In The Death of Trotsky, Cecelia Holland brings this fated and fatal day to life, from its quotidian beginnings to its dramatic close. Between Trotsky’s waking and his final rest, she probes the outer-workings and inner thoughts of those who were with him till the end, illuminating a man who exited life as he lived it: defiantly. Cecelia Holland, author of more than 30 books and articles, lives in northern California with her family.Cover Design by Adil Dara.

    Schultz was a noted author, explorer, Glacier National Park guide, fur trader and historian of the Blackfoot Indians. While operating a fur trading post at Carroll, Montana and living amongst the Pikuni tribe during the period 1880-82, he was given the name "Apikuni" by the Pikuni chief, Running Crane. Schultz is most noted for his prolific stories about Blackfoot life and his contributions to the naming of prominent features in Glacier National Park. Story of a maiden warrior of the Blackfoot tribe. The story of an Indian girl who became the acknowledged leader of her tribe. As a little girl Otaki asked for bows and arrows rather than for dolls. Her father, who loved her dearly, indulged her in her wishes. and taught her to hunt like a boy. When both father and mother were taken by death, she again turned back to the hunting, providing the game for her brothers and sisters and following the war path to avenge her father's death. Disapproval of her course finally gives way and she is highly honored by her tribe, and like the young men who prove themselves worthy, she is given a warrior's name. Running Eagle. This book originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1919 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.

     “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.” —Hernán CortésIt was a moment unique in human history, the face-to-face meeting between two men from civilizations a world apart. Only one would survive the encounter. In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived on the shores of Mexico with a roughshod crew of adventurers and the intent to expand the Spanish empire. Along the way, this brash and roguish conquistador schemed to convert the native inhabitants to Catholicism and carry off a fortune in gold. That he saw nothing paradoxical in his intentions is one of the most remarkable—and tragic—aspects of this unforgettable story of conquest.In Tenochtitlán, the famed City of Dreams, Cortés met his Aztec counterpart, Montezuma: king, divinity, ruler of fifteen million people, and commander of the most powerful military machine in the Americas. Yet in less than two years, Cortés defeated the entire Aztec nation in one of the most astonishing military campaigns ever waged. Sometimes outnumbered in battle thousands-to-one, Cortés repeatedly beat seemingly impossible odds. Buddy Levy meticulously researches the mix of cunning, courage, brutality, superstition, and finally disease that enabled Cortés and his men to survive.Conquistador is the story of a lost kingdom—a complex and sophisticated civilization where floating gardens, immense wealth, and reverence for art stood side by side with bloodstained temples and gruesome rites of human sacrifice. It’s the story of Montezuma—proud, spiritual, enigmatic, and doomed to misunderstand the stranger he thought a god. Epic in scope, as entertaining as it is enlightening, Conquistador is history at its most riveting.From the Hardcover edition.

    This remarkable book is his odyssey, first written in 1542 as an official report to the king of Spain under the title La Relacion.

    Conquest is an essential work of history from one of our most gifted historians.

    Lavishly illustrated with more than seventy-five boxes andcollages, as well as images of the fascinating source material that the artistcollected to create his exquisitely crafted worlds, it communicates to thereader the sense of surprise and delight that one experiences on viewingthe actual boxes with their toys, stuffed birds, maps, clay pipes, marbles,shells, and other paraphernalia of daily life.The book’s essays bring together the expertise of Lynda Roscoe Hartigan,former director of the Joseph Cornell Study Center; the compelling commentaryof Walter Hopps, art dealer, museum curator and director, and theartist’s personal friend; the wide-ranging scholarship of Richard Vine; andthe sensitivity of Robert Lehrman, a leading Cornell collector whose firsthandexperience lends this publication its distinctive intimacy. Among thetopics explored are the role of dualities in the artistic process, the dominantthemes of Cornell’s oeuvre, and the importance of his Christian Science faith.

     Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody, it’s a manual.   In this mind-bending, prismatic novel, worlds collide, time coils, traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, utopias, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Álvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short, powerful punch of a novel. Game, set, match.

    Written by a noted magazine writer who knew and interviewed Bolaño.How to know the man behind works of fiction so prone to extravagance? In the first biography of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, journalist Mónica Maristain tracks Bolaño from his childhood in Chile to his youth in Mexico and his early infatuation with literature, to his beginnings as a poet, and to the stardom that came with the publication of the novels The Savage Detectives and 2666.Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations is assembled from a series of rich interviews with the people who knew Bolaño best: we meet Bolaño’s first publisher, who printed 225 copies of his first book of poetry; glimpse the young author through interviews with his parents and an array of childhood friends, who watched a precocious young man turn into an obsessive writer who barely left the house; and witness the birth of Bolaño’s famed Infrarealist literary movement. The book also sheds new light on aspects of Bolaño’s life that have long been shrouded in mystery: for the first time, we learn the details of Bolaño’s fatal illness and the drama of his final days.Throughout the book, Maristain present an image far removed from the stereotypes that have been created over the years to introduce a writer whose works grabbed readers worldwide. Maristain writes as a journalist and admirer, impressed with the power of Bolaño’s prose and the cool irony with which he faced the literary world.

    Tecpatl, the Chief Warlord and a very content man, still married to the Anasazi woman his peers view as a barbarian, tries to obey the old Emperor's edicts. Yet, when Atolli, his elder son and a very promising but hotheaded youth, gets caught in the political turmoil, everything changes. Tecpatl isforced to choose between his duty and his family, while his wife takes her own non-traditional paths to deal with the crisis.

    Carrasco details the dynamics of two important cultures--the Aztec and the Maya--and discusses the impact of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of native traditions into the post-Columbian and contemporary eras. Integrating recent archaeological discoveries in Mexico City, he brings about a comprehensive understanding of ritual human sacrifice, a subject often ignored in religious studies.

    Succinct yet comprehensive, A Short History of Film provides an accessible overview of the major movements, directors, studios, and genres from the 1880s to the present. More than 250 rare stills and illustrations accompany the text, bringing readers face to face with many of the key players and films that have marked the industry.Beginning with precursors of what we call moving pictures, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster lead a fast-paced tour through the invention of the kinetoscope, the introduction of sound and color between the two world wars, and ultimately the computer generated imagery of the present day. They detail significant periods in world cinema, including the early major industries in Europe, the dominance of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the French New Wave of the 1960s. Special attention is also given to small independent efforts in developing nations and the corresponding more personal independent film movement that briefly flourished in the United States, the significant filmmakers of all nations, censorship and regulation and how they have affected production everywhere, and a wide range of studios and genres. Along the way, the authors take great care to incorporate the stories of women and other minority filmmakers who have often been overlooked in other texts.Compact and easily readable, this is the best one-stop source for the history of world film available to students, teachers, and general audiences alike.

    That story—and the story of what happened afterwards—has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars.For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists alike.

    Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett--this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as "the phonetic rendering of a living pulse."

    He is the author of numerous books on Latin American history and is currently the executive secretary of the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians.Oscar Loyola-Vega is a professor of history at the University of Havana.

    Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.