Winner of the Overseas Press Club of Americas Cornelius Ryan Award * Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in NonfictionNew York Times Book Review Notable Book * Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive"A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her countrys violent role in the world." -- Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book ReviewIn the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country -- and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, "a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship."Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on Americas place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation -- a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374280048
|
Paperback
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen
By Colley, Linda
A groundbreaking work that retells modern history through the rise and spread of written constitutions -- some enlightened, many oppressive -- to every corner of the globe. Filling a crucial void in our understanding of world history, Linda Colley reconfigures the rise of the modern world over three centuries through the advent of written constitutions. Her absorbing work challenges accepted narratives, focusing on rulers like Catherine the Great, who wrote her enlightened Nakaz years before the French Revolution; African visionaries like Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton; and Tunisias's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din, who championed constitutional reform in the Muslim world. Demonstrating how constitutions repeatedly evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they were used to free, but also exclude, people (especially women and indigenous populations) , this handsomely illustrated history -- with its pageant of powerful monarchs, visionary lawmakers, and insurrectionist rebels -- evokes The Silk Roads in its range and ambition.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780871403162
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Hardcover
West Like Lightning
By Defelice, Jim
"A GROUNDBREAKING WORK," hails True West: The #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of American Sniper brings the Pony Express to life in this rich and rollicking new history"One can hear horse hooves pounding across the prairie and sense the fear and courage and excitement." - Tom Clavin, author of Dodge CityOn the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation's two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express. Daring young men with colorful names like "Bronco Charlie" and "Sawed-Off Jim" galloped at speed over a vast and unforgiving landscape, etching an irresistible tale that passed into myth almost instantly. Equally an improbable success and a business disaster, the Pony Express came and went in just eighteen months, but not before uniting and captivating a nation on the brink of being torn apart. Jim DeFelice's brilliantly entertaining West Like Lightning is the first major history of the Pony Express to put its birth, life, and legacy into the full context of the American story.The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company - or "Pony Express," as it came to be known - was part of a plan by William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell to create the next American Express, a transportation and financial juggernaut that already dominated commerce back east. All that stood in their way were almost two thousand miles of uninhabited desert, ice-capped mountains, oceanic plains roamed by Indian tribes, whitewater-choked rivers, and harsh, unsettled wilderness.The Pony used a relay system of courageous horseback riders to ferry mail halfway across a continent in just ten days. The challenges the riders faced were enormous, yet the Pony Express succeeded, delivering thousands of letters at record speed. The service instantly became the most direct means of communication between the eastern United States and its far western territories, helping to firmly connect them to the Union.Populated with cast of characters including Abraham Lincoln (news of whose electoral victory the Express delivered to California) , Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody (who fed the legend of the Express in his Wild West Show) , and Mark Twain (who celebrated the riders in Roughing It) , West Like Lightning masterfully traces the development of the Pony Express and follows it from its start in St. Joseph, Missouri - the edge of the civilized world - west to Sacramento, the capital of California, then booming from the gold rush. Jim DeFelice, who traveled the Pony's route in his research, plumbs the legends, myths, and surprising truth of the service, exploring its lasting relevance today as a symbol of American enterprise, audacity, and daring.
WILLIAM MORROW
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9780062496768
|
Hardcover
The American War in Afghanistan
By Malkasian, Carter
The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners.The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades.In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serveas the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Oxford University Press; 1st edition
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9780197550779
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1st Edition
A Secret Sisterhood
By Midorikawa, Emily
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Bronte; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge. Through letters and diaries that have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these forgotten stories of female friendships. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always - until now - tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
9780544883734
|
Hardcover
Paper
By Kurlansky, Mark
From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today's world.Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history's greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Mo zhux yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) -- which doesn't include editions in 37 foreign languages and in braille -- to appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history's most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper.Now, amid discussion of "going paperless" -- and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant -- we've come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of "true knowledge," replacing the need to exercise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper's evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times. 24 illustrations
W W Norton, 2016.
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9780393239614
|
Print book
The Medici
By Strathern, Paul
A vivid, dramatic, and authoritative account of perhaps the most influential family in Italian history: the Medici.A dazzling history of the modest family that rose to become one of the most powerful in Europe, The Medici is a remarkably modern story of power, money, and ambition. Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Strathern also follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello; as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola; and the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence, including the two Medici popes and Catherine de' Mdicis, who became Queen of France and played a major role in that country through three turbulent reigns. 16 pages of color illustrations
Pegasus Books, 2016.
|
9781605989662
|
Print book
Castle of the Eagles
By Felton, Mark
Vincigliata Castle, a menacing medieval fortress set in the beautiful Tuscan hills, has become a very special prisoner of war camp on Benito Mussolini's personal order. Within are some of the most senior officers of the Allied army, guarded by almost two hundred Italian soldiers and a vicious fascist commando who answers directly to "Il Duce" Mussolini himself. Their unbelievable escape, told by Mark Felton in Castle of the Eagles, is a little-known marvel of World War II. By March 1943, the plan is ready: this extraordinary assemblage of middle-aged POWs has crafted civilian clothes, forged identity papers, gathered rations, and even constructed dummies to place in their beds, all in preparation for the moment they step into the tunnel they have been digging for six months.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250095855
|
Hardcover
Kovels' Antiques and Collectibles Price Guide 2022
By Kovel, Terry
The Kovels are the most trusted source for both the casual and expert collector. With 11,500 actual prices and 3,000 full-color photographs, the guide also features exceptionally well-organized, wide-ranging, and up-to-the-minute information, and includes more tips, marks, logos, and photographs than any other competitive title. Kovels' is the only guide with prices based on actual sales from the previous calendar year, never estimates. Unlike other guides, which focus almost exclusively on English or high-priced items, Kovels' covers all American and international items and includes reasonably-priced goods. The book is organized by categories most sought-after by collectors, including depression glass, dolls, jewelry, furniture, porcelain, and sports memorabilia.
Black Dog & Leventhal
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9780762473861
|
Paperback
The Liberation of Paris
By Smith, Jean Edward
Prize-winning and bestselling historian Jean Edward Smith tells the dramatic story of the liberation of Paris during World War II - a triumph that was achieved through the remarkable efforts of Americans, French, and Germans, all racing to save the city from destruction.Following their breakout from Normandy in late June 1944, the Allies swept across northern France in pursuit of the German army. The Allies intended to bypass Paris and cross the Rhine into Germany, ending the war before winter set in. But as they advanced, local forces in Paris began their own liberation, defying the occupying German troops. Charles de Gaulle, the leading figure of the Free French government, urged General Dwight Eisenhower to divert forces to liberate Paris. Eisenhower's most senior staff recommended otherwise, but Ike wanted to help position de Gaulle to lead France after the war. And both men were concerned about partisan conflict in Paris that could leave the communists in control of the city and the national government, perhaps even causing a bloodbath like the Paris Commune. Neither man knew that the German commandant, Dietrich von Choltitz, convinced that the war was lost, dissembled and schemed to surrender the city to the Allies intact, defying Hitler's orders to leave it a burning ruin. In The Liberation of Paris, Jean Edward Smith puts this dramatic event in context, showing how the decision to free the city came at a heavy price: it slowed the Allied momentum and allowed the Germans to regroup. After the war German generals argued that Eisenhower's decision to enter Paris prolonged the war for another six months. Was Paris worth this price? Smith answers this question in his superb, dramatic history of one of the great events of World War II - published seventy-five years after the liberation.
Notes on a Foreign Country
By Hansen, Suzy
Winner of the Overseas Press Club of Americas Cornelius Ryan Award * Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in NonfictionNew York Times Book Review Notable Book * Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive"A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her countrys violent role in the world." -- Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book ReviewIn the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country -- and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, "a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship."Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on Americas place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation -- a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen
By Colley, Linda
A groundbreaking work that retells modern history through the rise and spread of written constitutions -- some enlightened, many oppressive -- to every corner of the globe. Filling a crucial void in our understanding of world history, Linda Colley reconfigures the rise of the modern world over three centuries through the advent of written constitutions. Her absorbing work challenges accepted narratives, focusing on rulers like Catherine the Great, who wrote her enlightened Nakaz years before the French Revolution; African visionaries like Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton; and Tunisias's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din, who championed constitutional reform in the Muslim world. Demonstrating how constitutions repeatedly evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they were used to free, but also exclude, people (especially women and indigenous populations) , this handsomely illustrated history -- with its pageant of powerful monarchs, visionary lawmakers, and insurrectionist rebels -- evokes The Silk Roads in its range and ambition.
West Like Lightning
By Defelice, Jim
"A GROUNDBREAKING WORK," hails True West: The #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of American Sniper brings the Pony Express to life in this rich and rollicking new history"One can hear horse hooves pounding across the prairie and sense the fear and courage and excitement." - Tom Clavin, author of Dodge CityOn the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation's two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express. Daring young men with colorful names like "Bronco Charlie" and "Sawed-Off Jim" galloped at speed over a vast and unforgiving landscape, etching an irresistible tale that passed into myth almost instantly. Equally an improbable success and a business disaster, the Pony Express came and went in just eighteen months, but not before uniting and captivating a nation on the brink of being torn apart. Jim DeFelice's brilliantly entertaining West Like Lightning is the first major history of the Pony Express to put its birth, life, and legacy into the full context of the American story.The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company - or "Pony Express," as it came to be known - was part of a plan by William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell to create the next American Express, a transportation and financial juggernaut that already dominated commerce back east. All that stood in their way were almost two thousand miles of uninhabited desert, ice-capped mountains, oceanic plains roamed by Indian tribes, whitewater-choked rivers, and harsh, unsettled wilderness.The Pony used a relay system of courageous horseback riders to ferry mail halfway across a continent in just ten days. The challenges the riders faced were enormous, yet the Pony Express succeeded, delivering thousands of letters at record speed. The service instantly became the most direct means of communication between the eastern United States and its far western territories, helping to firmly connect them to the Union.Populated with cast of characters including Abraham Lincoln (news of whose electoral victory the Express delivered to California) , Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody (who fed the legend of the Express in his Wild West Show) , and Mark Twain (who celebrated the riders in Roughing It) , West Like Lightning masterfully traces the development of the Pony Express and follows it from its start in St. Joseph, Missouri - the edge of the civilized world - west to Sacramento, the capital of California, then booming from the gold rush. Jim DeFelice, who traveled the Pony's route in his research, plumbs the legends, myths, and surprising truth of the service, exploring its lasting relevance today as a symbol of American enterprise, audacity, and daring.
The American War in Afghanistan
By Malkasian, Carter
The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners.The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades.In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serveas the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
A Secret Sisterhood
By Midorikawa, Emily
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Bronte; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge. Through letters and diaries that have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these forgotten stories of female friendships. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always - until now - tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.
Paper
By Kurlansky, Mark
From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today's world.Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history's greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Mo zhux yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) -- which doesn't include editions in 37 foreign languages and in braille -- to appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history's most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper.Now, amid discussion of "going paperless" -- and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant -- we've come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of "true knowledge," replacing the need to exercise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper's evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times. 24 illustrations
The Medici
By Strathern, Paul
A vivid, dramatic, and authoritative account of perhaps the most influential family in Italian history: the Medici.A dazzling history of the modest family that rose to become one of the most powerful in Europe, The Medici is a remarkably modern story of power, money, and ambition. Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Strathern also follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello; as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola; and the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence, including the two Medici popes and Catherine de' Mdicis, who became Queen of France and played a major role in that country through three turbulent reigns. 16 pages of color illustrations
Castle of the Eagles
By Felton, Mark
Vincigliata Castle, a menacing medieval fortress set in the beautiful Tuscan hills, has become a very special prisoner of war camp on Benito Mussolini's personal order. Within are some of the most senior officers of the Allied army, guarded by almost two hundred Italian soldiers and a vicious fascist commando who answers directly to "Il Duce" Mussolini himself. Their unbelievable escape, told by Mark Felton in Castle of the Eagles, is a little-known marvel of World War II. By March 1943, the plan is ready: this extraordinary assemblage of middle-aged POWs has crafted civilian clothes, forged identity papers, gathered rations, and even constructed dummies to place in their beds, all in preparation for the moment they step into the tunnel they have been digging for six months.
Kovels' Antiques and Collectibles Price Guide 2022
By Kovel, Terry
The Kovels are the most trusted source for both the casual and expert collector. With 11,500 actual prices and 3,000 full-color photographs, the guide also features exceptionally well-organized, wide-ranging, and up-to-the-minute information, and includes more tips, marks, logos, and photographs than any other competitive title. Kovels' is the only guide with prices based on actual sales from the previous calendar year, never estimates. Unlike other guides, which focus almost exclusively on English or high-priced items, Kovels' covers all American and international items and includes reasonably-priced goods. The book is organized by categories most sought-after by collectors, including depression glass, dolls, jewelry, furniture, porcelain, and sports memorabilia.
The Liberation of Paris
By Smith, Jean Edward
Prize-winning and bestselling historian Jean Edward Smith tells the dramatic story of the liberation of Paris during World War II - a triumph that was achieved through the remarkable efforts of Americans, French, and Germans, all racing to save the city from destruction.Following their breakout from Normandy in late June 1944, the Allies swept across northern France in pursuit of the German army. The Allies intended to bypass Paris and cross the Rhine into Germany, ending the war before winter set in. But as they advanced, local forces in Paris began their own liberation, defying the occupying German troops. Charles de Gaulle, the leading figure of the Free French government, urged General Dwight Eisenhower to divert forces to liberate Paris. Eisenhower's most senior staff recommended otherwise, but Ike wanted to help position de Gaulle to lead France after the war. And both men were concerned about partisan conflict in Paris that could leave the communists in control of the city and the national government, perhaps even causing a bloodbath like the Paris Commune. Neither man knew that the German commandant, Dietrich von Choltitz, convinced that the war was lost, dissembled and schemed to surrender the city to the Allies intact, defying Hitler's orders to leave it a burning ruin. In The Liberation of Paris, Jean Edward Smith puts this dramatic event in context, showing how the decision to free the city came at a heavy price: it slowed the Allied momentum and allowed the Germans to regroup. After the war German generals argued that Eisenhower's decision to enter Paris prolonged the war for another six months. Was Paris worth this price? Smith answers this question in his superb, dramatic history of one of the great events of World War II - published seventy-five years after the liberation.