*****A group of kids in the 2000s had a dream to make their voice heard - and this book documents their seminal impact on today's pop culture.DJ Target grew up in Bow under the shadow of Canary Wharf, with money looming close on the skyline. The 'Godfather of Grime' Wiley and Dizzee Rascal first met each other in his bedroom. They were all just grime kids on the block back then, and didn't realise they were to become pioneers of an international music revolution. A movement that permeates deep into British culture and beyond. Household names were borne out of those housing estates, and the music industry now jumps to the beat of their gritty reality rather than the tune of glossy aspiration. Grime has shaken the world and Target is revealing its explosive and expansive journey in full, using his own unique insight and drawing on the input of grime's greatest names.

    He decided to keep a diary, where he made notes of everything that was happening. He did not know whether he would survive. When he was liberated, he gathered all the notes and deposited them with the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute. Unfortunately, few of the survivors kept notes about the horrible events that took place.When the history of the Holocaust will be written, and when future history of the Holocaust will be written, and when future historians gather their materials from the archives, there is no doubt that they will utilize Aaron Starkman's diary with its description of the events that took place and the murders that the Hitlerite hordes committed. These facts will also serve as an example of the fate that befell most Jewish communities in Poland and Eastern Europe.

    He has not only given us a fresh, clear-eyed, and often startling new look at the life of the last Romanovs, but also lived up to the promise of his title. He has shown us how the whole enterprise worked, from Tsar Nicholas to his lowest cook and chambermaid. This book is a great work of scholarship--and a wonderful read."--Peter Kurth, author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra and Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson"A mammoth, monumental achievement. No other book captures the essence and the entire scope of life at the court of Nicholas II. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and encyclopedic masterpiece that will be a major source for historians and biographers for years to come."--Marlene A. Eilers, author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and publisher of Royal Book News"Greg King has truly written a tour de force. The book is extremely well researched, has over 100 illustrations and is, quite simply, marvelous."--Coryne Hall, author of Little Mother of Russia, Once a Grand Duchess, and Imperial Dancer"Greg King is emerging as one of the leading authorities in today's liveliest field of Russian studies, and this is a major contribution to the study of late Imperial Russia."--Joseph T. Fuhrmann, author of Rasputin and the editor of The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra

    When you're a lonely six-year-old, you don't really understand what that means. All you know is you're happy to have a friend to play with.Patsy Whyte caught glimpses of an invisible world growing up in a children's home in Aberdeen. One of a family of ten traveller children, torn apart by the state in the 1950's, Patsy recalls a childhood scarred by years of mental and emotional abuse, prejudice and hatred.Patsy left the home at the age of 15, angry, naive and ill-prepared, but with a will to survive which would be tested to the limit. She rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful and the poorest in the land, and drifted into a world of violence, prostitution and drugs which almost claimed her life.More than anything, No Easy Road is a testament to the survival of the human spirit.

    Once hailed as “Super K”—the “indispensable man” whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama—he has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every “telcon” for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this 2-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding. The first half of Kissinger’s life is usually skimmed over as a quintessential tale of American ascent: the Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who made it to the White House. But in this first of two volumes, Ferguson shows that what Kissinger achieved before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser was astonishing in its own right. Toiling as a teen in a New York factory, he studied indefatigably at night. He was drafted into the infantry & saw action at the Battle of the Bulge—as well as the liberation of a concentration camp—but ended his army career interrogating Nazis. It was at Harvard that Kissinger found his vocation. Having immersed himself in the philosophy of Kant & the diplomacy of Metternich, he shot to celebrity by arguing for limited nuclear war. Nelson Rockefeller hired him. Kennedy called him to Camelot. Yet Kissinger’s rise was anything but irresistible. Dogged by press gaffes & disappointed by Rocky, Kissinger seemed stuck—until a trip to Vietnam changed everything. The Idealist is the story of one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. It's also a political Bildungsroman, explaining how “Dr Strangelove” ended up as consigliere to a politician he'd always abhorred. Like Ferguson’s classic 2-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds new light on an entire era. The essential account of an extraordinary life, it recasts the Cold War world.

    Based on private diaries, letters, and documents long hidden in the Soviet archives, it sheds light on an extraordinary tale of enduring love and ultimate tragedy that, until now, has never been told. He was the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, the tall, dashing brother of Tsar Nicholas II. She was Nathalie Wulfert, a beautiful, elegant, intelligent, divorced commoner, and the wife of a Guards officer under Michael's command. Everything was wrong...yet for Grand Duke Michael, it was love at first sight-an obsession that would lead to disgrace, humiliation, and exile.Much of Michael and Natasha's story is told in their own words, through hundreds of hitherto unpublished letters. Here they reveal their passion, their joy, and their despair as they are banished from their own country, bathed in scandal in the courts of Europe, and forced to suffer cruel separation. But more than a love story, Michael and Natasha is a historical drama played out against the elegant background of a bygone age and a world at war. It is a spell-binding account of Michael's return to Russia, his reputation as a war hero, the downfall of Nicholas II, the strange and short reign of Grand Duke Michael, and the cruel and tragic end of one of the most colorful eras in world history.

    Those who served her throne, or her bed, were well rewarded while the serfs were condemned to ever-worsening conditions. Men were instruments of pleasure. The weak had to perish. The future belonged to men - and sometimes a man could have the outward appearance of a woman. She was proof of that. This literary tour de force paints an enthralling picture of Catherine, her seductions, her coaxings and her phenomenal devotion to politics and work, but it also brings the Russian court - with all its intrigues - brilliantly to life.

    Professionally, Alison Weir, Kate Williams, Sarah Gristwood and Tracy Borman do events and television together, and are known affectionately, as the 'History Girls'. They bring an elan, and a passion for detail and dramatic narrative to all their subjects.Each writer focuses on different areas of interest. Alison Weir deals with the medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods. Kate Williams scrutinises the Georgians and Victorians. Sarah Gristwood takes up the story in 1919, when Princess Patricia of Connaught revived the tradition of royal brides marrying in Westminster Abbey, and goes on to examine the weddings of the Queen Mother (1923), the Queen (1947), and Princess Margaret in 1960. Lastly, Tracy Borman brings the book right up to date, with accounts of the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer through to the fanfare that will celebrate the nuptials of Kate and William.Every kind of wedding features -- from those attended by great public celebrations, to the many that took place in private chapels, parish churches and even in secret.Fascinating anecdotal details are revealed in the course of this most informative and entertaining overview of royal weddings through history, some amusing, some poignant, some bawdy. The Ring and the Crown places the royal wedding of the heir to the throne in historical perspective, and it does so with carefully selected illustrations that help make the authors' insights come even more vividly alive.

    George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, known in the family as Georgie, Willy and Nicky, were cousins. Between them they ruled over half the world. They had been friends since childhood. But by July 1914 the Trade Union of Kings was falling apart. Each was blaming the other for the impending disaster of the First World War. 'Have I gone mad?' Nicky asked his wife Alix in St Petersburg, showing her another telegram from Willy. 'What on earth does William mean pretending that it still depends on me whether war is averted or not!' Behind the friendliness of family gatherings lurked family quarrels, which were often played out in public. Drawing widely on previously unpublished documents, this is the extraordinary story of their overlapping lives, conducted in palaces of unimaginable opulence, surrounded by flattery and political intrigue. And through it runs the question: to what extent were the King, the Kaiser and the Tsar responsible for the outbreak of the war, and, as it turned out, for the end of autocratic monarchy?

    But in the wake of that one deceptively calm moment, conflict and violence soon followed. Some of the emergent new countries began to shed totalitarianism while other sought to revive their own dead empires or were led by ex-Soviet leaders who built equally or even more repressive political machines. Since the late 1980s, Sheets lived and reported from the former USSR and saw firsthand the reverberations of the empire’s collapse. Eight Pieces of Empire draws readers into the people, politics and day-to-day life, painting a vivid portrait of a tumultuous time.Sheets’ stories about people living through these tectonic shifts of fortune—a trio of female saboteurs in Chechnya, the chaos of newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s, young hustlers eager to strike it rich in the post-Soviet economic vacuum—reveal the underreported and surprising ways in which the ghosts of empire still haunt these lands and the world.

    His family didn’t always have it good. His father, a criminal lawyer, succumbed to a celebral stroke when Virat was very young, depriving him of someone he calls his ‘biggest support’ both on and off the field. The son paid his tribute to Prem Kohli in a way the older man himself would have applauded: Virat Kohli returned to the field to continue an innings a few hours after he lost him. ‘He was the one who drove me to practice every day, ’ the captain of the Indian cricket team recalls with his characteristic humility and grace. Widely read sports journalist Vijay Lokapally goes on to record happier times on the journey of Virat’s rapid rise to international stardom, an account punctuated by little-known stories by his fellow players, coaches and intimates. At 28, he has already been the recipient of countless accolades — not the least of them being the Arjuna Award and the title of BCCI’s ‘International Cricketer of the Year’ for the 2011-12 and 2014-15 seasons. He was the ICC’s ‘ODI Player of the Year’ as early as in 2012. On a more commercial note, British journal SportsPro pronounced him the ‘second-most marketable athlete in the world’ just two years later. But for the Run Machine, it’s not about the money or fame or the roar of the crowds or that women of all ages vie for the wide-eyed attention of his extraordinary gaze. Few incidences have been reported of his open hearted altruism, his numerous charities for under-privileged children and his sheer pluck when the odds are against him. But what has not escaped the public eye is how this wizard of the willow and wicket wears his heavy mantle with such insouciant ease.

    It was as if her mother knew that Risé was not meant to be written into the family’s tragedies. In fact, from a young age Risé found a way to rise above the chaos, abuse, and molestation of her childhood, eventually escaping the weight of her family, and learning to love and believe in herself. This story is a testament to her deep determination and innate courage.

    and Sniper with the River Raiders of the Mekong. His stories include the one which garnered him a recommendation for the Medal of Honor.

    Originally published in France in 1952, during the years of Prince Youssoupoff's exile from Russia, Lost Splendor has all the excitement of a thriller. Born to great riches, lord of vast feudal estates and many palaces, Felix Youssoupoff led the life of a grand seigneur in the days before the Russian Revolution. Married to the niece of Czar Nicholas II, he could observe at close range the rampant corruption and intrigues of the imperial court, which culminated in the rise to power of the sinister monk Rasputin. Finally, impelled by patriotism and his love for the Romanoff dynasty, which he felt was in danger of destroying itself and Russia, he killed Rasputin in 1916 with the help of the Grand Duke Dimitri and others. More than any other single event, this deed helped to bring about the cataclysmic upheaval that ended in the advent of the Soviet regime.~The author describes the luxury and glamour of his upbringing, fantastic episodes at nightclubs and with the gypsies in St. Petersburg, grand tours of Europe, dabbling in spiritualism and occultism, and an occasional conscience-stricken attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor.~Prince Youssoupoff was an aristocrat of character. When the moment for action came, when the monk's evil influence over the czar and czarina became unbearable, he and his friends decided that they must get rid of the monster. He tells how Rasputin courted him and tried to hypnotize him, and how finally they decoyed him to the basement of the prince's palace. Prince Youssoupoff...is perfectly objective, remarkably modern and as accurate as human fallibility allows. His book is therefore readable, of historical value and intimately tragic. It is as if Count Fersen had written a detailed account of the last years of Marie Antoinette. --Harold Nicholson, on the first English edition, 1955 By Prince Felix Youssoupoff. Hardcover, 5.25 x 8.25 in./300 pgs / 0 color 14 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20143

    A privileged, happy Victorian childhood was touched by tragedy not only with the early deaths of her youngest brother and sister but also that of her young mother. Close to Queen Victoria, Ella spent some of her happiest times in Britain. At 20, however, much against the wishes of her grandmother, who despised everything Russian, Ella became engaged to Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, the authoritarian younger brother of Tsar Alexander III. It was at their wedding that her younger sister, Alix, formed a love match with the future Tsar Nicholas II; an event which not only sealed the fate of both sisters, but that of the Imperial House of Romanov. But for these two marriages, the history of Russia might have been very different. With the assassination of her husband, Ella renounced society and, against considerable opposition, founded the first religious Order of its kind in Russia, working for the poor and destitute of Moscow. Though loved for her charitable works and pionerering achievements, Ella, like Nicholas, Alexandra, and fourteen members of their family, met a brutal death at the hands of the Bolsheviks. At the height of the Russian Revolution, she was taken captive to Siberia where, having been clubbed with rifle butts, she was hurled alive into a disused mineshaft and left to die of her injuries. Later retrieved, her incorrupt body was eventually laid to rest on the Mount of Olives. She was subsequently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as the Holy Imperial Martyr Saint Elisabeth Romanova.