this book appears to be the fruit of a sick fantasy and yet, every word is true. The publication of this book played an uncontested role in revealing in all its hideousness the true face of a dictatorship, which with diabolical cunningness had managed to outfox a part of the world."

    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.

    En route, he travels through Spain’s most picturesque towns. And Benidorm.Along the way he learns about the region’s history, from the time four hydrogen bombs fell over Spain, to the politician who shot General Franco’s daughter in the bottom yet rose to become one of the country’s most powerful men. While riding across Spain, Chris also meets an array of eccentric characters such as the man who lives in a cave and the Airbnb host who admitted strangling her previous guest.People told him he was crazy to leave his job and his girlfriend behind to jump on the cheapest bike he could find. After a series of mishaps including one that almost sparked a mountain rescue mission, it would appear they were right.

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

     In ancient times, it was known as one of the Pillars of Hercules, and a glance at its formidable mass suggests that it may well have been created by the gods. Sought after by every nation with territorial ambitions in Europe, Asia, and Africa, Gibraltar was possessed by the Arabs, the Spanish, and ultimately the British, who captured it in the early 1700s and held onto it in a siege of more than three years late in the eighteenth century. The fact that that was one of more than a dozen sieges exemplifies Gibraltar’s quintessential value as a prize and the desperation of governments to fly their flag above its forbidding ramparts. Bradford uses his matchless skill and knowledge to take the reader through the history of this great and unique fortress. From its geological creation to its two-thousand-year influence on politics and war, he crafts the compelling tale of how these few square miles played a major part in history. Ernle Bradford's books have been widely praised. 'A gripping story' - The Economist. Ernle Bradford (1922-1986) was an historian who wrote books on naval battles and historical figures. Among his subjects were Lord Nelson, the Mary Rose, Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar and Hannibal. He also documented his own voyages on the Mediterranean Sea.

    Gavin

    Eyes fixed on a mysterious point in the air, they were mesmerized by something which was invisible to everyone else. What the girls said they saw--and heard--sent shock waves that are still reverberating today. The messages the four girls claimed to receive revealed a picture of a Catholic church in crisis and a world that faced an earth-shattering future that would unfold in their lifetime. The girls’ pronouncements about coming trouble in the church and world were met with fierce skepticism from the first. Some charged the girls with being possessed by demons (based on the girls’ strange physical poses and apparent levitation), and others claimed the girls were putting on an act (revealing their true colors when they chose ordinary married lives instead of the convent). There was also a third body of critics: those who believed that a group of girls on the cusp of adolescence in a remote and insular society conjured up a psychodrama which, fueled by the spotlight and mounting frenzy, gained a frightening life of its own. There was one other possibility--that the strange events in Garabandal, Spain actually did occur, and the girls received an apocalyptic warning for both the church and the modern world. The warning to the world included a prediction that a newly militant Russia would rise again. The prophecies of Garabandal also foretell a World-Wide Warning and a Global Miracle, whose purpose is to convince a world reeling from one catastrophe to the next that God exists. But the Warning and Miracle, dramatic as they sound, are not even the most unsettling of the messages. One night, the young girls dissolved into screams. During this so-called “Night of the Screams,” the girls say they were shown a tragic chastisement that would befall the entire world if the Warning and Miracle failed to trigger global change. As disquieting as those messages were, the most shocking message at Garabandal was for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Why were the messages of Garabandal so effectively suppressed? Did it have to do with the fact that the messages presciently warned of coming scandal and turmoil in the Roman Catholic Church itself? Did a portal open between worlds on a Spanish mountaintop in that summer of 1961? And if so, who opened the door--an angel of God or an angel of darkness? Did a young girl's flight of fancy one summer night spin wildly out of control? Or was it a visitation from God? Now that the “girls” at the center of this drama are 60-year-old women, should their claims be discredited or re-examined? Are the apparitions bogus or fast-approaching their fulfillment? If the events are false, Garabandal is a fascinating and perhaps tragic human interest story with several explanations. If the events and warnings are true--then what do we do? By the end of this book, readers can judge whether the visions of four young seers on a mountaintop in Spain were historical fact, a devilish fraud, or the creative confusion of four girls who would spend the rest of their lives trying to escape a human tragicomedy that they themselves had produced.

    

    This narrative history of Latin America surveys five centuries in less than five hundred pages.  The first third of the book moves from the Americas before Columbus to the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century.  The construction of new nations and peoples in the nineteenth century forms the middle third, and the final section analyzes economic development, rising political participation, and the search of identity over the last century.  The collision of peoples and cultures--Native Americans, Europeans, Africans--that defines Latin America, and gives it both its unity and diversity, provides the central theme of this concise, synthetic history.

    Written with passion and from the heart, We Will Be Free is more than just another travel book, it is a modern manifesto, a declaration of independence and self sufficiency. “From the title to the very last page of the book, I was intrigued and entertained! It is full of unabashedly honest and hilarious metaphors describing life on the road and what it's like to be a part of the "overlanding tribe."Graeme makes you feel like you are a part of the travel adventure as he divulges his raw, poetic and amusing consciousness.This book is both a salty and a tender work of art about a beautiful family. The Bell family, on paper and in real life, will inspire you to live life fully and in your own way.Overland The Americas”.

    That Sweden achieved this was due to its leadership—a case-study in history when pure military skill, and that alone, could override the demographic and economic factors which have in modern times been termed so pre-eminent.Once Protestantism emerged, via Martin Luther, the most devastating war in European history ensued, as the Holy Roman Empire sought to resassert its authority by force. Into this bloody maelstrom stepped Gustav Adolf of Sweden, a brilliant tactician and strategist, who with his finely honed Swedish legions proceeded to establish a new authority in northern Europe. Gustav, as brave as he was brilliant, was finally killed while leading a cavalry charge at the Battle of Lützen.He had innovated, however, tactics and weaponry that put his successors in good stead, as Sweden remained a great power, rivaled only by France and Spain in terms of territory in Europe. And then one of his successors, Karl XII, turned out to be just as great a military genius as Gustav himself, and as the year 1700 arrived, Swedish armies once more burst out in all directions. Karl, like Gustav, assumed the throne while still a teenager, but immediately displayed so much acumen, daring and skill that chroniclers could only compare him, like Gustav, to Alexander the Great.This book examines thoroughly, yet in highly readable fashion, the century during which Swedish military power set an example for all Europe. While the Continent was most visibly divided along religious lines—Catholic versus Protestant—geopolitical motives always underlied the conflicts. Sweden’s reliance on its military skill was especially noteworthy, as it veritably founded the modern concept of making wars pay through conquest.Karl XII finally let his ambitions lead him too far, as did Napoleon and Hitler in following centuries, into the vastness of the nascent Russian Empire, where he was finally defeated, at Poltava in Ukraine. Thus the period of Swedish supremacy in Europe came to a close, albeit not without leaving important lessons behind. In this work, by renowned author Henrik O. Lunde, these are clearly to be seen.About the author:HENRIK O. LUNDE, born in Norway, moved to America as a child and thence rose in the U.S. Army to become a Colonel in Special Forces. Highly decorated for bravery in Vietnam, he proceeded to gain advance degrees and assume strategic posts, his last being in the Plans and Policy Branch of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. After retirement from the Army he turned to writing, with a focus on his native North, and given his combination of personal tactical knowledge plus objective strategic grasp has authored several groundbreaking works. These include Hitler s Pre-Emptive War, about Norway 1940, Finland s War of Choice, and Hitler s Wave-Breaking Concept, which analyzes the controversial retreat of Germany s Army Group North from the Leningrad front in WWII. In A Warrior Dynasty he re-examines the potential of pure military skill in global affairs. His next, long-awaited work, will examine how America itself has fared in this regard during the last 50 years. "

    However, Christy Kinahan will never be fêted in the financial press. For his business - drugs, guns, money-laundering, murder - also makes him Ireland's leading criminal.While Kinahan kept a low profile as he grew his empire, by the time his crime cartel shot to public attention in 2010 it was known to European police forces for over a decade. In that year police raided members' homes and premises in Spain, Ireland the UK. By then Kinahan and his sons Daniel and Christopher Jr were already among the richest men in Europe, with an estimated joint worth of €750m.However, events in February 2016 made Kinahan a household name. A daring and deadly gun attack in a suburban Dublin hotel - an attack targeting Daniel Kinahan (who escaped) - stunned the public and exposed the depth of enmity between the Kinahans and the family and associates of the veteran Dublin criminal, Gerry Hutch. Despite an intense garda crack-down on the gangsters' activities, the body count continues to rise.The Cartel gives behind-the-scenes story of that initial Spanish-led raid on the Kinahans. The authors have had exclusive access to the wiretaps that tracked the cartel for two years and talked to key officers who investigated them. They expose the criminal clan's aims and actions - in members' own words - and reveal the surprising truths behind how they built their empire.And The Cartel brings the story bang up-to-date to explain the origins of and fall-out from the feud with the Hutches, one of the most violent and vicious Ireland has ever known - and one that could be the undoing of the Kinahans.The authors' combined depth of knowledge - Stephen Breen has been a crime correspondent for over 15 years and in addition to writing about crime for over a decade, Owen Conlon is a fluent Spanish speaker - has culminated in a detailed and gripping account of double-crossing, vengeance and murder.