South Sea Tales

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Gulliver's Travels

The Catcher in the Rye

The Brothers Karamazov Penguin Classics

Anna Karenina

The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

Models Attract Women Through Honesty

Cicero The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

Stalin as Warlord

Joanna Potts, Simon Berthon - Warlords

The Great Courses - Espionage and Covert Operations - A Global History

Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World - David L. Roll

David McCullough - Truman

The Watchdog How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two

The Watchdog How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two

Alien Oceans The Search for Life in the Depths of Space

The Book on Rental Property Investing

Dear Shareholder: The best executive letters from Warren Buffett, Prem Watsa and other great CEOs

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Screw It, Lets Do It - Lessons in Life and Business (Richard Branson)

Peter Diamandis - Bold

Business Stripped Bare Richard Branson

The Virgin Way - Richard Branson

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

About  national and international power in the "modern" or Post Renaissance  period. Explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the 5  centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in W. Europe.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail - Ray Dalio

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, in an expanded P.S. edition

Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote  of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel  through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.

This  P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book,  including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery  novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the  novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will  Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female  Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle  Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other  characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery  while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as  destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. Uncle Tom's Cabin was  the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling  book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping  fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was  published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States;  one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was  published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact  attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when  Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln  declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The  quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has  been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an  anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be  explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals  ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."

The awesome conclusion to The Lord of the Rings—the greatest fantasy epic of all time—which began in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

While the evil might of the Dark Lord Sauron swarms out to conquer all  Middle-earth, Frodo and Sam struggle deep into Mordor, seat of Sauron’s  power. To defeat the Dark Lord, the One Ring, ruler of the accursed  Rings of Power, must be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. But the  way is impossibly hard, and Frodo is weakening. Weighed down by the  compulsion of the Ring, he begins finally to despair.

Inspired by The Hobbit and begun in 1937, The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy that J.R.R. Tolkien created to provide "the necessary  background of history for Elvish tongues". From these academic  aspirations was born one of the most popular and imaginative works in  English literature.

The Fellowship of the Ring,  the first volume in the trilogy, tells of the fateful power of the One  Ring. It begins a magnificent tale of adventure that will plunge the  members of the Fellowship of the Ring into a perilous quest and set the  stage for the ultimate clash between the powers of good and evil.

In  this splendid, unabridged audio production of Tolkien's great work, all  the inhabitants of a magical universe – hobbits, elves, and wizards –  step colorfully into life. Rob Inglis' narration has been praised as a  masterpiece of audio.

The Two Towers is the second volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic saga, The Lord of the Rings.

The  Fellowship has been forced to split up. Frodo and Sam must continue  alone towards Mount Doom, where the One Ring must be destroyed.  Meanwhile, at Helm’s Deep and Isengard, the first great battles of the  War of the Ring take shape.

In this splendid,  unabridged audio production of Tolkien’s great work, all the inhabitants  of a magical universe - hobbits, elves, and wizards - spring to life.  Rob Inglis’ narration has been praised as a masterpiece of audio.

The journey through Middle-earth begins here with J.R.R. Tolkien's classic prelude to his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“A  glorious account of a magnificent adventure, filled with suspense and  seasoned with a quiet humor that is irresistible... All those, young or  old, who love a fine adventurous tale, beautifully told, will take The Hobbit to their hearts.”—The New York Times Book Review

"In  a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." So begins one of the most  beloved and delightful tales in the English language—Tolkien's prelude  to The Lord of the Rings. Set in the imaginary world of Middle-earth, at once a classic myth and a modern fairy tale, The Hobbit is one of literature's most enduring and well-loved novels.

Bilbo  Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely  traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is  disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his  doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a  plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a  large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest,  unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter  both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.

Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked  with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the  “spice” melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing  consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize  worth killing for....

When House Atreides is betrayed, the  destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a  destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into  the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition  humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream. 

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis  of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

Named 2006 Best Book of the Year by Amazon.com

“An authoritative and exciting portrait not only of Caesar but of the complex society in which he lived.”—Steven Coates, New York Times Book Review

“The best introduction to Caesar and his world that is currently available.”—Karl Galinsky, Bookforum

Tracing the extraordinary trajectory of the great Roman emperor’s life,  Goldsworthy covers not only the great Roman emperor’s accomplishments  as charismatic orator, conquering general, and powerful dictator but  also lesser-known chapters during which he was high priest of an exotic  cult, captive of pirates, seducer not only of Cleopatra but also of the  wives of his two main political rivals, and rebel condemned by his own  country. Ultimately, Goldsworthy realizes the full complexity of  Caesar’s character and shows why his political and military leadership  continues to resonate some two thousand years later. In the introduction  to his biography of the great Roman emperor, Adrian Goldsworthy writes,  “Caesar was at times many things, including a fugitive, prisoner,  rising politician, army leader, legal advocate, rebel, dictator . . . as  well as husband, father, lover and adulterer.” In this landmark  biography, Goldsworthy examines Caesar as military leader, all of these  roles and places his subject firmly within the context of Roman society  in the first century B.C.

A fascinating, comprehensive biography of the cunning Roman conqueror Julius Caesar.

More  than two thousand years after his death, Julius Caesar remains one of  the great figures of history. He shaped Rome for generations, and his  name became a synonym for “emperor”—not only in Rome but as far away as  Germany and Russia. He is best known as the general who defeated the  Gauls and doubled the size of Rome’s territories. But, as Philip Freeman  describes in this fascinating new biography, Caesar was also a  brilliant orator, an accomplished writer, a skilled politician, and much  more.

Julius Caesar was a complex man, both hero and villain.  He possessed great courage, ambition, honor, and vanity. Born into a  noble family that had long been in decline, he advanced his career  cunningly, beginning as a priest and eventually becoming Rome’s leading  general. He made alliances with his rivals and then discarded them when  it suited him. He was a spokesman for the ordinary people of Rome, who  rallied around him time and again, but he profited enormously from his  conquests and lived opulently. Eventually he was murdered in one of the  most famous assassinations in history.

Caesar’s contemporaries  included some of Rome’s most famous figures, from the generals Marius,  Sulla, and Pompey to the orator and legislator Cicero as well as the  young politicians Mark Antony and Octavius (later Caesar Augustus).  Caesar’s legendary romance with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra still  fascinates us today.

In this splendid biography, Freeman  presents Caesar in all his dimensions and contradictions. With  remarkable clarity and brevity, Freeman shows how Caesar dominated a  newly powerful Rome and shaped its destiny. This book will captivate  readers discovering Caesar and ancient Rome for the first time as well  as those who have a deep interest in the classical world.

From classicist James Romm comes a “striking…fascinating” (Booklist)  deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to  Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes - and the saga of the  greatest military corps of the time, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit  composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.

The story of  the Sacred Band, an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers,  highlights a chaotic era of ancient Greek history, four decades marked  by battles, ideological disputes, and the rise of vicious strongmen. At  stake was freedom, democracy, and the fate of Thebes, at this time the  leading power of the Greek world.

The tale begins in  379 BC, with a group of Theban patriots sneaking into occupied Thebes.  Disguised in women’s clothing, they cut down the agents of Sparta, the  state that had cowed much of Greece with its military might. To counter  the Spartans, this group of patriots would form the Sacred Band, a corps  whose history plays out against a backdrop of Theban democracy, of  desperate power struggles between leading city-states, and the new  prominence of eros, sexual love, in Greek public life.

After  four decades without a defeat, the Sacred Band was annihilated by the  forces of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander in the Battle of  Chaeronea - extinguishing Greek liberty for two thousand years. Buried  on the battlefield where they fell, they were rediscovered in 1880 -  some skeletons still in pairs, with arms linked together.

From  violent combat in city streets to massive clashes on open ground, from  ruthless tyrants to bold women who held their era in thrall, The Sacred Band recounts “in fluent, accessible prose” (The Wall Street Journal) the twists and turns of a crucial historical moment: the end of the treasured freedom of ancient Greece.

21st Century Monetary Policy takes readers inside the Federal Reserve, explaining what it does and why.

In  response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve deployed an  extraordinary range of policy tools that helped prevent the collapse of  the financial system and the U.S. economy. Chair Jerome Powell and his  colleagues lent directly to U.S. businesses, purchased trillions of  dollars of government securities, pumped dollars into the international  financial system, and crafted a new framework for monetary policy that  emphasized job creation.

These strategies would have  astonished Powell’s late-20th-century predecessors, from William  McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan, and the advent of these tools raises  new questions about the future landscape of economic policy.

In 21st Century Monetary Policy,  Ben S. Bernanke―former chair of the Federal Reserve and one of the  world’s leading economists―explains the Fed’s evolution and speculates  on its future. Taking a fresh look at the bank’s policymaking over the  past seventy years, including his own time as chair, Bernanke shows how  changes in the economy have driven the Fed’s innovations. He also lays  out new challenges confronting the Fed, including the return of  inflation, cryptocurrencies, increased risks of financial instability,  and threats to its independence.

Beyond explaining  the central bank’s new policymaking tools, Bernanke also captures the  drama of moments when so much hung on the Fed’s decisions, as well as  the personalities and philosophies of those who led the institution.

Many appreciate Richard P. Feynman's contributions to  twentieth-century physics, but few realize how engaged he was with the  world around him -- how deeply and thoughtfully he considered the  religious, political, and social issues of his day. Now, a wonderful  book -- based on a previously unpublished, three-part public lecture he  gave at the University of Washington in 1963 -- shows us this other side  of Feynman, as he expounds on the inherent conflict between science and  religion, people's distrust of politicians, and our universal  fascination with flying saucers, faith healing, and mental telepathy.  Here we see Feynman in top form: nearly bursting into a Navajo war  chant, then pressing for an overhaul of the English language (if you  want to know why Johnny can't read, just look at the spelling of  "friend"); and, finally, ruminating on the death of his first wife from  tuberculosis. This is quintessential Feynman -- reflective, amusing, and  ever enlightening.

One  of the most famous science books of our time, the phenomenal national  bestseller that "buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes  you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest).

Richard  P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous  adventures. In this lively work that “can shatter the stereotype of the  stuffy scientist” (Detroit Free Press),  Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with  Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply  held nuclear secrets―and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature. In his  stories, Feynman’s life shines through in all its eccentric glory―a  combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and  raging chutzpah.

Included for this edition is a new introduction by Bill Gates.

Alexander the Great, perhaps the most commanding leader in  history, united his empire and his army by the titanic force of his  will. His death at the age of thirty-two spelled the end of that unity.

The  story of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire is known to many  readers, but the dramatic and consequential saga of the empire’s  collapse remains virtually untold. It is a tale of loss that begins with  the greatest loss of all, the death of the Macedonian king who had held  the empire together.

With his demise, it was as if the sun had  disappeared from the solar system, as if planets and moons began to spin  crazily in new directions, crashing into one another with unimaginable  force.

Alexander bequeathed his power, legend has it, “to the  strongest,” leaving behind a mentally damaged half brother and a  posthumously born son as his only heirs. In a strange compromise, both figures—Philip III and Alexander IV—were elevated to the kingship,  quickly becoming prizes, pawns, fought over by a half-dozen Macedonian  generals. Each successor could confer legitimacy on whichever general  controlled him.

At the book’s center is the monarch’s most  vigorous defender; Alexander’s former Greek secretary, now transformed  into a general himself. He was a man both fascinating and entertaining, a  man full of tricks and connivances, like the enthroned ghost of  Alexander that gives the book its title, and becomes the determining  factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family.

James  Romm, brilliant classicist and storyteller, tells the galvanizing saga  of the men who followed Alexander and found themselves incapable of  preserving his empire. The result was the undoing of a world, formerly  united in a single empire, now ripped apart into a nightmare of warring  nation-states struggling for domination, the template of our own times.

The  Spartans were a society of warrior-heroes who were the living exemplars  of such core values as duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, and extreme  toughness. This book, written by one of the world’s leading experts on  Sparta, traces the rise and fall of Spartan society and explores the  tremendous influence the Spartans had on their world and even on ours.  Paul Cartledge brings to life figures like legendary founding father  Lycurgus and King Leonidas, who embodied the heroism so closely  identified with this unique culture, and he shows how Spartan women  enjoyed an unusually dominant and powerful role in this hyper-masculine  society. Based firmly on original sources, The Spartans is the definitive book about one of the most fascinating cultures of ancient Greece.

The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book’s many stories―some funny, others intensely moving―display  Richard P. Feynman’s unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled  ability to recount important moments from his life.

Here  we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s  irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked  on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating  narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger’s  explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the  disaster’s cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of  rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

“Plutarch  regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material  interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter,  in government as in life.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Pompey,  Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across  thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended  the Roman republic, their lives pose a question that haunts us still:  how to safeguard a republic from the flaws of its leaders.

This  reader’s edition of Plutarch delivers a fresh translation of notable  clarity, explanatory notes, and ample historical context in the Preface  and Introduction.

Timeless wisdom on death and dying from the celebrated Stoic philosopher Seneca

"It  takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic  philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death  always," and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and  again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable  meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker and dazzling writer who speaks with a  startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under  certain conditions, to seek it out.

Seneca believed that life is  only a journey toward death and that one must rehearse for death  throughout life. Here, he tells us how to practice for death, how to die  well, and how to understand the role of a good death in a good life. He  stresses the universality of death, its importance as life's final rite  of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or  political oppression.

Featuring beautifully rendered new translations, How to Die also includes an enlightening introduction, notes, the original Latin  texts, and an epilogue presenting Tacitus's description of Seneca's grim  suicide.

An  introduction to modern physics and to Richard Feynman at his witty and  enthusiastic best, discussing gravitation, irreversibility, symmetry,  and the nature of scientific discovery.

Richard Feynman  was one of the most famous and important physicists of the second half  of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965,  celebrated for his spirited and engaging lectures, and briefly a star on  the evening news for his presence on the commission investigating the  explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Feynman is best known for his  contributions to the field of quantum electrodynamics. The Character of Physical Law,  drawn from Feynman's famous 1964 series of Messenger Lectures at  Cornell, offers an introduction to modern physics—and to Feynman at his  witty and enthusiastic best.

In this classic book  (originally published in 1967), Feynman offers an overview of selected  physical laws and gathers their common features, arguing that the  importance of a physical law is not “how clever we are to have found it  out” but “how clever nature is to pay attention to it.” He discusses  such topics as the interaction of mathematics and physics, the principle  of conservation, the puzzle of symmetry, and the process of scientific  discovery. A foreword by 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek  updates some of Feynman's observations—noting, however, “the need for  these particular updates enhances rather than detracts from the book.”  In The Character of Physical Law, Feynman chose to grapple with issues at the forefront of physics that seemed unresolved, important, and approachable.

Based  on an extraordinary collaboration between Steve Forbes, chairman, CEO,  and editor in chief of Forbes Media, and classics professor John Prevas,  Power Ambition Glory provides intriguing comparisons between six great leaders of the ancient world and contemporary business leaders.

•  Great leaders not only have vision but know how to build structures to  effect it. Cyrus the Great did so in creating an empire based on  tolerance and inclusion, an approach highly unusual for his or any age.  Jack Welch and John Chambers built their business empires using a  similar approach, and like Cyrus, they remain the exceptions rather than  the rule.
• Great leaders know how to build consensus and motivate  by doing what is right rather than what is in their self-interest.  Xenophon put personal gain aside to lead his fellow Greeks out of a  perilous situation in Persia–something very similar to what Lou Gerstner  and Anne Mulcahy did in rescuing IBM and Xerox.
• Character matters  in leadership. Alexander the Great had exceptional leadership skills  that enabled him to conquer the eastern half of the ancient world, but  he was ultimately destroyed by his inability to manage his phenomenal  success. The corporate world is full of similar examples, such as the  now incarcerated Dennis Kozlowski, who, flush with success at the head  of his empire, was driven down the highway of self-destruction by an  out-of-control ego.
• A great leader is one who challenges the  conventional wisdom of the day and is able to think out of the box to  pull off amazing feats. Hannibal did something no one in the ancient  world thought possible; he crossed the Alps in winter to challenge Rome  for control of the ancient world. That same innovative way of thinking  enabled Serge Brin and Larry Page of Google to challenge and best two  formidable competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!
• A leader must have  ambition to succeed, and Julius Caesar had plenty of it. He set Rome on  the path to empire, but his success made him believe he was a living god  and blinded him to the dangers that eventually did him in. The  parallels with corporate leaders and Wall Street master-of-the-universe  types are numerous, but none more salient than Hank Greenberg, who built  the AIG insurance empire only to be struck down at the height of his  success by the corporate daggers of his directors.
• And finally,  leadership is about keeping a sane and modest perspective in the face of  success and remaining focused on the fundamentals–the nuts and bolts of  making an organization work day in and day out. Augustus saved Rome  from dissolution after the assassination of Julius Caesar and ruled it  for more than forty years, bringing the empire to the height of its  power. What made him successful were personal humility, attention to the  mundane details of building and maintaining an infrastructure, and the  understanding of limits. Augustus set Rome on a course of prosperity and  stability that lasted for centuries, just as Alfred Sloan, using many  of the same approaches, built GM into the leviathan that until recently  dominated the automotive business.

Throughout  this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong's life and  thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader's personal  experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and  developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese  revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting  informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and  discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and  territorial sovereignty. Karl begins with Mao's early life in a small  village in Hunan province, documenting his relationships with his  parents, passion for education, and political awakening during the fall  of the Qing dynasty in late 1911.

She traces his transition from  liberal to Communist over the course of the next decade, his early  critiques of the subjugation of women, and the gathering force of the  May 4th movement for reform and radical change. Describing Mao's rise to  power, she delves into the dynamics of Communist organizing in an  overwhelmingly agrarian society, and Mao's confrontations with Chiang  Kai-shek and other nationalist conservatives. She also considers his  marriages and romantic liaisons and their relation to Mao as the  revolutionary founder of Communism in China.

The book is published by Duke University Press.

“Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five  ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro,  NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday

Anthony Bourdain meets  Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the  appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by  the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears.

What was Pol  Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi  Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one  particular cow?

Traveling across four continents, from the  ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szabłowski tracked down  the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and  massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi  Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol  Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat  pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously  readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term  impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of  contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,”  Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s  radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the  damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of  personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had  stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng  opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions  of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to  his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in  June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in  Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that  also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese  Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous  rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before  becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992.  When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy  much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a  loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

First published in 1841,  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is often  cited as the best book ever written about market psychology. This  Harriman House edition includes Charles Mackay's account of the three  infamous financial manias - John Law's Mississipi Scheme, the South Sea  Bubble, and Tulipomania.
Between the three of them, these historic  episodes confirm that greed and fear have always been the driving forces  of financial markets, and, furthermore, that being sensible and clever  is no defence against the mesmeric allure of a popular craze with the  wind behind it.

In writing the history of the great financial  manias, Charles Mackay proved himself a master chronicler of social as  well as financial history. Blessed with a cast of characters that  covered all the vices, gifted a passage of events which was inevitably  heading for disaster, and with the benefit of hindsight, he produced a  record that is at once a riveting thriller and absorbing historical  document. A century and a half later, it is as vibrant and lurid as the  day it was written.

For modern-day investors, still reeling from  the dotcom crash, the moral of the popular manias scarcely needs  spelling out. When the next stock market bubble comes along, as it  surely will, you are advised to recall the plight of some of the  unfortunates on these pages, and avoid getting dragged under the wheels  of the careering bandwagon yourself.

The Sword and the Shield is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent  times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the  Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as  the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any  source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage  of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of  its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked  in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified  files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in  exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The  archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the  1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the  world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States.  Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the  world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as  containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to  the secret history of the twentieth century. Among the topics and  revelations explored are: The KGB's covert operations in the United  States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today.  KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost  certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB's  attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its  infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader. The KGB's use of radio  intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to  intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB's attempts  to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology  corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald  Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who  successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious  disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons  of New York society.

THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF PITCH ANYTHING IS BACK TO FLIP YOUR ENTIRE APPROACH TO PERSUASION.

Is  there anything worse than a high-pressure salesperson pushing you to  say "yes" (then sign on the dotted line) before you're ready?

If  there's one lesson Oren Klaff has learned over decades of pitching,  presenting, and closing long-shot, high-stakes deals, it's that people  are sick of being marketed and sold to. Most of all, they hate being  told what to think. The more you push them, the more they resist.

What  people love, however, is coming up with a great idea on their own, even  if it's the idea you were guiding them to have all along. Often, the  only way to get someone to sign is to make them feel like they're  smarter than you.

That's why Oren is throwing out the  old playbook on persuasion. Instead, he'll show you a new approach that  works on this simple insight: Everyone trusts their own ideas. If,  rather than pushing your idea on your buyer, you can guide them to  discover it on their own, they'll believe it, trust it, and get excited  about it. Then they'll buy in and feel good about the chance to work  with you.

That might sound easier said than done, but  Oren has taught thousands of people how to do it with a series of  simple steps that anyone can follow in any situation.

And as you'll see in this book, Oren has been in a lot of different situations.

He'll  show you how he got a billionaire to take him seriously, how he got a  venture capital firm to cough up capital, and how he made a skeptical  Swiss banker see him as an expert in banking. He'll even show you how to  become so compelling that buyers are even more attracted to you than to  your product.

These days, it's not enough to make a great pitch.

To get attention, create trust, and close the deal, you need to flip the script.

"It’s a startling and disconcerting read that should make you think twice every time a friend of a friend offers you the opportunity of a lifetime.”
—Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and bestselling author of Devil in the White City

Think you can’t get conned? Think again. The New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains how to spot the con before they spot you.

“[An] excellent study of Con Artists, stories & the human need to believe” –Neil Gaiman, via Twitter


A  compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con  artists—and the people who fall for their cons over and over again.

While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen—the  Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs—are elegant,  outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust.  How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling  for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and  psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book.

From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova  pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what  all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and  psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings  readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between  artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we  believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how  our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us.

When you react, the event controls you. When you respond, you're in control.

Verbal Judo is the classic guide to the martial art of the mind and mouth that can  help you defuse confrontations and generate cooperation, whether you're  talking to a boss, a spouse, or even a teenager. For more than a  generation, Dr. George J. Thompson's essential handbook has taught  people how to communicate more confidently and persuasively in any  situation. Verbal Judo shows you how to listen and speak more  effectively, engage others through empathy (the most powerful word in  the English language), avoid the most common conversational disasters,  and use proven strategies to successfully express your point of view -  and take the lead in most disputes.

This updated edition includes a new foreword and a chapter featuring Dr. Thompson's five universal truths of human interaction:

• People feel the need to be respected
• People would rather be asked than be told
• People have a desire to know why
• People prefer to have options over threats
• People want to have second chances

Stop being frustrated and misunderstood. Stop finding yourself on the losing end of an argument. With Verbal Judo you'll be able to have your say - and say what you mean.

A master class in the art of persuasion, as taught by  professors ranging from Bart Simpson to Winston Churchill, newly revised  and updated.

The time-tested secrets taught in this book  include Cicero's three-step strategy for moving an audience to action,  and Honest Abe's Shameless Trick for lowering an audience's  expectations. And it's also replete with contemporary techniques such as  politicians' use of code language to appeal to specfic groups and an  eye-opening assortment of persuasive tricks, including the Eddie Haskell  Ploy, the Belushi Paradigm, Stalin's Timing Secret, and the Yoda  Technique.   

Whether you're an inveterate lover of language  books or just want to win a lot more anger-free arguments on the page,  at the podium, or over a beer, Thank You for Arguing is for you. Warm,  witty, erudite, and truly enlightening, it not only teaches you how to  recognize a paralipsis when you hear it, but also how to wield the  weapons of persuasion the next time you really, really, want to get your  own way.

Timeless techniques of effective public speaking from ancient Rome's greatest orator

National Book Award Finalist
TIME Magazine's #1 Nonfiction Book of 2012
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2012
Best Nonfiction of 2012: The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer

In the much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag,  acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history  of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and  transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its  sway. Iron Curtain describes how, spurred by Stalin and his  secret police, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and  what daily life was like once they were complete. Drawing on newly  opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts  translated for the first time, Applebaum portrays in chilling detail the  dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of  life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they  had accumulated. As a result the Soviet Bloc became a lost civilization,  one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics  Applebaum captures in these electrifying pages.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

The  Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity,  why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward  nationalism and authoritarianism.

From the United States and  Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under  siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was  one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about  antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and  autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political  systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing,  especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone  else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.

Of all the despots of our time, Joseph Stalin lasted the longest and  wielded the greatest power, and his secrets have been the most jealously  guarded—even after his death.

In this book, the first to draw  from recently released archives, Robert Conquest gives us Stalin as a  child and student; as a revolutionary and communist theoretician; as a  political animal skilled in amassing power and absolutely ruthless in  maintaining it. He presents the landmarks of Stalin’s rule: the class  with Lenin; collectivization; the Great Terror; the Nazi-Soviet pact and  the Nazi-Soviet war; the anti-Semitic campaign that preceded his death;  and the legacy he left behind.

Distilling a lifetime’s study,  weaving detail, analysis, and research, Conquest has given us an  extraordinarily powerful narrative of this incredible figure.

“Thoughtful and thorough and shot through with insight.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Definitive . . . a magnificent, even poetic, act of historical retribution.”—The New Leader

“Brilliant . . . this book probably is the most cogent and readable account of Stalin’s life yet published.”—The San Diego Union

A  gripping account of the months before and after Stalin’s death and how  his demise reshaped the course of twentieth-century history

 Joshua Rubenstein’s riveting account takes us back to the second half of  1952 when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin’s murderous  regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected U.S. President  Dwight Eisenhower with armed force, and was also broadening a vicious  campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin’s sudden collapse and death in  March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no  overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in  the twentieth century.

The Last Days of Stalin is an  engaging, briskly told account of the dictator’s final active months,  the vigil at his deathbed, and the unfolding of Soviet and international  events in the months after his death. Rubenstein throws fresh light on

• the  devious plotting of Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and other “comrades in  arms” who well understood the significance of the dictator’s impending  death;
• the witness-documented events of his death as compared to official published versions;
• Stalin’s rumored plans to forcibly exile Soviet Jews;
• the responses of Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles to the Kremlin’s conciliatory gestures after Stalin’s death; and
• the momentous repercussions when Stalin’s regime of terror was cut short.

The bestselling historian on the dramatic wartime relationship - and shocking similarities - between two tyrants

'Laurence  Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid  narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two  terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and  inhumane war in history' Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler - Hubris and Hitler - Nemesis

This  compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years'  work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when  Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in  history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees  shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of  the same coin.

Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with  Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the  war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to  events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt-of  suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build  the utopias they wanted, and while Hitler's creation of the Holocaust  remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin  committed a series of atrocities at the same time.

Using  previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers of  the Red Army and Wehrmacht, civilians who suffered during the conflict  and those who knew both men personally, bestselling historian Laurence  Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for  Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held  popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in  history. This is a master work from one of our finest historians.

Scientists throughout history, from Galileo to today’s experts on  climate change, have often had to contend with politics in their pursuit  of knowledge. But in the Soviet Union, where the ruling elites  embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before,  scientists lived their lives on a knife edge. The Soviet Union had the  best-funded scientific establishment in history. Scientists were  elevated as popular heroes and lavished with awards and privileges. But  if their ideas or their field of study lost favor with the elites, they  could be exiled, imprisoned, or murdered. And yet they persisted, making  major contributions to 20th century science.

Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from  the years leading up to the Revolution through the death of the “Great  Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of  scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes  horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They  often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by  falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who  denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of  biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant  scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine.

But  from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to  neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made  breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine.  A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics.

Here is the story of Jerry Weintraub: the self-made, Brooklyn-born,  Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer, legendary deal maker, and  friend of politicians and stars. No matter where nature has placed  him--the club rooms of Brooklyn, the Mafia dives of New York's Lower  East Side, the wilds of Alaska, or the hills of Hollywood--he has found a  way to put on a show and sell tickets at the door. "All life was a  theater and I wanted to put it up on a stage," he writes. "I wanted to  set the world under a marquee that read: 'Jerry Weintraub Presents.'"

 In When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead,  we follow Weintraub from his first great success at age twenty-six with  Elvis Presley, whom he took on the road with the help of Colonel Tom  Parker; to the immortal days with Sinatra and Rat Pack glory; to his  crowning hits as a movie producer, starting with Robert Altman and Nashville, continuing with Oh, God!, The Karate Kid movies, and Diner, among others, and summiting with Steven Soderbergh and Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen.

 Along the way, we'll watch as Jerry moves from the poker tables of  Palm Springs (the games went on for days), to the power rooms of  Hollywood, to the halls of the White House, to Red Square in Moscow and  the Great Palace in Beijing-all the while counseling potentates, poets,  and kings, with clients and confidants like George Clooney, Bruce  Willis, George H. W. Bush, Armand Hammer, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Bob  Dylan, Led Zeppelin, John Denver, Bobby Fischer . . .well, the list goes  on forever.

 And of course, the story is not yet over . . .as the old-timers say, "The best is yet to come."

 As Weintraub says, "When I stop talking, you'll know I'm dead."

 With wit, wisdom, and the cool confidence that has colored his  remarkable career, Jerry chronicles a quintessentially American journey,  one marked by luck, love, and improvisation. The stories he tells and  the lessons we learn are essential, not just for those who love movies  and music, but for businessmen, entrepreneurs, artists . . . everyone.

Understand Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrency

“Antony helps us all clearly understand the mechanics of bitcoin and blockchain.” ―Rob Findlay, Founder, Next Money

#1  Best Seller in Investing Derivatives and Natural Resource Extraction  Industry, Futures Trading, Banks & Banking, Energy & Mining,  Monetary Policy, and Computers & Technology

There’s a  lot written on cryptocurrency and blockchains. But, for the uninitiated,  most of this information can be indecipherable. The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains provides a clear guide to this new currency and the revolutionary technology that powers it.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Gain  an understanding of a broad spectrum of Bitcoin topics including the  history of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin blockchain, and Bitcoin buying, selling,  and mining. Learn how payments are made, and how to put a value on  cryptocurrencies and digital tokens.

Blockchain technology.  What exactly is a blockchain, how does it work, and why is it important? The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains answers  these questions and more. Learn about notable blockchain platforms,  smart contracts, and other important facets of blockchains and their  function in the changing cyber-economy.

Things to know before buying cryptocurrencies. Find   trustworthy and balanced insights into Bitcoin investing and investing  in other cryptocurrency. Discover the risks and mitigations, learn how  to identify scams, and understand cryptocurrency exchanges, digital  wallets, and regulations.

Learn about:

• Blockchain technology and how it works
• Workings of the cryptocurrency market
• Evolution and potential impacts of Bitcoin and blockchains on global businesses

You’ve read books such as Blockchain Bubble or Revolution, Cryptoassets, Blockchain Technology Explained, Blockchain Revolution, The Bitcoin Standard, Mastering Bitcoin, or Bitcoin For Dummies, but to really understand the technology read The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains.

Blockchain: The Complete Guide to Uncovering Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Technology and the Future of Money

“Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the  Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable  scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each  is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular  moment of fame or notoriety; these notable and fascinating accounts are  as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as  they were when the events happened.

Stories about Wall Street  are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and  volatile nature of the world of finance. Longtime New Yorker contributor  John Brooks’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and  critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market  crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold  attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the  sense that history repeats itself.

Five additional stories on  equally fascinating subjects round out this wonderful collection that  will both entertain and inform readers . . . Business Adventures is truly financial journalism at its liveliest and best.

 In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, one of the hundred most  influential people in the world. Since he made his fortune, his impact  has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music,  and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual  rigor-combined with the resources to launch and support new  initiatives-have literally changed the world.

In 2009 Allen  discovered that he had lymphoma, lending urgency to his desire to share  his story for the first time. In this long-awaited memoir, Allen  explains how he has solved problems, what he's learned from his many  endeavors-both the triumphs and the failures-and his compelling vision  for the future. He reflects candidly on an extraordinary life.

 The book also features previously untold stories about everything from  the true origins of Microsoft to Allen's role in the dawn of private  space travel (with SpaceShipOne) and in discoveries at the frontiers of  brain science. With honesty, humor, and insight, Allen tells the story  of a life of ideas made real.

Eswar Prasad explains the world of finance is at the threshold of  major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and  indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite  how ordinary people live.

Above all, Prasad foresees the end of  physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but  rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to  develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile,  cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global  corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be  accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and  have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and  manage risk.

Prasad shows how these and other changes will  redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions  as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The  promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased  sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market  access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of  accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The  Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the  worst of what is to come.

Built to Last, the defining management study of the '90s,  showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained  performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the  very beginning.

But what about companies that are not born with  great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad  companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert  long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what  are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from  good to great?

Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team  have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some  companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness
• The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence
• A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results
• Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do frequent restructuring fail to make the leap

There may be no hotter company on the planet than Xiaomi. In less  than a decade, the company has gone from being a Chinese start-up to a  global player in the smartphone market. Driven by the philosophy of  "Innovation for all", Xiaomi has a cult fan following; after all, it  offers high-end features at relatively low prices.

Besides, it  does not only sell phones. It also sells earphones, Bluetooth speakers,  televisions, fitness bands, weighing scales, power banks, and air  purifiers, among other products. Each one of them offering the best  possible value for money.

How did a small Chinese start-up  become so big in a matter of years? How has it managed a cult following  in such a short time period when a company like Apple took decades?  What's the secret behind Xiaomi's success? Such are the answers this  book will provide at length.

An engrossing insider's account of how a teacher built one of the  world's most valuable companies - rivaling Walmart and Amazon - and  forever reshaped the global economy.

In just a decade and a  half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an  English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's  largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of  Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the  largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs  and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming  private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of  middle-class consumers.

Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in  the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented  access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark  draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two  decades in China chronicling the Internet's impact on the country to  create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba's rise.

How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to  achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival  entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80  percent market share? As it forges ahead into finance and  entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba's ambitions? How does the  Chinese government view its rise? Will Alibaba expand further overseas,  including in the US?

Clark tells Alibaba's tale in the context  of China's momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an  unlikely corporate titan as never before.

"I hope everyone reads this book. It has become such a crucial thing for all of us to understand." —Erin Burnett, CNN

"An  ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole  that is QAnon. It even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit." —Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm

Its  messaging can seem cryptic, even nonsensical, yet for tens of thousands  of people, it explains everything:  What is QAnon, where did it come  from, and is the Capitol insurgency a sign of where it’s going next?

On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the  State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt  like “the calm before the storm”—then refused to elaborate as puzzled  journalists asked him to explain.  But on the infamous message boards of  4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed  to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own.

In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump's remarks  began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while  satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America.  But did any of what Q  predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every  word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider  and wider? No.

Why not? Who were these rapt listeners? How do  they reconcile their worldview with the America they see around them?  Why do their numbers keep growing? Mike Rothschild, a journalist  specializing in conspiracy theories, has been collecting their stories  for years, and through interviews with QAnon converts, apostates, and  victims, as well as psychologists, sociologists, and academics, he is  uniquely equipped to explain the movement and its followers.

In The Storm Is Upon Us,  he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed  the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by right-wing media and Donald Trump,  through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q’s  increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on.

And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump’s loss of  the presidency—with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms  proving susceptible to its messaging—and politicians starting to openly  espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking  the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his  impassioned reportage makes clear it's time to figure out what QAnon  really is — because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything  isn’t done yet.

An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's  vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world  around them.

Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all  the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they  changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II,  Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in  sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen,  affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern  Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives  sacrificed.

Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct  experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian.  Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative  portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism,  and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a  jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and  doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious  magnetism of their leadership.

Communism has decisively shaped the modern world. After the Second   World War, Marxist regimes ruled over one-third of the population of the  globe.  Even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union, communist ideas  continue to steer  current events in Eastern Europe and East Asia.

According  to award-winning historian Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius  of the  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to understand the inner dynamics of   communist thought and rule (and the reasons they linger in places like  Cuba,  North Korea, and China), you have to go back to the crucial  beginnings of  communism. How did it become such a pervasive economic  and political philosophy?  Why, of all places, did it first take root in  early 20th-century  Russia?

These and other questions all get  addressed as part of a  fascinating story that stretches from the  intellectual partnership between Karl  Marx and Friedrich Engels in the  late 19th century to the Russian  Revolution of 1917 to the death of  Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It's a story whose  drama, Professor Liulevicius  notes, “has few equals in terms of sheer scale,  scope, or suffering.”

This second edition of McLellan's comprehensive selection of Marx's writings  includes carefully selected extracts from the whole range of Marx's  political, philosophical, and economic thought. Each section of the book  deals with a different period of Marx's life, allowing readers to trace  the development of his thought from his early years as a student and  political journalist in Germany up through the final letters he wrote in  the early 1880s. A fully updated editorial introduction and  bibliography has been included for each extract in this new edition.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence.

A  rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil  societies around the globe. It has never been more important to  understand extremism, yet the dictionary definition—a logical starting  point in a search for understanding—tells us only that extremism is “the  quality or state of being extreme.” In this volume in the MIT Press  Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction  to extremist movements, explaining what extremism is, how extremist  ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into  violence. Berger shows that although the ideological content of  extremist movements varies widely, there are common structural elements.

Berger, an expert on extremist movements and terrorism, explains  that extremism arises from a perception of “us versus them,”  intensified by the conviction that the success of “us” is inseparable  from hostile acts against “them.” Extremism differs from ordinary  unpleasantness—run-of-the-mill hatred and racism—by its sweeping  rationalization of an insistence on violence. Berger illustrates his  argument with case studies and examples from around the world and  throughout history, from the destruction of Carthage by the Romans—often  called “the first genocide”—to the apocalyptic jihadism of Al Qaeda,  America's new “alt-right,” and the anti-Semitic conspiracy tract The  Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He describes the evolution of identity  movements, individual and group radicalization, and more. If we  understand the causes of extremism, and the common elements of extremist  movements, Berger says, we will be more effective in countering it.

The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes  the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown  and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the  ultimate form of power.

What makes “cults” so intriguing and  frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us  binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes  researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a  satisfying explanation for what causes people to join - and more  importantly, stay in - extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could  it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it  already has....

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy  answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague  talk of “brainwashing”. But the true answer has nothing to do with  freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell  argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and  us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and  shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear - and are influenced  by - every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting  original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide  spectrum of communities “cultish”, revealing how they affect followers  of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our  modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive  and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of  power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish”  everywhere.

“Masterful. . . . Evans demonstrates a fluent style and a sweeping  grasp of the Third Reich’s history and of the enormous historical  literature. . . . Evans’s fellow historians as well as a broader public  will read this work, not quite with pleasure, for there is little joy in  this story, but with admiration for the author’s narrative powers.” ―Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

A New York Times bestseller!

An absorbing, revelatory, and definitive account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history

Adroitly blending narrative, description, and analysis, Richard J.  Evans portrays a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking  much of Europe with it. Interweaving a broad narrative of the war's  progress from a wide range of people, Evans reveals the dynamics of a  society plunged into war at every level. The great battles and events of  the conflict are here, but just as telling is Evans's re- creation of  the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime. At the center of  the book is the Nazi extermi­nation of the Jews. The final book in  Richard J. Evan's three-volume history of Hitler's Germany, hailed "a  masterpiece" by The New York Times, The Third Reich at War lays bare the most momentous and tragic years of the Nazi regime.

The second book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich in Power: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation explores how Hitler turned Germany from a vibrant democracy into a one-party state.

Before Hitler seized power in 1933, Germany had been famous for its  sophistication and complexity. So how was it possible for a group of  ideological obsessives to re-mould it into a one-party state directed at  war and race hate? How did the Nazis win over the hearts and minds of  Germany's citizens, twist science, religion and culture, and transform  the country's politics to achieve total dominance so quickly?

From the Nuremberg Laws to the Olympic Games, Kristallnacht to  the Hitler Youth, this gripping account shows how a whole population  became enmeshed in a dictatorship that was consumed by hatred and driven  by war.

'Impressive ... perceptive ... humane'
  Ian Kershaw

'Excellent ... powerful ... it makes an indelible impression'
  Robert Service, Sunday Times

'Likely to be the standard work for some years to come'
Spectator Books of the Year

'A rich and detailed description of just what the Third Reich did in  every compartment of the state and every corner of society ... Evans's  magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come'
Economist

'Written with great style and human sympathy'
Daily Telegraph Books of the Year

'Evans brilliantly conveys how the Fuhrer reignited Germans' pride as he led them to catastrophe'
  Neal Ascherson, Observer

Sir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich at War.

"Brilliant.” —Washington Post

"The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement

“The  generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served. . . . The  book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and  succeeds in its aim of giving “voice to the people who lived through the  years with which it deals.” —Denver Post

There  is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand  than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi  Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one  of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive  account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly  work integrated with important new research and interpretations,  Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of  Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the  early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche? This lonely and chronically ill, yet passionate, daring, and complex man is perhaps the most mysterious and least understood of all contemporary philosophers. Why are his brilliant insights so relevant for today? How did he become the most misinterpreted and unfairly maligned intellectual figure of the last two centuries?

To provide shape to Nietzsche's thought, each of these 24 lectures focuses on specific ideas that preoccupied Nietzsche while tracing the profound themes that give meaning to his work. You'll get a chance to put Nietzsche's life and work in a larger historical and philosophical context. You'll explore the controversial philosopher's subtle, complex critique of both religious belief and Greek rationalism.

You'll also spend a wealth of time focusing on Nietzsche's famous writing style, which deftly combines the majesty of the prophet, the force of the Homeric warrior, and the lyricism of the poet - but which nonetheless is rife with inconsistencies, exaggerations, and personal attacks. And you'll get a better understanding of Nietzsche's complaints and criticisms of the intellectual currents of his time: Christian moralism, evolution, socialism, democracy, and nationalism.

As you make your way through these lectures, you'll discover that Nietzsche, even at his most polemical and offensive, exudes an unmistakable enthusiasm and love of life. In fact, you'll see that his exhortation to learn to love and accept one's own life, to make it better by becoming who one really is, forms the project that is the true core of his work.

From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new audiobook on decoding the behavior of the people around you.

Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of listeners, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding, and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.

We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.

The product of 11 years of research, The Story of Philosophy is an endlessly inspiring and instructive chronicle of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Socrates to Santayana. Written with exacting and scrupulous scholarship, it was designed both to command the respect of educators and to capture the interest of the layman.

Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit.

Will Durant (1885-1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He spent over 50 years writing his critically acclaimed 11-volume series The Story of Civilization. A champion of human-rights issues such as social reform and the brotherhood of man long before they were popular, he continues to educate and entertain readers and listeners worldwide through his writings.

Previously unpublished talks from the Father of Modern Management.

Throughout his professional life, Peter F. Drucker inspired millions of business leaders not only through his famous writings, but also through his lectures and keynotes. These speeches contained some of his most valuable insights but had never been published in book form - until now.

The Drucker Lectures features more than 30 talks from one of management's most important figures. Drawn from the Drucker Archives at the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, the lectures showcase Drucker's wisdom, wit, profundity, and prescience on such topics as:

• Politics and economics of the environment
• Knowledge workers and the Knowledge Society
• Computer and information literacy
• Managing nonprofit organizations
• Globalization

During his life, Drucker well understood that over the last 150 years the world had become a society of large institutions - and that they would only become larger and more powerful. He contended that unless these institutions were effectively managed and ethically led, the good health of society as a whole would be in peril. His prediction is unfolding before our eyes.

The Drucker Lectures is a timely, instructive book proving that responsible behavior and good business can, in fact, exist hand in hand.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about someone committing a violent, reprehensible, even evil, act. And each time it happens, before we know anything about the circumstances, we are already sure of one thing: We are nothing like that perpetrator. But how can we be so sure? After all, we are all human.

In Understanding the Dark Side of Human Nature, Professor Daniel Breyer takes us on a fascinating philosophical journey into many of the deepest and darkest questions that have engaged humanity for millennia. The dark side of our nature is our mysterious and fragile underbelly - our negative, but all too human, side. For many of us, it may be easier to simply avoid looking into the darker aspects of ourselves and our world - the suffering we see everywhere around us, from real world events to the entertainment we consume. But the truth is, if we don’t face the totality of what it means to be human, we can never fully understand ourselves or fully appreciate our deep desire for meaning and purpose in our lives.

Thinkers from across the world and in many different eras have considered the dark side of human nature, and that’s why this course will adopt a cross-cultural approach, investigating perspectives from many different traditions - Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and secular. This cross-cultural approach will help you see humanity as fully as possible from many perspectives, better allowing for progress toward finding answers that can apply across cultures and times.

This course is fueled by the power of questions, one of philosophy’s most potent tools. Some are questions we have all asked ourselves: Why do so many people commit violence against others, why is there so much suffering in the world? Professor Breyer provides some fascinating potential answers to many of our darkest questions.

A commemorative edition of Peter F. Drucker's timeless classic work on leadership and management, with a foreword by Jim Collins.

What makes an effective executive?

For decades Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country's business and management philosophers" (Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management - the executive.

The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done". This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.

Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can - and must - be mastered:

• Managing time
• Choosing what to contribute to the organization
• Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
• Setting the right priorities
• Knitting all of them together with effective decision making

Ranging across the annals of business and government, Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.

Go from being a good manager to an extraordinary leader.

If you listen to nothing else on leadership, you should at least hear these 10 articles (featuring "What Makes an Effective Executive" by Peter F. Drucker). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.

HBR's 10 Must Reads On Leadership will inspire you to:

• Motivate others to excel
• Build your team's self-confidence in others
• Provoke positive change
• Set direction
• Encourage smart risk-taking
• Manage with tough empathy
• Credit others for your success
• Increase self-awareness
• Draw strength from adversity

This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "What Makes an Effective Executive" by Peter F. Drucker, "What Makes a Leader?", "What Leaders Really Do", "The Work of Leadership", "Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?", "Crucibles of Leadership", "Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve", "Seven Transformations of Leadership", "Discovering Your Authentic Leadership", and "In Praise of the Incomplete Leader".

Peter Drucker's classic book on innovation and entrepreneurship

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline that explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Superbly practical, Innovation and Entrepreneurship explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures need to know and do to succeed in today's economy.

An unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women's sexuality that rivals the culture-shifting Kinsey Report, from two of America's leading research psychologists

Do women have sex simply to express love, experience pleasure, or reproduce? When clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, both at the University of Texas at Austin, joined forces to investigate women's underlying sexual motivations, what they found astonished them.

Using women's own words, and backed by extensive scientific evidence, the authors delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a mate's infidelity, a ploy to boost social status, a barter for household chores, and even as a cure for a migraine headache. Meston and Buss offer a revelatory examination of the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women to have sex, sometimes in pursuit of joy, and sometimes for darker, more disturbing reasons.

Why Women Have Sex stands as the richest and deepest psychological understanding of women's sexuality yet achieved and promises to inform every woman's (and her partner's) awareness of her relationship to sex.

The groundbreaking, provocative book that uses evolutionary psychology to explain human mating and the mysteries of love.

If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships? To answer this question we must look into our evolutionary past, argues prominent psychologist David M. Buss. Based one of the largest studies of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first work to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. Drawing on a wide range of examples of mating behavior -- from lovebugs to elephant seals, from the Yanomamö tribe of Venezuela to online dating apps -- Buss reveals what women want, what men want, and why their desires radically differ. Love has a central place in human sexual psychology, but conflict, competition, and manipulation also pervade human mating -- something we must confront in order to control our own mating destiny.

Updated to reflect the very latest scientific research on human mating, this definitive edition of this classic work of evolutionary psychology explains the powerful forces that shape our most intimate desires.

The definitive work on Stalin's purges, The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. While the original volume had relied heavily on unofficial sources, later developments within the Soviet Union provided an avalanche of new material, which Conquest has mined to write this revised and updated edition of his classic work.

Under the light of fresh evidence, it is remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have been verified. Many details have also been added, including hitherto secret information on the three great "Moscow Trials", the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, life in the labor camps, and many other key matters.

Both a leading Sovietologist and a highly respected poet, Conquest blends profound research with evocative prose to create a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of the 20th century's most tragic events.

"Illuminates the past with a mighty searchlight and clears away mountains of nonsense."―Gabriel Schoenfeld, Wall Street Journal

Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian." As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century’s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Winner of the Ingersoll Prize; winner of the Richard M. Weaver Prize; a New York Times Notable Book. "Provides many glowing embers of reasoned and wise argument."―Richard Bernstein, The New York Times  "A book that ought to be required reading for everyone about to enter college, and by every member of Congress."―Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

Don Quixote (Unabridged)

Homer Box Set Iliad & Odyssey - Homer

Ancient Roman senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus is known throughout Western history as one of the greatest historical writers of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He lived during the first century AD and was the son of a wealthy aristocratic family. Not much is known about his personal life; however, it is clear that both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder were acquaintances and even possibly childhood friends, though there is no substantial evidence to support this. Tacitus studied rhetoric in order to create a career in law and politics. He steadily rose throughout the ranks due to his strong speaking style and oration skills. However, his language skills did not stop with verbal speeches. He was also an accomplished writer who focused on the history of the Roman Empire. He created five works, "The Annals," "The Histories," "The Agricola," "The Germania," and "A Dialogue on Oratory." His works delve deep into the facts as he knew them, rarely ever embellishing history to create a story. He also stayed true to chronological order and laid history out in visible steps. It is also notable that Tacitus knew that his fellow politicians were corrupt; he believed that they gave up their strong voice in order to please a usually corrupt emperor. These five great works are brought together in this collection of "The Complete Works of Tacitus."

East of Eden
 
The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is  a sprawling epic in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing  characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of  identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of  love’s absence.

Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world  literature, but until now there has not been a version that is a  superlative literary text in its own right.

Acclaimed by  critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell's version allows us to enter an  ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly  beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is.

The Grapes of Wrath

Whether we’ve experienced small setbacks or major traumas, we are all  influenced by memories and experiences we may not remember or don’t  fully understand. Getting Past Your Past offers practical procedures  that demystify the human condition and empower listeners looking to  achieve real change.Francine Shapiro, the creator of EMDR (Eye Movement  Desensitization and Reprocessing), explains how our personalities  develop and why we become trapped into feeling, believing and acting in  ways that don’t serve us. Through detailed examples and exercises  listeners will learn to understand themselves, and why the people in  their lives act the way they do. Most importantly, listeners will also  learn techniques to improve their relationships, break through emotional  barriers, overcome limitations and excel in ways taught to Olympic  athletes, successful executives and performers.An easy conversational  style, humor and fascinating real life stories make it simple to  understand the brain science, why we get stuck in various ways and what  to do about it.

The real Hugh Hefner-the extraordinary inside story of an American icon

""Riveting... Watts packs in plenty of gasp-inducing passages.""-Newark Star Ledger

""Like it or not, Hugh Hefner has affected all of us, so I treasured learning about how and why in the sober biography.""-Chicago Sun Times

""This  is a fun book. How could it not be? Watts aims to give a full account  of the man, his magazine and their place in social history. Playboy is no longer the cultural force it used to be, but it made a stamp on society.""-Associated Press

At the age of twenty-four, in 1913, Adolf Hitler was eking out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Nothing marked him in any way as exceptional, but he did possess certain distinguishing characteristics: a capacity to hate, an inability to accept criticism, and a massive overconfidence in his own abilities. He was a socially and emotionally inadequate individual without direction, from whence came a sense of personal mission that would transform these weaknesses and liabilities into strengths—certainties that would provide him not only with a sense of identity, but of purpose in a communal enterprise. This is the focus of Laurence Rees’s social, psychological, and historical investigation into a personality that would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.

Revolution 1989 is the first in-depth, authoritative account of a few months that changed the world.

At  the start of 1989, six European nations were Soviet vassal states. By  year's end, they had all declared national independence and embarked on  the road to democracy. How did it happen so quickly? Victor Sebestyen,  who was on the scene as a reporter, draws on his firsthand knowledge of  the events, on scores of interviews with witnesses and participants, and  on newly uncovered archival material. He tells the story through the  eyes of ordinary men and women as well as through the strategic moves of  world leaders. He shows how the KGB helped bring down former allies;  how the United States tried to slow the process; and why the collapse of  the Iron Curtain was the catalyst for the fall of the entire Soviet  empire.

Poker champion turned business  consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with  uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.

In Super  Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most  controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and  trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass  instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was  intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play  in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually  make a great move that was ruined by bad luck?

Even the best  decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an  element of luck that you can't control, and there is always information  that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding  worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are  the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest  odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that  works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather  than great decision making?

Annie Duke, a former World Series  of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from  business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone  can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most  people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values, and  even rewards, the appearance of certainty. But professional poker  players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always  lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don't always lead to bad  outcomes.

By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to  a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll  be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and  destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more  confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.

Includes a bonus PDF of charts and graphs.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

”This book takes an impossibly broad area of computer science and  communicates what working developers need to understand in a clear and  thorough way.” - David Jacobs, Product Advance Local

Key Features
Master the core algorithms of deep learning and AI
Build an intuitive understanding of AI problems and solutions
Written in simple language, with lots of illustrations and hands-on examples
Creative coding exercises, including building a maze puzzle game and exploring drone optimization

About The Book

“Artificial  intelligence” requires teaching a computer how to approach different  types of problems in a systematic way. The core of AI is the algorithms  that the system uses to do things like identifying objects in an image,  interpreting the meaning of text, or looking for patterns in data to  spot fraud and other anomalies.  Mastering the core algorithms for  search, image recognition, and other common tasks is essential to  building good AI applications

Grokking Artificial Intelligence  Algorithms uses illustrations, exercises, and jargon-free explanations  to teach fundamental AI concepts.You’ll explore coding challenges like  detect­ing bank fraud, creating artistic masterpieces, and setting a  self-driving car in motion. All you need is the algebra you remember  from high school math class and beginning programming skills. 

What You Will Learn

Use cases for different AI algorithms
Intelligent search for decision making
Biologically inspired algorithms
Machine learning and neural networks
Reinforcement learning to build a better robot

This Book Is Written For
For software developers with high school–level math skills.

About the Author
Rishal Hurbans is a technologist, startup and AI group founder, and international speaker.

Table of Contents

1 Intuition of artificial intelligence
2 Search fundamentals
3 Intelligent search
4 Evolutionary algorithms
5 Advanced evolutionary approaches
6 Swarm intelligence: Ants
7 Swarm intelligence: Particles
8 Machine learning
9 Artificial neural networks
10 Reinforcement learning with Q-learning

Newly adapted for audiobook listeners.

Today,  software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but  also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase  sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between  programming and software engineering.

How can software engineers  manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing  requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their  experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright,  along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and  insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners  construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique  engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects  contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.

You’ll  explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should  keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining  code:

• How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time
• How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization
• What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions

Whatever has happened to you, it is not who you are.

The  world may know Chris Duffin as the "mad scientist of strength", but you  wouldn't have ever guessed that if you saw the scrawny kid skinning  rattlesnakes and chasing dragonflies in the early '80s. The story of his  unconventional life will take you from gripping tales of murder,  trauma, heartbreak, and survival deep in the Pacific Northwest  wilderness all the way to an idealization of the self-made man - still  flawed, but never broken.

In The Eagle and the Dragon,  you'll follow one man's journey into the darkness of his own heart and  witness the transformation of alcoholism, pain, and defeat into vision,  character, and victory. Through Chris's powerful self-realization,  you'll see how the human spirit can be either shackled by circumstance  or freed from it.

Are you ready to walk through the fire and make your vision a reality?  This audiobook will show you how.

This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from  ancient teenage priest-queens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation  that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two  centuries in self-imposed seclusion.

First revealed to  Westerners in the chronicles of Marco Polo, Japan was a legendary  faraway land defended by a fearsome Kamikaze storm and ruled by a divine  sovereign. It was the terminus of the Silk Road, the furthest end of  the known world, a fertile source of inspiration for European artists,  and an enduring symbol of the mysterious East. In recent times, it has  become a powerhouse of global industry, a nexus of popular culture, and a  harbinger of post-industrial decline.

With intelligence and  wit, author Jonathan Clements blends documentary and storytelling styles  to connect the past, present and future of Japan, and in broad yet  detailed strokes reveals a country of paradoxes: a modern nation steeped  in ancient traditions; a democracy with an emperor as head of state; a  famously safe society built on 108 volcanoes resting on the world's most  active earthquake zone; a fast-paced urban and technologically advanced  country whose land consists predominantly of mountains and forests.

From a leading expert in Japanese history, this is one of the first full  histories of the art and culture of the Samurai warrior. The Samurai  emerged as a warrior caste in Medieval Japan and would have a powerful  influence on the history and culture of the country from the next 500  years. Clements also looks at the Samurai wars that tore Japan apart in  the 17th and 18th centuries and how the caste was finally demolished in  the advent of the mechanized world.

The Romanovs were the most  successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's  surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined  principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it  all?

This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas,  some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy  autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping  chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless  empire building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries,  sexual decadence, and wild extravagance, with a global cast of  adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries, and poets, from Ivan the  Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria,  and Lenin.

To rule Russia was both imperial-sacred mission and  poisoned chalice: Six of the last 12 tsars were murdered. Peter the  Great tortured his own son to death while making Russia an empire and  dominated his court with a dining club notable for compulsory  drunkenness, naked dwarfs, and fancy dress. Catherine the Great  overthrew her own husband (who was murdered soon afterward), enjoyed  affairs with a series of young male favorites, conquered Ukraine, and  fascinated Europe. Paul I was strangled by courtiers backed by his own  son, Alexander I, who in turn faced Napoleon's invasion and the burning  of Moscow, then went on to take Paris. Alexander II liberated the serfs,  survived five assassination attempts, and wrote perhaps the most  explicit love letters ever composed by a ruler. The Romanovs  climaxes with a fresh, unforgettable portrayal of Nicholas II and  Alexandra, the rise and murder of Rasputin, war, and revolution - and  the harrowing massacre of the entire family.

Dazzlingly entertaining and beautifully written from start to finish, The Romanovs brings these monarchs - male and female, great and flawed, their  families and courts - blazingly to life. Drawing on new archival  research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and  tragedy, love and murder, encompassing the seminal years 1812, 1914, and  1917, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of an  empire that helps define Russia today.

In this instant and tenacious New York Times bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight “offers a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh” (Booklist, starred review), illuminating his company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.

Bill Gates named Shoe Dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey, riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Phil Knight opens up in ways few CEOs are willing to do.”

Fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his car in 1963, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In this age of start-ups, Knight’s Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world.

But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always been a mystery. In Shoe Dog, he tells his story at last. At twenty-four, Knight decides that rather than work for a big corporation, he will create something all his own, new, dynamic, different. He details the many risks he encountered, the crushing setbacks, the ruthless competitors and hostile bankers—as well as his many thrilling triumphs. Above all, he recalls the relationships that formed the heart and soul of Nike, with his former track coach, the irascible and charismatic Bill Bowerman, and with his first employees, a ragtag group of misfits and savants who quickly became a band of swoosh-crazed brothers.

Together, harnessing the electrifying power of a bold vision and a shared belief in the transformative power of sports, they created a brand—and a culture—that changed everything.

A dazzling new history of the world told through the ten major empires of human civilization.

Eminent historian Paul Strathern opens the story of Empire with the Akkadian civilization, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our Western and Eastern roots.

Next the narrative describes how a great deal of Western Classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire . . .

Combining breathtaking scope with masterful narrative control, Paul Strathern traces these connections across four millennia and sheds new light on these major civilizations—from the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty to the Aztec and Ottoman, through to the most recent and biggest empires: the British, Russo-Soviet, and American.

Charting five thousand years of global history in ten lucid chapters, Empire makes comprehensive and inspiring reading to anyone fascinated by the history of the world.

Jason L. Riley - Maverick; A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Companies small and large are initiating AI projects, investing vast sums of money on software, developers, and data scientists. Too often, these AI projects focus on technology at the expense of actionable or tangible business results, resulting in scattershot results and wasted investment. Succeeding with AI sets out a blueprint for AI projects to ensure they are predictable, successful, and profitable. It’s filled with practical techniques for running data science programs that are cost effective and focused on the right business goals.

About the technology

Succeeding with AI requires talent, tools, and money. So why do many well-funded, state-of-the-art projects fail to deliver meaningful business value? Because talent, tools, and money aren’t enough: You also need to know how to ask the right questions. In this unique book, AI consultant Veljko Krunic reveals a tested process to start AI projects right, so you’ll get the results you want.

About the book

It sets out a framework for planning and running cost-effective, reliable AI projects that produce real business results. This practical guide reveals secrets forged during the author’s experience with dozens of startups, established businesses, and Fortune 500 giants that will help you establish meaningful, achievable goals. In it, you’ll master a repeatable process to maximize the return on data-scientist hours and learn to implement effectiveness metrics for keeping projects on track and resistant to calcification.

What's inside

• Where to invest for maximum payoff
• How AI projects are different from other software projects
• Catching early warnings in time to correct course
• Exercises and examples based on real-world business dilemmas

About the listener

For project and business leadership, result-focused data scientists, and engineering teams. No AI knowledge required.

about the author

Veljko Krunic is a data science consultant, has a computer science PhD, and is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt.

"Jonah Berger is one of those rare thinkers who blends research-based insights with immensely practical guidance. I am grateful to be one of the many who have learned from this master teacher." (Jim Collins, author Good to Great, coauthor Built to Last)

From the author of New York Times best sellers Contagious and Invisible Influence comes a revolutionary approach to changing anyone's mind.

Everyone has something they want to change. Marketers want to change their customers' minds and leaders want to change organizations. Start-ups want to change industries and nonprofits want to change the world. But change is hard. Often, we persuade and pressure and push, but nothing moves. Could there be a better way?

This book takes a different approach. Successful change agents know it's not about pushing harder, or providing more information, it's about being a catalyst. Catalysts remove roadblocks and reduce the barriers to change. Instead of asking, "How could I change someone's mind?" they ask a different question: "Why haven’t they changed already? What’s stopping them?"

The Catalyst identifies the key barriers to change and how to mitigate them. You'll learn how catalysts change minds in the toughest of situations: how hostage negotiators get people to come out with their hands up and how marketers get new products to catch on, how leaders transform organizational culture and how activists ignite social movements, how substance abuse counselors get addicts to realize they have a problem, and how political canvassers change deeply rooted political beliefs.

This book is designed for anyone who wants to catalyze change. It provides a powerful way of thinking and a range of techniques that can lead to extraordinary results. Whether you're trying to change one person, transform an organization, or shift the way an entire industry does business, this book will teach you how to become a catalyst.

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World by out-of-the-box thinker Brendan Kane breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand - both online and off - so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live.

A lot of people know who they are, what they do, and a few even know why they do it - but even when brands or individuals have clarity in these areas, they often struggle to grab a potential audience’s attention for long enough to get them to learn about their attributes. Others have amazing products or services that fail to achieve great success because they don’t know how to talk about what they do effectively. This is because digital and social media have reshaped our world into one of micro-attention.

There are more than 60 billion messages shared on digital platforms each day, and the average person is exposed to between 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day. This bombardment of stimuli has changed the way we communicate and market content both online and off. In fact, research shows that you have less than three seconds to capture a person’s attention. With such a short window of time, we need to hook audiences quickly, efficiently, and consistently if we want to successfully fuel brand awareness and growth.

Luckily, Brendan Kane, a thinker and strategist who’s built platforms for celebrities like Taylor Swift and Rhianna and worked with Fortune 500 companies like Paramount, Viacom, and MTV, has mastered the art of standing out. In Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, he reveals the power of hook points - a communication tool that helps marketers package their messages in a succinct, attention-grabbing way that leads to better opportunities both online and off. Whether you’re promoting a brand, product, or service, this book is the essential guide for making it in our three-second world.

The final revision of this classic bestseller, the 7th edition defines the common thread linking the world's greatest economic thinkers and explores the philosophies that motivate them. Hailed by Galbraith as a "brilliant achievement", "The Worldly Philosophers" with over 2 million copies sold worldwide, not only enables us to see more deeply into our history, but helps us to better understand our own times. Heilbroner provides the new theme that connects thinkers as different as Adam Smith and Karl Marx: the desire to understand how a capitalist society works. A new chapter conveys a concern that today's increasingly "scientific" economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics.

This century has seen the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history―but who bears the brunt of these monster storms?

Consider  this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made  landfall since 2005: Katrina ($160 billion), Ike ($40 billion), Sandy  ($72 billion), Harvey ($125 billion), and Maria ($90 billion). With more  property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming  dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane.  Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some  of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal  floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M.  Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array  of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and  government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from  private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common  notions of risk.

These federal incentives, Gaul argues, have  resulted in one of the worst planning failures in American history, and  the costs to taxpayers are reaching unsustainable levels. We have become  responsible for a shocking array of coastal amenities: new roads,  bridges, buildings, streetlights, tennis courts, marinas, gazebos, and  even spoiled food after hurricanes. The Geography of Risk  will forever change the way you think about the coasts, from the clash  between economic interests and nature, to the heated politics of  regulators and developers.

In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store.

The  American supermarket is an everyday miracle. But what does it take to  run one? What are the inner workings of product delivery and  distribution? Who sets the price? And who suffers for the convenience  and efficiency we’ve come to expect? In this rollicking exposé, author  Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry.  Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively  listenable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation to:

• Learn the secrets of Trader Joe’s success from Trader Joe himself
• Drive with truckers caught in a job they call “sharecropping on wheels”;
• Break  into industrial farms with activists to learn what it takes for a  product to earn certification labels like “rain forest friendly” and  “fair trade”;
• Follow entrepreneurs as they fight for shelf space, learning essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business;
• Journey with migrants to examine shocking forced labor practices through their eyes.

The  result is a compelling portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the  passion, ingenuity, and inequity required to make this piece of the  American dream run. The product of five years of research and hundreds  of interviews across every level of the industry, The Secret Life of Groceries is  essential listening for those who want to understand our food system -  delivering powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest  for more and compassionate insight into the lives that provide it.

Zac Bissonnette - The Great Beanie Baby Bubble

'Fascinating and entertaining. If you read one book on human origins, this should be it' Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules - For Now

'The who, what, where, when and how of human evolution, from one of the world's experts on the dating of prehistoric fossils' Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

'The application of new genetic science to pre-history is analogous to how the telescope transformed astronomy. Tom Higham brings us to the frontier of recent discoveries with a book that is both gripping and fun' Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

'This exciting book shows that we now have a revolutionary new tool for reconstructing the human past: DNA from minute pieces of tooth and bone, and even from the dirt on the floor of caves' David Abulafia, author of The Boundless Sea

'The remarkable new science of palaeoanthropology, from lab bench to trench' Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred

'Higham's thrilling account makes readers feel as if they were participating themselves in the extraordinary series of events that in the last few years has revealed our long-lost cousins' David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here

'A brilliant distillation of the ideas and discoveries revolutionising our understanding of human evolution' Chris Gosden, author of The History of Magic

Small changes can make a big difference in your powers of persuasion.

Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, it is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction.

Based on more than 60 years of research into the psychology of persuasion, Yes! reveals 50 simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too.

Cowritten by the world's most quoted expert on influence, Professor Robert Cialdini, Yes! presents dozens of surprising discoveries from the science of persuasion in short, enjoyable, and insightful chapters that you can apply immediately to become a more effective persuader.

Why did a sign pointing out the problem of vandalism in the Petrified Forest National Park actually increase the theft of pieces of petrified wood? Why did sales of jam multiply tenfold when consumers were offered many fewer flavors? Why did people prefer a Mercedes immediately after giving reasons why they prefer a BMW? What simple message on cards left in hotel rooms greatly increased the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways?

Often counterintuitive, the findings presented in Yes! will steer you away from common pitfalls while empowering you with little known but proven wisdom.

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.

The foundational and wildly popular go-to resource for influence and persuasion - a renowned international best seller, with over five million copies sold - now revised adding: new research, new insights, new examples, and online applications.

In the new edition of this highly acclaimed best seller, Robert Cialdini - New York Times best-selling author of Pre-Suasion and the seminal expert in the fields of influence and persuasion - explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these insights ethically in business and everyday settings. Using memorable stories and relatable examples, Cialdini makes this crucially important subject surprisingly easy. With Cialdini as a guide, you don’t have to be a scientist to learn how to use this science.

You’ll learn Cialdini’s Universal Principles of Influence, including new research and new uses so you can become an even more skilled persuader - and just as importantly, you’ll learn how to defend yourself against unethical influence attempts. You may think you know these principles, but without understanding their intricacies, you may be ceding their power to someone else.

Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion:

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity
• Unity, the newest principle for this edition

Understanding and applying the principles ethically is cost-free and deceptively easy. Backed by Dr. Cialdini’s 35 years of evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific research - including a three-year field study on what leads people to change - Influence is a comprehensive guide to using these principles to move others in your direction.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

If you had the opportunity to work where, when, and with whom you wanted - all while getting paid very well - would you take it? Self-made multimillionaire and best-selling author Michael Masterson did, and with Ready, Fire, Aim he'll show you how to do the same.

Whether you're thinking about starting a new business or growing an existing one, Ready, Fire, Aim has what you need to succeed in your entrepreneurial endeavors. In it, Masterson shares the knowledge he has gained from creating and expanding numerous businesses and outlines a focused strategy for guiding a small business through the four stages of entrepreneurial growth. Along the way, you'll learn the skills needed to succeed in this dynamic environment. Discover how to:

• Start a business from scratch and make it profitable quickly
• Keep a growing business growing
• Get other people to do almost all the hard work for you, so you are free to do the fun stuff
• Position yourself as an indispensable business builder, so you can enjoy a big share of the profits - even if you are only working part time
• Over the course of his remarkably successful career, Masterson has developed dozens of businesses, including one still growing at $300 million. Now he shows you how to outsell your competitors by implementing innovative operational procedures to reduce costs and using the power of the Internet to reduce customer complaints and increase profits.Duplicate your winning strategy in several businesses so you never have to worry about "needing" any one of them.
  
  

In an exclusive, private seminar that Eben Pagan and his mentor Wyatt Woodsmall created, learn how to learn faster, teach better, and train like a professional.

Professor Campbell explores questions such as: Have we lost our mythic heritage? Is our future contained in ur past? Where are our heroes? In this interview he reveals how myth can enrich our lives. Whole set is available from this seller. Two cassettes, two sides each.

Woven from Joseph Campbell’s previously unpublished work, this volume explores Judeo-Christian symbols and metaphors — and their misinterpretations — with the famed mythologist’s characteristic conversational warmth and accessible scholarship. Campbell’s insights highlight centuries of confusion between literal and metaphorical interpretations of Western religious symbols that are, he argues, perennially relevant keys to spiritual understanding and mystical revelation.

The first collection of Joseph Campbell’s writings and lectures on the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, a central focus of his celebrated scholarship, edited and introduced by Arthurian scholar Evans Lansing Smith, PhD, the chair of Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. In this new volume of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, editor Evans Lansing Smith collects Campbell’s writings and lectures on Arthurian legends, including his never-before-published master’s thesis on Arthurian myth, “A Study of the Dolorous Stroke.” Campbell’s writing captures the incredible stories of such figures as Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere as well as the larger patterns and meanings revealed in these myths. Merlin’s death and Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, for example, are not just vibrant stories but also central to the mythologist’s thinking.

The Arthurian myths opened the world of comparative mythology to Campbell, turning his attention to the Near and Far Eastern roots of myth. Calling the Arthurian romances the world’s first “secular mythology,” Campbell found metaphors in them for human stages of growth, development, and psychology. The myths exemplify the kind of love Campbell called amor, in which individuals become more fully themselves through connection. Campbell’s infectious delight in his discoveries makes this volume essential for anyone intrigued by the stories we tell—and the stories behind them.

Explore the magic of modern myth

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore—the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career. For the next sixty years, Campbell moved through the labyrinths of Joyce’s creations—writing and lecturing on Joyce using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis.

Arranged by Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words presents a wide range of Campbell’s writing and lectures on Joyce, which together form an illuminating running commentary on Joyce’s masterworks. Campbell’s visceral appreciation for all that was new in Joyce will delight the previously uninitiated, and perhaps intimidated, as well as longtime lovers of both Joyce and Campbell.

Joseph Campbell brought mythology to a mass audience. His bestselling books, including The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, are the rare blockbusters that are also scholarly classics.

While Campbell’s work reached wide and deep as he covered the world’s great mythological traditions, he never wrote a book on goddesses in world mythology. He did, however, have much to say on the subject. Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on goddesses, exploring the figures, functions, symbols, and themes of the feminine divine, following them through their transformations across cultures and epochs.

In this provocative volume, editor Safron Rossi—a goddess studies scholar, professor of mythology, and curator of collections at Opus Archives, which holds the Joseph Campbell archival manuscript collection and personal library—collects these lectures for the first time. In them, Campbell traces the evolution of the feminine divine from one Great Goddess to many, from Neolithic Old Europe to the Renaissance. He sheds new light on classical motifs and reveals how the feminine divine symbolizes the archetypal energies of transformation, initiation, and inspiration.

Galahad is  a word from the Old Testament that means Mountain of Testimony; [Sir  Galahad] is a mountain of testimony to Christ. The whole tradition of  the virgin knight as the Grail knight belongs to a Cistercian monastic  line.

Whereas the line of Wolfram is the secular line of a secular  knight [Parcival] who is married. And as we’re going to see it’s because  of his loyalty to his marriage under all circumstances and his courage  and resolution in combat, fearlessness and also integrity in love that  he becomes finally the Grail King. —Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell explores the historical roots of the Grail legend. He  discusses the development of the Roman Catholic Church in the Dark  Ages, and shows how new conceptions of love, marriage, and worship gave  rise to a secular “religion,” that of courtly romance. He then examines  the quest for the Holy Grail, both as an expression of these new ideas  of love and as a reaction against the dogmatic practices of the medieval  Church. Finally, in his own inimitable style, he recounts the Grail  Legend.

Joseph Campbell’s collected writings on dance and art, edited  and introduced by Nancy Allison, CMA, the founder of Jean Erdman Dance,  and including Campbell’s unpublished manuscript “Mythology and Form in  the Performing and Visual Arts,” the book he was working on when he  died.

Dance was one of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s  wide-ranging passions. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a leading figure in  modern dance who worked with Martha Graham and had Merce Cunningham in  her first company. When Campbell retired from teaching in 1972, he and  Erdman formed the Theater of the Open Eye, where for nearly fifteen  years they presented a wide array of dance and theater productions,  lectures, and performance pieces.

The Ecstasy of Being brings  together seven of Campbell’s previously uncollected articles on dance,  along with “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the  treatise that he was working on when he died, published here for the  first time.

In this new collection Campbell explores the rise  of modern art and dance in the twentieth century; delves into the work  and philosophy of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and others; and, as  always, probes the idea of art as “the funnel through which spirit is  poured into life.” This book offers the reader an accessible, yet  profound and provocative, insight into Campbell’s lifelong fascination  with the relationship of myth to aesthetic form and human psychology.

At the beginning of his career, Joseph Campbell developed a lasting  fascination with the cultures of the Far East, and explorations of  Buddhist and Hindu philosophy later became recurring motifs in his vast  body of work. However, Campbell had to wait until middle age to visit  the lands that inspired him so deeply. In 1954, he took a sabbatical  from his teaching position and embarked on a yearlong voyage through  India, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally Japan. Asian Journals combines the two hardcover editions of Campbell’s journals, Baksheesh & Brahman and Sake & Satori,  into one paperback volume, an edited day-to-day travel diary of the  people he met and the historical places he visited on his trek through  Asia. Along the way, he enlivens the narrative with his musings on  culture, religion, myth, and politics, describing both the trivial and  the sublime. As always, Campbell’s keen intellect and boundless  curiosity shine through in his lucid prose. From these pages, Campbell  enthusiasts will come away with a deeper understanding of the man, his  work, and his enduring legacy.

Joseph Campbell - A Joseph Campbell Companion Reflections on the Art of Living

A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history.

World  War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between  good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was  not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly  dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his  empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any  of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The  Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.

Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes  our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to  the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash  Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in  September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the  Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a  devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon”  capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

McMeekin  also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US  and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease  aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to  every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was  substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks,  trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to  industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed  the Red Army.

This unreciprocated American generosity gave  Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia,  from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.

The national bestseller, now available in a non-illustrated, standard format paperback edition

The Power of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. A preeminent scholar, writer, and teacher, he has had a profound influence on millions of people--including Star Wars creator George Lucas. To Campbell, mythology was the “song of the universe, the music of the spheres.” With Bill Moyers, one of America’s most prominent journalists, as his thoughtful and engaging interviewer, The Power of Myth touches on subjects from modern marriage to virgin births, from Jesus to John Lennon, offering a brilliant combination of intelligence and wit.

This extraordinary book reveals how the themes and symbols of ancient narratives continue to bring meaning to birth, death, love, and war. From stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome to traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, a broad array of themes are considered that together identify the universality of human experience across time and culture. An impeccable match of interviewer and subject, a timeless distillation of Campbell’s work, The Power of Myth continues to exert a profound influence on our culture.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell, in which the author discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths.

William Shakespeare may have been  the greatest playwright in the English language, but how does he measure  up as a historian? In this brilliant comparison between the events and  characters in Shakespeare's history plays and the actual events that  inspired them, acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich examines the nine  works that together amount to an epic masterpiece on England's most  fascinating period.

Beginning with the newly authenticated  "Edward III," and proceeding through "Richard II; Henry IV Parts I" and  "II; " and "Henry V; Henry VI Parts I, II," and "III; " and finally  "Richard III," Norwich holds the plays up to the light of history,  answering questions such as: Who was the real Falstaff? How realistic is  Shakespeare's depiction of Joan of Arc? At the same time, he provides a  vibrant narrative of medieval life from 1337 to 1485, the era of the  100 Years War and the Wars of the Roses. It was a time of uncertainty  and incessant warfare, a time during which the crown was constantly  contested, alliances were made and broken, peasants and townsmen alike  arose in revolt. Here was the raw material that Shakespeare used to  explore the role of the monarch and the meaning of statehood.

But  where does history stop and drama begin? Norwich concludes that  Shakespeare was a reliable enough historian. He was, however, always  willing to take liberties with the facts for the sake of his drama. As  Norwich explains, "In the vast majority of instances when Shakespeare  departed from the historic truth he did so for the best of all reasons:  to make a better play." Beyond assessing Shakespeare's accuracy, Norwich  provides the crucial knowledge that will enhance everyone's  appreciation and understanding of these glorious plays.

No one  but John Julius Norwich, praised for his three-part history of  Byanztium, could weave drama and history together into such a lucid and  absorbing account of a distant yet vitally important era. Illuminating  and accessible, Shakespeare's Kings is an indispensable companion  to Shakespeare's rich imagination -- an imagination that continues to  inform the way we view the past today.

“This is an essential book for those who wish to understand a city that remains a nexus of world affairs.” —Booklist (starred)

Jerusalem is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, fanaticism,  bloodshed, and coexistence, from King David to the 21st century, from  the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine  conflict.

How did this small, remote town become the Holy  City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle  East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this  ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and  character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the  wars, love affairs, and revelations of the men and women who created,  destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many  ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast  varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra,  Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the  ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern  times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence  of Arabia and Moshe Dayan.

In this masterful narrative, Simon  Sebag Montefiore brings the holy city to life and draws on the latest  scholarship, his own family history, and a lifetime of study to show  that the story of Jerusalem is truly the story of the world.

An absorbing and original narrative history of American capitalism

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE ECONOMIST

From  the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a  place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in  pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a  four-hundred-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition  through a series of Next Big Things -- the inventions, techniques, and  industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the  railroad, guns, radio, and banking to flight, suburbia, and sneakers,  culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the  twenty-first century. The result is a thrilling alternative history of  modern America that reframes events, trends, and people we thought we  knew through the prism of the value that, for better or for worse, this  nation holds dearest: capitalism. 

In a winning, accessible  style, Bhu Srinivasan boldly takes on four centuries of American  enterprise, revealing the unexpected connections that link them. We  learn how Andrew Carnegie's early job as a telegraph messenger boy paved  the way for his leadership of the steel empire that would make him one  of the nation's richest men; how the gunmaker Remington reinvented  itself in the postwar years to sell typewriters; how the inner workings  of the Mafia mirrored the trend of consolidation and regulation in more  traditional business; and how a 1950s infrastructure bill triggered a  series of events that produced one of America's most enduring brands:  KFC. Reliving the heady early days of Silicon Valley, we are reminded  that the start-up is an idea as old as America itself.

Entertaining, eye-opening, and sweeping in its reach, Americana is an exhilarating new work of narrative history.

In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe. But  traditional capitalism has been unable to solve problems like inequality  and poverty. In Muhammad Yunus' groundbreaking sequel to Banker to the Poor,  he outlines the concept of social business -- business where the  creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious  problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and  protecting the planet. Creating a World Without Poverty reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already underway.

Dark Psychology

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most  respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor  has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice  Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with  those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies,  and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete  biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”

Although  the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full  life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards.  Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far  as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of  paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the  years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and  championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and  speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from  the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of  this fits the term “simple.”

When Alice Schroeder met Warren  Buffett she was an insurance industry analyst and a gifted writer known  for her keen perception and business acumen. Her writings on finance  impressed him, and as she came to know him she realized that while much  had been written on the subject of his investing style, no one had moved  beyond that to explore his larger philosophy, which is bound up in a  complex personality and the details of his life. Out of this came his  decision to cooperate with her on the book about himself that he would  never write.

Never before has Buffett spent countless hours  responding to a writer’s questions, talking, giving complete access to  his wife, children, friends, and business associates—opening his files,  recalling his childhood. It was an act of courage, as The Snowball makes  immensely clear. Being human, his own life, like most lives, has been a  mix of strengths and frailties. Yet notable though his wealth may be,  Buffett’s legacy will not be his ranking on the scorecard of wealth; it  will be his principles and ideas that have enriched people’s lives. This  book tells you why Warren Buffett is the most fascinating American  success story of our time.

John Julius Norwich―called a “true master of narrative history” by Simon  Sebag Montefiore―returns with the book he has spent his distinguished  career wanting to write, A History of France: a portrait of the past two centuries of the country he loves best.

Beginning  with Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the first century BC, this  study of French history comprises a cast of legendary  characters―Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Joan of Arc and Marie  Antionette, to name a few―as Norwich chronicles France’s often violent,  always fascinating history. From the French Revolution―after which  neither France, nor the world, would be the same again―to the storming  of the Bastille, from the Vichy regime and the Resistance to the end of  the Second World War, A History of France is packed with heroes  and villains, battles and rebellion, stories so enthralling that Norwich  declared, “I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed writing a book  more.”

With his celebrated stylistic panache and expert command  of detail, Norwich writes in an inviting, intimate tone, and with a  palpable affection for France. One of our greatest contemporary  historians has deftly crafted a comprehensive yet concise portrait of  the country's historical sweep.

Robert Cialdini-Instant Influence

Critically acclaimed author John Julius Norwich weaves the turbulent  story of Sicily into a spellbinding narrative that places the island at  the crossroads of world history.

“Sicily,” said Goethe, “is  the key to everything.” It is the largest island in the Mediterranean,  the stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, the link between the Latin  West and the Greek East. Sicily’s strategic location has tempted Roman  emperors, French princes, and Spanish kings. The subsequent struggles to  conquer and keep it have played crucial roles in the rise and fall of  the world’s most powerful dynasties.

This classic  biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a  hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age  forty-two to become the youngest President in history.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New  Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw  open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook  8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House,  you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home  to wring the personality out of your clothes.”

The rest of this  book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the  years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail,  asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he  simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and  became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New  York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North  Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester  rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he  became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant  civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police  commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he  almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After  leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan  Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the  governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he  fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator  Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months  later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had  always craved.

His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so  surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated  it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of  TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief  executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man  of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one  in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”

In a sparkling, fast-paced narrative, esteemed historian John Julius  Norwich chronicles the turbulent events of fourteenth- and  fifteenth-century England that inspired Shakespeare's history plays. It  was a time of uncertainty and incessant warfare, a time during which the  crown was constantly contested, alliances were made and broken, and  peasants and townsmen alike arose in revolt. This was the raw material  of Shakespeare's dramas, and Norwich holds up his work to the light of  history to ask: Who was the real Falstaff? How accurate a historian was  the playwright? Shakespeare's Kings is a marvelous study of the Bard's method of spinning history into art, and a captivating portrait of the Middle Ages.

Winner of the National Book Award and now considered a classic, The House of Morgan is the most ambitious history ever written about an American banking dynasty. Acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as "brilliantly researched and written", the book tells the rich,  panoramic story of four generations of Morgans and the powerful,  secretive firms they spawned. It is the definitive account of the rise  of the modern financial world. A gripping history of banking and the  booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure  beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a  fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the  rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved.  Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business  archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece, a  compelling account of a remarkable institution and the men who ran it,  and an essential book for understanding the money and power behind the  major historical events of the last 150 years.

"A wonderful, splendid book - a book that should be ready by every  American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country,  its true history, and its hope for the future." (Howard Fast)

For  much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history  from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools -  with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street,  the home, and the workplace.

Everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Long before our own day of  self-help books offering twelve-step programs and other guides to attain  happiness, the philosophers of ancient Greece explored the riddle of  what makes a life worth living, producing a wide variety of ideas and  examples to follow. This rich tradition was recast by Diogenes Laertius  into an anthology, a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes, that  generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as  entertainment ever since the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,  first compiled in the third century AD, came to prominence in  Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of  what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient  Greece, covering a longer period of time and a larger number of  figures-from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus-than any  other ancient source.

One of The Economist's Best Books of the Year

A  gripping, meticulously researched account of Lenin’s fateful 1917 rail  journey from Zurich to Petrograd, where he ignited the Russian  Revolution and forever changed the world

In April 1917, as the  Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn  Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Lenin was  far away, exiled in Zurich. When the news reached him, Lenin  immediately resolved to return to Petrograd and lead the revolt. But to  get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help  from the deadliest of Russia’s adversaries. Millions of Russians at home  were suffering as a result of German aggression, and to accept German  aid―or even safe passage―would be to betray his homeland. Germany, for  its part, saw an opportunity to further destabilize Russia by allowing  Lenin and his small group of revolutionaries to return.

Now, in Lenin on the Train,  drawing on a dazzling array of sources and never-before-seen archival  material, renowned historian Catherine Merridale provides a riveting,  nuanced account of this enormously consequential journey―the train ride  that changed the world―as well as the underground conspiracy and  subterfuge that went into making it happen. Writing with the same  insight and formidable intelligence that distinguished her earlier  works, she brings to life a world of counter-espionage and intrigue,  wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism.

 When Lenin arrived in Petrograd’s now-famous Finland Station, he  delivered an explosive address to the impassioned crowds. Simple and  extreme, the text of this speech has been compared to such momentous  documents as Constantine’s edict of Milan and Martin Luther’s  ninety-five theses. It was the moment when the Russian revolution became  Soviet, the genesis of a system of tyranny and faith that changed the  course of Russia’s history forever and transformed the international  political climate.

The Moralia (Ancient Greek: Ἠθικά Ethika;  loosely translated as "Morals" or "Matters relating to customs and  mores") is a group of manuscripts dating from the 10th-13th centuries,  traditionally ascribed to the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea.[1] The eclectic collection contains 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They provide insights into Roman and Greek life, but often are also timeless observations in their own right. Many  generations of Europeans have read or imitated them, including Michel de Montaigne and the Renaissance Humanists and Enlightenment philosophers.

“Lives” is a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans by the  ancient Greek historian Plutarch who lived during the first and second  century AD. The work consists of twenty-three paired biographies, one  Greek and one Roman, and four unpaired, which explore the influence of  character on the lives and destinies of important persons of Ancient  Greece and Rome. Rather than providing strictly historical accounts,  Plutarch was most concerned with capturing his subjects common moral  virtues and failings. This volume includes the complete “Lives” in which  you will find the biographies of the following persons: Theseus,  Romulus, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Solon, Poplicola, Themistocles,  Camillus, Pericles, Fabius, Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Timoleon, Æmilius  Paulus, Pelopidas, Marcellus, Aristides, Marcus Cato, Philopœmen,  Flamininus, Pyrrhus, Caius Marius, Lysander, Sylla, Cimon, Lucullus,  Nicias, Crassus, Sertorius, Eumenes, Agesilaus, Pompey, Alexander,  Cæsar, Phocion, Cato the younger, Agis, Cleomenes, Tiberius Gracchus,  Caius Gracchus, Demosthenes, Cicero, Demetrius, Antony, Dion, Marcus  Brutus, Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho. Plutarch’s “Lives” remains  today as one of the most important historical accounts of the classical  period. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s  landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty,  probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t  understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension,  and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many  things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.  What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of  things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and  flourish. 

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even  necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner.  The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists  shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and  protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the  nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call  “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social  policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write  your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the  sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by  trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal  finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to  the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of  ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are  loud and clear.

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.

Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.

Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The  House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize  as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D.  Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book  Critics Circle Award finalist.

New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky  physicist is “a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great  minds of the century” (The New York Review of Books). Raised  in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was  irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of  scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of  quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the  Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man  held his own among the nation’s greatest minds. There, Feynman turned  theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945,  when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just  getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the  forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman’s work and life  in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the  scientists who follow in his footsteps.

Called a great book worthy of a  great man, this definitive biography of the Commander in Chief of the  Pacific Fleet in World War II is considered the best book ever written  about Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Highly respected by both the civilian  and naval communities, Nimitz was sometimes overshadowed by more  colorful warriors in the Pacific such as MacArthur and Halsey.

Potter's  lively and authoritative style fleshes out Admiral Nimitz's personality  to help listeners appreciate the contributions he made as the principle  architect of Japan's defeat. Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl  Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt named Nimitz the  commander of the Pacific Fleet.

An experienced and respected  leader, Nimitz was also an effective military strategist who directed US  forces as they closed in on Japan, beginning in May and June of 1942  with the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Nimitz was promoted to the  newly created rank of fleet admiral in 1944 and became the naval  equivalent to the army's General Dwight Eisenhower. The book covers his  full life: from a poverty-stricken childhood to postwar appointments as  chief of naval operations and UN mediator, and candidly reveals Nimitz's  opinions of Halsey, Kimmel, King, Spruance, MacArthur, Forrestal,  Roosevelt, and Truman.

A brilliant and concise account of the lives and ideas of the great philosophers, from Plato to Dewey.

Few  write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a  splendid example of his eminently readable scholarship. Durant’s  insight and wit never cease to dazzle; The Story of Philosophy is a key book for anyone who wishes to survey the history and development of philosophical ideas in the Western world.

2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the  computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of  the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation  really happens.

What were the talents that allowed certain  inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into  disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some  succeed and others fail?

In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins  with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer  programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that  created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan  Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert  Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry  Page.

This is the story of how their minds worked and what made  them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to  collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more  creative.

For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.

Julius Caesar wrote his exciting Commentaries during some of the most  grueling campaigns ever undertaken by a Roman army. The Gallic Wars and  The Civil Wars constitute the greatest series of military dispatches  ever written. As literature, they are representative of the finest  expressions of Latin prose in its "golden" age, a benchmark of elegant  style and masculine brevity imitated by young schoolboys for centuries.

One  of the most daring and brilliant generals of all time, Julius Caesar  combined the elements of tactical genius with the shrewdness of a master  politician. He was an astute judge of men's character - their strengths  and weaknesses. Whenever possible, he exercised restraint and mercy  even when his worst enemies were in his power. But he also knew when and  how to mete out stern punishment and his swift retaliations became a  hallmark of his career. With his charismatic leadership, his powerful  intellect and his magnetic personal charm, Julius Caesar became the idol  of men and women everywhere. The fanatic loyalty of his troops and the  adulation of the Roman public propelled him to the pinnacle of power.  Historian Will Durant called him "the most complete man that antiquity  produced."

Follow along in this recording as Julius Caesar in 50  B.C. undertakes the awesome enterprise of subduing savage Gaul, an area  roughly the size of Texas. That task was barely completed before his  enemies in Rome struck, igniting the bloody Civil War that engulfed most  of the Roman Empire and afterward left Caesar in supreme power.

Wilson is a sophisticated and marvelously humane writer. His vision is a  liberating one, and a reader of this splendid book comes away with a  sense of the kinship that exists among the people, animals, and insects  that share the planet. (New Yorker 20041219)

Compellingly  interesting and enormously important...The most stimulating, the most  provocative, and the most illuminating work of nonfiction I have read in  some time.
--William McPherson (Washington Post Book World 20050301)

A  work of high intellectual daring...Here is an accomplished biologist  explaining, in notably clear and unprevaricating language, what he  thinks his subject now has to offer to the understanding of man and  society...The implications of Wilson's thesis are rather considerable,  for if true, no system of political, social, religious or ethical  thought can afford to ignore it.
--Nicholas Wade (New Republic 20071124)

Twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvard University Press has re-released Edward O. Wilson's classic work, On Human Nature.  A double Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilson is a writer of effortless grace  and stylish succinctness and this is one of his finest, most important  books...[A] highly influential, elegantly written book.
--Robin McKie (The Observer )

A seminal, groundbreaking, informative, thought-provoking, enduringly valuable, and highly recommended read. (Bookwatch )

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's  extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history.  Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw,  others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put  together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western  communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But  when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates  of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number  of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower  than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen  Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal

"Anthony Powell  once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking  enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond  dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion

"The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition  Kindle Edition

by                 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

Featuring extensive revisions to  the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue - bringing the book  completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade  and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse - this compact,  original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the  great historical events of the last 50 years.

Combining  historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin  draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders  and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of  Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context  of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the  present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post-Soviet Russia,  and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been  predicted - that the world's largest police state, with several million  troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would  liquidate itself with barely a whimper.

Throughout the book,  Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently  released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture  of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely  committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist  renewal was leading to the system's liquidation" - and more or less  going along with it.

At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled  restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek  dissolution".

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany

Nazism  triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United  States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire  the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model,  James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact  on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation  of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation  laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the  Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted  otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained,  significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks  at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices,  it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too  harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi  policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends the understanding of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.

From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier  countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine  Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.

Robert Kaplan first  visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the  country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest  corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued  was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country—a  country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that  Russia poses to Europe. In Europe’s Shadow is a vivid blend of  memoir, travelogue, journalism, and history, a masterly work thirty  years in the making—the story of a journalist coming of age, and a  country struggling to do the same. Through the lens of one country,  Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of  fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust, and more.

Here Kaplan illuminates the fusion of the Latin West and the Greek East  that created Romania, the country that gave rise to Ion Antonescu,  Hitler’s chief foreign accomplice during World War II, and the country  that was home to the most brutal strain of Communism under Nicolae  Ceaușescu. Romania past and present are rendered in cinematic prose: the  ashen faces of citizens waiting in bread lines in Cold War–era  Bucharest; the Bărăgan Steppe, laid bare by centuries of foreign  invasion; the grim labor camps of the Black Sea Canal; the majestic  Gothic church spires of Transylvania and Maramureş. Kaplan finds himself  in dialogue with the great thinkers of the past, and with the Romanians  of today, the philosophers, priests, and politicians—those who struggle  to keep the flame of humanism alive in the era of a resurgent Russia.

Upon his return to Romania in 2013 and 2014, Kaplan found the country  transformed yet again—now a traveler’s destination shaped by Western  tastes, yet still emerging from the long shadows of Hitler and Stalin. In Europe’s Shadow is the story of an ideological and geographic frontier—and the book you  must read in order to truly understand the crisis Europe faces, from  Russia and from within.

Tracing the extraordinary trajectory of Julius Caesar's life, Adrian  Goldsworthy covers not only the great Roman emperor's accomplishments as  charismatic orator, conquering general, and powerful dictator but also  lesser-known chapters. Ultimately, Goldsworthy realizes the full  complexity of Caesar's character and shows why his political and  military leadership continues to resonate some 2,000 years later. In  this landmark biography, Goldsworthy examines Caesar as a military  leader, as well as his other roles, and places his subject firmly within  the context of Roman society in the first century B.C.

“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times

This  Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic  rise  and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria  and China to the  atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from  the Japanese perspective, The  Rising Sun is, in the author’s  words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the  flood of the most  overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling,   disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.”

In weaving together  the historical facts  and human drama leading up to and culminating in  the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts  a riveting and unbiased narrative  history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we  are to draw any  conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons  in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.”

“Unbelievably  rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book  are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest  reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek

A blend of Manhunt, Killing Pablo, and Zero Dark Thirty,  Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century's sensational investigative high-tech  thriller - soon to be a major motion picture from Sony - chronicles a  riveting chapter in the 20th-century drug wars: the exclusive inside  story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that  captured El Chapo - the world's most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the  law for more than a decade.

Every generation has a  larger-than-life criminal: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger,  Al Capone, John Gotti, Pablo Escobar. But each of these notorious  lawbreakers had a "white hat" in pursuit: Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Eliot  Ness, Steve Murphy. For notorious drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo  Guzmán-Loera - El Chapo - that lawman is former Drug Enforcement  Administration Special Agent Andrew Hogan.

In 2006, fresh out of  the DEA Academy, Hogan heads west to Arizona, where he immediately  plunges into a series of gripping undercover adventures, all unknowingly  placing him on the trail of Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a  Forbes billionaire, and public enemy number one in the United  States. Six years later, as head of the DEA's Sinaloa Cartel desk in  Mexico City, Hogan finds his life and Chapo's are, ironically, on  parallel paths: They're both obsessed with the details.

In a recasting of the classic American Western on the global stage, Hunting El Chapo takes us on Hogan's quest to achieve the seemingly impossible, from  infiltrating El Chapo's inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt  with an elite brigade of trusted Mexican marines - racing door to door  through the cartel's stronghold and ultimately bringing the elusive and  murderous kingpin to justice.

This cinematic crime story  following the relentless investigative work of Hogan and his team  unfolds at breakneck speed, taking the listener behind the scenes of one  of the most sophisticated and dangerous counternarcotics operations in  the history of the United States and Mexico.

Though it is the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam remains  shrouded by ignorance and fear. What is the essence of this ancient  faith? Is it a religion of peace or war? How does Allah differ from the  God of Jews and Christians? Can an Islamic state be founded on  democratic values such as pluralism and human rights? A writer and  scholar of comparative religions, Reza Aslan has earned international  acclaim for the passion and clarity he has brought to these questions.  In No god but God, challenging the "clash of civilizations"  mentality that has distorted our view of Islam, Aslan explains this  critical faith in all its complexity, beauty, and compassion.

Contrary  to popular perception in the West, Islam is a religion firmly rooted in  the prophetic traditions of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Aslan  begins with a vivid account of the social and religious milieu in which  the Prophet Muhammad lived. The revelations that Muhammad received in  Mecca and Medina, which were recorded in the Quran, became the  foundation for a radically more egalitarian community, the likes of  which had never been seen before.

According to Reza Aslan, we are now living in the era of "the Islamic Reformation". No god but God is a persuasive and elegantly written account of the roots of this reformation and the future of Islamic faith.

The surprising rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story of how Michael Jackson grew a billion-dollar business.

Michael  Jackson is known by many as the greatest entertainer of all time, but  he was also a revolutionary when it came to business. In addition to  famously buying the Beatles' publishing catalogue, Jackson was one of  the first pop stars to launch his own clothing line, record label,  sneakers, and video games - creating a fundamental shift in the  monetization of fame and paving the way for entertainer-entrepreneurs  like Jay Z and Diddy. All told, Jackson earned more than $1.1 billion in  his solo career, and the assets he built in life have earned more than  $700 million in the five years since his death - more than any other  solo music act over that time.

Michael Jackson, Inc.  reveals the incredible rise, fall, and rise again of Michael Jackson's  fortune - driven by the unmatched perfectionism of the King of Pop. Forbes senior editor Zack O'Malley Greenburg uncovers never-before-told  stories from interviews with more than 100 people, including music  industry veterans Berry Gordy, John Branca, and Walter Yetnikoff;  artists 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow, and Jon Bon Jovi; and members of the  Jackson family. Other insights come from court documents and Jackson's  private notes, some of them previously unpublished. Through Greenburg's  novelistic telling, a clear picture emerges of Jackson's early years,  his rise to international superstardom, his decline - fueled by demons  internal and external, as well as the dissolution of the team that  helped him execute his best business moves - and, finally, his financial  life after death.

Underlying Jackson's unique history is the  complex but universal tale of the effects of wealth and fame on the  human psyche. A valuable case study for generations of entertainers to  come and for anyone interested in show business, Michael Jackson, Inc. tells the story of a man whose financial feats, once obscured by his late-life travails, have become an enduring legacy.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the number-one New York Times best seller Outliers, reinvents the audiobook in this immersive production of Talking to Strangers, a powerful examination of our interactions with people we don’t know.

How  did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville  Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual  assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the  way we relate to each other that isn't true?

While tackling  these questions, Malcolm Gladwell was not solely writing a book for the  page. He was also producing for the ear. In the audiobook version of Talking to Strangers,  you’ll hear the voices of people he interviewed - scientists,  criminologists, military psychologists. Court transcripts are brought to  life with re-enactments. You actually hear the contentious arrest of  Sandra Bland by the side of the road in Texas. As Gladwell revisits the  deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, and the suicide  of Sylvia Plath, you hear directly from many of the players in these  real-life tragedies. There’s even a theme song - Janelle Monae’s “Hell  You Talmbout”.

Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with  the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know.  And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting  conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our  lives and our world.

The audiobook edition of Talking to Strangers was an instant number-one best seller, and was one of the most  pre-ordered audiobooks in history. It seamlessly marries audiobooks and  podcasts, creating a completely new and real listening experience.

The general public has a glorified  view of the pursuit of scientific research. However, the idealized  perception of science as a rule-based, methodical system for  accumulating facts could not be further from the truth. Modern science  involves the idiosyncratic, often bumbling search for understanding in  uncharted territories, full of wrong turns, false findings, and the  occasional remarkable success.

In his sequel to Ignorance (Oxford University Press, 2012), Stuart Firestein shows us that the  scientific enterprise is riddled with mistakes and errors - and that  this is a good thing! Failure: Why Science Is So Successful delves  into the origins of scientific research as a process that relies upon  trial and error, one which inevitably results in a hefty dose of  failure. In fact, scientists throughout history have relied on failure  to guide their research, viewing mistakes as a necessary part of the  process. Citing both historical and contemporary examples, Firestein  strips away the distorted view of science as infallible to provide the  public with a rare, inside glimpse of the messy realities of the  scientific process.

An insider's view of how science is actually  carried out, this book will delight anyone with an interest in science,  from aspiring scientists to curious general listeners. Accessible and  entertaining, Failure illuminates the greatest and most productive adventure of human history, with all the missteps along the way.

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

No  recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and  filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial  intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading  computer scientist, now reveals its turbulent history and the recent  surge of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears that  surround AI.

In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to  the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent - really  - are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually  do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become,  and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the  way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine  learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors,  and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements. She  meets with fellow experts like Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive  scientist and Pulitzer Prize - winning author of the modern classic Gödel, Escher, Bach,  who explains why he is “terrified” about the future of AI. She explores  the profound disconnect between the hype and the actual achievements in  AI, providing a clear sense of what the field has accomplished and how  much farther it has to go.

Interweaving stories about the science and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and approachable accounts of the  most interesting and provocative modern work in AI, flavored with  Mitchell’s humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book will  prove an indispensable guide to understanding today’s AI, its quest for  “human-level” intelligence, and its impacts on all of our futures.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

When Lee Kuan Yew speaks, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs listen.

Lee,  the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from  1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the  world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming  Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique  perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents  from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House;  British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair have  recognized his wisdom; and business leaders from Rupert Murdoch to Rex  Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, have praised his accomplishments.

This  book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee's  voluminous published writings and presents them in an engaging question  and answer format. Lee offers his assessment of China's future,  asserting, among other things, that "China will want to share this  century as co-equals with the U.S." He affirms the United States'  position as the world's sole superpower but expresses dismay at the  vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing  with China and goes on to discuss India'sfuture, Islamic terrorism,  economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy.

Lee  does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on  multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market.  This audiobook belongs on the reading list of every world leader -  including the one who took the oath of office on January 20, 2013.

The special assistant to Boris Yeltsin radically alters the traditional  image of Lenin with a biography based on secret Soviet archives,  revealing the Founding Father as a cruel, totalitarian leader who was  responsible for the worst excesses of the Soviet state.

The first full account, based on access to key players who have never  before spoken, of the Munich Massacre and the Israeli response–a lethal,  top secret, thirty-year-long antiterrorism campaign to track down the  killers.
1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black  September group murder eleven Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million  people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that  inaugurates the modern age of terror and remains a scar on the  collective conscience of the world.
Back in Israel, Prime Minister  Golda Meir vows to track down those responsible and, in Menachem Begin’s  words, “run these criminals and murderers off the face of the earth.” A  secret Mossad unit, code named Caesarea, is mobilized, a list of  targets drawn up. Thus begins the Israeli response–a mission that  unfolds not over months but over decades. The Mossad has never spoken  about this operation. No one has known the real story. Until now.
Award-winning  journalist Aaron Klein’s incisive and riveting account tells for the  first time the full story of Munich and the Israeli counterterrorism  operation it spawned. With unprecedented access to Mossad agents and an  unparalleled knowledge of Israeli intelligence, Klein peels back the  layers of myth and misinformation that have permeated previous books,  films, and magazine articles about the “shadow war” against Black  September and other terrorist groups.
Spycraft, secret diplomacy, and  fierce detective work abound in a story with more drama than any  fictional thriller. Burning questions are at last answered, including  who was killed and who was not, how it was done, which targets were hit  and which were missed. Truths are revealed: the degree to which the  Mossad targeted nonaffiliated Black September terrorists for  assassination, the length and full scope of the operation (far greater  than previously suspected), retributive acts against Israel, and much  more.
Finally, Klein shows that the Israeli response to Munich was  not simply about revenge, as is popularly believed. By illuminating the  tactical and strategic purposes of the Israeli operation, Striking Back  allows us to draw profoundly relevant lessons from one of the most  important counterterrorism campaigns in history.

The first comprehensive yet  accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present  day, from Daniel Gordis, "one of the most respected Israel analysts" (The Forward) living and writing in Jerusalem.

Israel  is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused  its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why  does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More  pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in  its future?

We cannot answer these questions until we  understand Israel's people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes  and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though  Israel's history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully  communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift  to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the  Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of  Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people's story  and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates  how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse - but  also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long  history of Israel's deepening isolation.

With Israel,  public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account  of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex  nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and  rigorous, Israel sheds light on Israel's past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn.

In The Story of Christianity: Volume 1, Justo L. González, author of the highly praised three-volume History of Christian Thought,  presents a narrative history of Christianity, from the Early Church to  the Dawn of the Protestant Reformation. From Jesus’ faithful apostles to  the early reformist John Wycliffe, González skillfully traces core  theological issues and developments within the various traditions of the  church, including major events outside of Europe, such as the Spanish  and Portuguese conquest of the New World. This updated and expanded  edition incorporates recent archaeological discoveries about the life of  Early Christian Communities, as well as important contemporary research  revealing the significant role of women throughout the history of the  church. With lively storytelling, The Story of Christianity provides  a fascinating and panoramic history of the dramatic events, colorful  characters, and revolutionary ideas that shaped the first fifteen  centuries of the church.

Dubbed the "pirate queen" by the Vatican and Spain's Philip II,  Elizabeth I was feared and admired by her enemies. Extravagant,  whimsical, and hot-tempered, Elizabeth was the epitome of power. Her  visionary accomplishments were made possible by her daring merchants,  gifted rapscallion adventurers, astronomer philosophers, and her  stalwart Privy Council, including Sir William Cecil, Sir Francis  Walsingham, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. All these men contributed their vast  genius, power, greed, and expertise to the advancement of England.

In The Pirate Queen,  historian Susan Ronald offers a fresh look at Elizabeth I, focusing on  her uncanny instinct for financial survival and the superior intellect  that propelled and sustained her rise. The foundation of Elizabeth's  empire was built on a carefully choreographed strategy whereby piracy  transformed England from an impoverished state on the fringes of Europe  into the first building block of an empire that covered two-fifths of  the world.

Based on a wealth of historical sources and thousands  of personal letters between Elizabeth and her merchant adventurers,  advisers, and royal "cousins", The Pirate Queen tells the  thrilling story of Elizabeth and the swashbuckling mariners who  terrorized the seas, planted the seedlings of an empire, and amassed  great wealth for themselves and the Crown.

"Human beings have always been mythmakers.” So begins best-selling writer  Karen Armstrong’s concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what  it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She  takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right  up to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last five hundred years  and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the  history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts  to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other.  Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by  authors from around the world, Armstrong’s characteristically insightful  and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking  introduction to myth in the broadest sense—and explains why if we  dismiss it, we do so at our peril.

“[A] tale of power, perseverance and passion . . . a great story in the hands of a master storyteller.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns   with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary   story of an obscure German princess who became one of the most   remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. Born into a   minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia   by sheer determination. For thirty-four years, the government, foreign   policy, cultural development, and welfare of the Russian people were  in  her hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars, and the   tidal wave of political change and violence churned up by the French   Revolution. Catherine’s family, friends, ministers, generals, lovers,   and enemies—all are here, vividly brought to life. History offers few   stories richer than that of Catherine the Great. In this book, an   eternally fascinating woman is returned to life.

“[A] compelling portrait not just of a Russian titan, but also of a flesh-and-blood woman.”—Newsweek
 
“An absorbing, satisfying biography.”—Los Angeles Times

“Juicy and suspenseful.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A great life, indeed, and irresistibly told.”—Salon
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times • The Washington Post • USA Today • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • Salon • Vogue • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Providence Journal • Washington Examiner • South Florida Sun-Sentinel • BookPage • Bookreporter • Publishers Weekly

BONUS: This edition contains a Catherine the Great reader's guide.

'A learned, wise, wonderfully written single volume history of a civilisation that I knew I should know more about' Tom Holland
'Masterful and engrossing...well-paced, eminently readable and  well-timed. A must-read for those who want – and need – to know about  the China of yesterday, today and tomorrow' Peter Frankopan

China’s  story is extraordinarily rich and dramatic. Now Michael Wood, one of  the UK's pre-eminent historians, brings it all together in a major new  one-volume history of China that is essential reading for anyone who  wants to understand its burgeoning role in our world today.

 China is the oldest living civilisation on earth, but its history is  still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's  sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and  personal stories, woven together with the author’s own travel journals,  is an enthralling account of China’s 4000-year-old tradition, taking in  life stationed on the Great Wall or inside the Forbidden City.  The story is enriched with the latest archaeological and documentary  discoveries; correspondence and court cases going back to the Qin and Han dynasties; family letters from soldiers in the real-life Terracotta Army; stories from Silk Road merchants and Buddhist travellers, along with memoirs and diaries of  emperors, poets and peasants. 

In the modern era, the book is full of new insights, with the electrifying manifestos of the feminist revolutionaries Qiu Jin and He Zhen, extraordinary eye-witness accounts of the Japanese invasion, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao, and fascinating newly published sources for the great turning points in China’s modern history, including the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989, and the new order of  President Xi Jinping.

A compelling portrait of a single civilisation over an immense period  of time, the book is full of intimate detail and colourful voices,  taking us from the desolate Mongolian steppes to the ultra-modern world of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.  It also asks what were the forces that have kept China together for so  long? Why was China overtaken by the west after the 18th century? What  lies behind China’s extraordinary rise today? The Story of China tells a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity and deep  humanity; a portrait of a country that will be of the greatest  importance to the world in the twenty-first century.

'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the  twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished … Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be … The  nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians  have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to  write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language'  Sunday Telegraph

An ideal introduction to the history of Buddhism. Andrew Skilton - a  writer on and practitioner of Buddhism - explains the development of the  basic concepts of Buddhism during its 2,500 years of history and  describes its varied developments in India, Buddhism’s homeland, as well  as its spread across Asia, from Mongolia to Sri Lanka and from Japan to  the Middle East. A fascinating insight into the historical progress of  one of the world’s great religions.

"..an excellent synopsis of  current scholarship..."—Alan Sponberg, Professor of Asian Philosophy and  Religion, University of Montana

Of all our great presidents,  Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of  office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt”, he  was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to  put him up in their palaces. “If I see another king,” he joked, “I think  I shall bite him.”

Had TR won his historic “Bull Moose”  campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William  Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his  international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of  60, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the  White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the  United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially  just.

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex,  is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive.  Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a  big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the  last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What  other president has written 40 books, hunted lions, founded a third  political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown  river longer than the Rhine?

Misha Glenny's groundbreaking  study of global organized crime is now the inspiration for an eight-part  AMC crime drama starring James Norton (War and Peace), Juliet Rylance, and David Strathairn.

With  the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the  deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and  entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by dreams of newly opened  markets. But no one could have foreseen that the greatest success story  to arise from these events would be the worldwide rise of organized  crime. Today, it is estimated that illegal trade accounts for one-fifth  of the global GDP.

In this fearless and wholly authoritative  investigation of the seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares,  veteran reporter Misha Glenny travels across five continents to speak  with participants from every level of the global underworld - police,  victims, politicians, and even the criminals themselves. What follows is  a groundbreaking, propulsive look at an unprecedented phenomenon from a  savvy, street-wise guide.

At its height, Renaissance Florence was a center of enormous wealth,  power, and influence. A republican city-state funded by trade and  banking, its often bloody political scene was dominated by rich  mercantile families, the most famous of which were the Medici. This  enthralling book charts the family's huge influence on the political,  economic, and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s  with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici,  it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most  remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the  Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence's slide into decay and  bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.

From the best-selling author of Islam: A Short History comes an important addition to the Eminent Lives book series. A former Roman Catholic nun and winner of a Muslim Public  Affairs Council Media Award, Karen Armstrong shows how Muhammad's life  can teach us a great deal about our world. More is known about Muhammad  than any other major religion founder, yet he remains mysterious.

Born  in 570 CE, he spent six decades spreading his message of peace and  compassion. Yet for many people today, their knowledge of Muhammad is  rife with misconceptions and misinformation, often fueled by bigotry.  Armstrong sets the record straight, shattering the myth that Islam is a  religion of cruelty and violence. One of the world's leading religious  experts, Armstrong is a deeply respected voice in the continuous  struggle for interfaith understanding. Her cogent assessment of  Muhammad's genius and insightful summary of his authentic beliefs are  priceless in this modern world troubled by religious extremism and  intolerance.

Andrei Lankov has gone where few  outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived  as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it  for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts  to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea,  Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric  surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible  history of the nation, he turns his focus to what North Korea is, what  its leadership thinks, and how its people cope with living in such an  oppressive and poor place. He argues that North Korea is not irrational,  and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all  odds. A living political fossil, it clings to existence in the face of  limited resources and a zombie economy, manipulating great powers  despite its weakness. Its leaders are not ideological zealots or madmen,  but perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can  be found in the modern world. Even though they preside over a failed  state, they have successfully used diplomacy - including nuclear threats  - to extract support from other nations. But while the people in charge  have been ruthless and successful in holding on to power, Lankov goes  on to argue that this cannot continue forever, since the old system is  slowly falling apart. In the long run, with or without reform, the  regime is unsustainable. Lankov contends that reforms, if attempted,  will trigger a dramatic implosion of the regime. They will not prolong  its existence.

Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive.

Translated by W. E. D. Rouse, The March of the Ten Thousand is  one of the most admired and widely read pieces of ancient literature to  come down to us. Xenophon employs a very simple, straightforward style  to describe what is probably the most exciting military adventure ever  undertaken. When Cyrus, brother to the Great King of Persia, attempts to  overthrow his feckless sibling in 401 B.C., he employs a Greek  mercenary army of 10,000 hoplites as the core of his rebellious force.  Xenophon, who seeks the advice of Socrates before joining, is among the  common soldiers. Inexorably, Cyrus and his huge army march southward  1,500 miles from the coast of Ionia all the way to Babylon, and there  give battle to Artaxerxes, the Great King. Although the battle is soon  decided in favor of Cyrus, the would-be usurper is killed while in  pursuit of the king. Meanwhile, the Greeks are victorious on their part  of the battlefield and await the return of Cyrus and his instructions.

By  the next morning, they realize that Cyrus is dead and that his allies  have melted away in the night, leaving them alone trapped behind enemy  lines within a few miles of the Persian capital. And only a few miles  distant lies an enormous Persian army with vengeance in mind. Despair  deepens when the Greek officer corps is treacherously murdered during  peace talks. Alone, leaderless and hopelessly outnumbered, the Greeks  nevertheless elect new officers.

Xenophon steps into the pages of  history with his magnificent rallying speeches and selfless acts of  courage. Follow one of history's most spirited bands of soldiers as they  fight and maneuver their way through 1,500 miles of hostile territory  seething with adversaries. It is an epic of courage, faith and  democratic principle.

Widely recognized as the best biography of the Prophet (peace and  blessings of Allah be upon him) in English, Dr. Martin Lings'  award-winning book is now available in audio, read by well-known  narrator Sean Barrett. This excellent audiobook is the first of its kind  and has been selected by a number of organizations as a worthy  introduction to the life of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of  Allah be upon him), including Muslim Welfare House, London, and the  Muslim Council of Britain.

Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent,  parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world  while ignoring the other. As Europeans colonized the globe, the two  world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other  one under. The West hardly noticed, but the Islamic world found the  encounter profoundly disrupting.

This book reveals the parallel  "other" narrative of world history to help us make sense of today's  world conflicts. Ansary traces the history of the Muslim world from pre-Mohammedan days through 9/11, introducing people, events, empires,  legends, and religious disputes, both in terms of what happened and how  it was understood and interpreted.

In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's  leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the  vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and  insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our  lives. The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from  the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the  opposing strategies of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, the  strategic advice of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, the great military  innovations of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, the  grounding of revolutionary strategy in class struggles by Marx, the  insights into corporate strategy found in Peter Drucker and Alfred  Sloan, and the contributions of the leading social scientists working on  strategy today. The core issue at the heart of strategy, the author  notes, is whether it is possible to manipulate and shape our environment  rather than simply become the victim of forces beyond one's control.  Time and again, Freedman demonstrates that the inherent unpredictability  of this environment - subject to chance events, the efforts of  opponents, the missteps of friends - provides strategy with its  challenge and its drama. Armies or corporations or nations rarely move  from one predictable state of affairs to another, but instead feel their  way through a series of states, each one not quite what was  anticipated, requiring a reappraisal of the original strategy, including  its ultimate objective. Thus the picture of strategy that emerges in  this book is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting  point, not the end point. A brilliant overview of the most prominent  strategic theories in history, from David's use of deception against  Goliath, to the modern use of game theory in economics, this masterful  volume sums up a lifetime of reflection on strategy.

Now in trade paperback, a gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history, and the  end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's readable and comprehensive  account of the battle between Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire,  and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the  period in history that was a precursor to the current jihad between the  West and the Middle East.

William Shakespeare's gripping  play showed Caesar's assassination to be an amateur and idealistic  affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary  operation, a generals' plot put together by Caesar's disaffected  officers and designed with precision. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key  players, but they had the help of a third man - Decimus. He was the  mole in Caesar's entourage, one of Caesar's leading generals, and a  lifelong friend. It was he, not Brutus, who truly betrayed Caesar.

Caesar's  assassins saw him as a military dictator who wanted to be king. He  threatened a permanent change in the Roman way of life and in the power  of senators. The assassins rallied support among the common people, but  they underestimated Caesar's soldiers, who flooded Rome. The assassins  were vanquished; their beloved Republic became the Roman Empire.

From a renowned historian comes a  groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution - a number  one international best seller - that explores the ways in which biology  and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it  means to be "human".

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one - Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most  books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a  biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this  highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the  appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans  have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives,  connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine  specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari  also compels us to look ahead, because, over the last few decades,  humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed  life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to  design not only the world around us but also ourselves. Where is this  leading us, and what do we want to become?

This provocative and  insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential for aficionados  of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon  Moalem.

In Masters of Command, Barry Strauss compares the way the  three greatest generals of the ancient world waged war and draws lessons  from their experiences that apply on and off the battlefield.

ALEXANDER,  HANNIBAL, CAESAR—each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the  battlefield to decide whom to fight, when, and why; to know what victory  was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the  lands he conquered. Each general had to be a battlefield tactician and  more: a statesman, a strategist, a leader.

Tactics change,  weapons change, but war itself remains much the same throughout the  centuries, and a great warrior must know how to define success.  Understanding where each of these three great (but flawed) commanders  succeeded and failed can serve anyone who wants to think strategically  or who has to demonstrate leadership. In Masters of Command Barry  Strauss explains the qualities these great generals shared, the keys to  their success, from ambition and judgment to leadership itself.

Cicero How to Win Elections & How to Run a Country

'His passion was for glory only, and in that he was insatiable'

Although written over four hundred years after Alexander’s death, Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander is the most reliable account of the man and his achievements we have.  Arrian’s own experience as a military commander gave him unique insights  into the life of the world’s greatest conqueror. He tells of  Alexander’s violent suppression of the Theban rebellion, his total  defeat of Persia, and his campaigns through Egypt, India and Babylon –  establishing new cities and destroying others in his path. While  Alexander emerges from this record as an unparalleled and charismatic  leader, Arrian succeeds brilliantly in creating an objective and fully  rounded portrait of a man of boundless ambition, who was exposed to the  temptations of power and worshipped as a god in his own lifetime.

Aubrey  de Sélincourt’s vivid translation is accompanied by J. R. Hamilton’s  introduction, which discusses Arrian’s life and times, his synthesis of  other classical sources and the composition of Alexander’s army. The  edition also includes maps, a list for further reading and a detailed  index.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading  publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more  than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of  the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.  Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by  introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary  authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning  translators.

In this dazzling portrait of Rome’s first imperial dynasty, Tom Holland  traces the astonishing century-long story of the rise and fall of the  Julio-Claudians—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.  Capturing both the brilliant allure of their rule and the blood-steeped  shadows cast by their crimes, Dynasty travels from the great  capital rebuilt in marble to the dank and barbarian forests of Germany.   Populated by a spectacular cast: murderers and metrosexuals, adulterers  and Druids, scheming grandmothers and reluctant gladiators, it vividly  recreates the world of Rome after Julius Caesar. A tale of rule and  ruination, Dynasty is the story of a family that transformed and  stupefied the western world and that continues to cast a mesmerizing  spell across the millennia.

The ninth edition of this widely  acclaimed text has been extensively revised to reflect the latest  scholarship and the most recent events in the Middle East. As an  introduction to the history of this turbulent region from the beginnings  of Islam to the present day, the book is distinguished by its clear  style, broad scope, and balanced treatment. It focuses on the evolution  of Islamic institutions and culture, the influence of the West, the  modernization efforts of Middle Eastern governments, the struggle for  political independence, the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the  roles of Iraq and Iran in the post-9/11 Middle East, and more.

Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Modern Egypt: Foundation of a Nation-State and the recipient of the Amoco Foundation Award for Outstanding  Teaching and the 2000 Middle East Studies Association Mentoring Award.

Lawrence Davidson is a professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of several books, including America’s Palestine and Islamic Fundamentalism.

The New York Times bestselling, authoritative account of the life  of Charles Manson, filled with surprising new information and  previously unpublished photographs: “A riveting, almost Dickensian  narrative…four stars” (People).

More than forty years ago  Charles Manson and his mostly female commune killed nine people, among  them the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. It was the culmination of a  criminal career that author Jeff Guinn traces back to Manson’s  childhood. Guinn interviewed Manson’s sister and cousin, neither of whom  had ever previously cooperated with an author. Childhood friends,  cellmates, and even some members of the Manson family have provided new  information about Manson’s life. Guinn has made discoveries about the  night of the Tate murders, answering unresolved questions, such as why  one person near the scene of the crime was spared.

Manson puts the killer in the context of the turbulent late sixties, an era of  race riots and street protests when authority in all its forms was  under siege. Guinn shows us how Manson created and refined his message  to fit the times, persuading confused young women (and a few men) that  he had the solutions to their problems. At the same time he used them to  pursue his long-standing musical ambitions. His frustrated ambitions,  combined with his bizarre race-war obsession, would have lethal  consequences.

Guinn’s book is a “tour de force of a biography…Manson stands as a definitive work: important for students of criminology,  human behavior, popular culture, music, psychopathology, and  sociopathology…and compulsively readable” (Ann Rule, The New York Times Book Review).

"This book tells what should have  been known and isn't—that Israel's hidden force is as formidable as its  recognized physical strength."
— Israeli President Shimon Peres

For  decades, Israel's renowned security arm, the Mossad, has been widely  recognized as the best intelligence service in the world. In Mossad,  authors Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed  curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the  most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history.  These are real Mission: Impossible true stories brimming with  high-octane action—from the breathtaking capture of Nazi executioner  Adolph Eichmann to the recent elimination of key Iranian nuclear  scientists. Anyone who is fascinated by the world of international  espionage, intelligence, and covert "Black-Ops" warfare will find Mossad electrifying reading.

Mossad unveils  the defining and most dangerous operations, unknown heroes, and  mysterious agents of the world's most respected—and most  enigmatic—intelligence service. Here are the thrilling stories of daring  top secret missions, including the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the  eradication of Black September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear  facility, and the elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists.

Drawn  from intensive research and exclusive interviews with Israeli leaders  and Mossad operatives, this riveting history brings to life the brave  agents, deadly villains, and major battlegrounds that have shaped Israel  and the world at large for more than sixty years.

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are  the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars.  But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world  beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against  England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of  the tremors that spread throughout the world.

In this ambitious  and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic  Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective.  France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also  in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India,  Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and  Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses  major political-military events around the world and situates  geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts.  From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the  Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the  French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs  well into the next century. In Egypt, the wars led to the rise of Mehmed  Ali and the emergence of a powerful state; in North America, the period  transformed and enlarged the newly established United States; and in  South America, the Spanish colonial empire witnessed the start of  national-liberation movements that ultimately ended imperial control.

Skillfully  narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the global history of  the period, one that expands our view of the Napoleonic Wars and their  role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

A definitive and sweeping account of the life and times of the  world's greatest conqueror -- Genghis Khan -- and the rise of the Mongol  empire in the 13th century

Combining fast-paced accounts of  battles with rich cultural background and the latest scholarship, Frank  McLynn brings vividly to life the strange world of the Mongols and  Genghis Khan's rise from boyhood outcast to world conqueror. McLynn  provides the most accurate and absorbing account yet of one of the most  powerful men ever to have ever lived.

From renowned journalist Ryszard  Kapuscinski comes this intimate account of his years in the field,  traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China,  Ethiopia, and other exotic locales.

In the 1950s, Kapuscinski  finished university in Poland and became a foreign correspondent, hoping  to go abroad - perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead he was sent to India -  the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world that took him from  Iran to El Salvador and from Angola to Armenia. Revisiting his memories  of traveling the globe with a copy of Herodotus's The Histories  in tow, Kapuscinski describes his awakening to the intricacies and  idiosyncrasies of new environments and how the words of the Greek  historiographer helped shape his own view of an increasingly globalized  world. Written with supreme eloquence and a constant eye to the global  undercurrents that shaped the latter half of the 20th century, Travels with Herodotus is an exceptional chronicle of one man's journey across continents.

Dorothy H. Crawford - Viruses 2021

A compelling biography of the legendary king, rebel, and poisoner who defied the Roman Empire

Machiavelli  praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret  elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, while for  centuries poets and playwrights recited bloody, romantic tales of his  victories, defeats, intrigues, concubines, and mysterious death. But  until now no modern historian has recounted the full story of  Mithradates, the ruthless king and visionary rebel who challenged the  power of Rome in the first century BC. In this richly illustrated  book―the first biography of Mithradates in fifty years―Adrienne Mayor  combines a storyteller's gifts with the most recent archaeological and  scientific discoveries to tell the tale of Mithradates as it has never  been told before.

The Poison King describes a life  brimming with spectacle and excitement. Claiming Alexander the Great and  Darius of Persia as ancestors, Mithradates inherited a wealthy Black  Sea kingdom at age fourteen after his mother poisoned his father. He  fled into exile and returned in triumph to become a ruler of superb  intelligence and fierce ambition. Hailed as a savior by his followers  and feared as a second Hannibal by his enemies, he envisioned a grand  Eastern empire to rival Rome. After massacring eighty thousand Roman  citizens in 88 BC, he seized Greece and modern-day Turkey. Fighting some  of the most spectacular battles in ancient history, he dragged Rome  into a long round of wars and threatened to invade Italy itself. His  uncanny ability to elude capture and surge back after devastating losses  unnerved the Romans, while his mastery of poisons allowed him to foil  assassination attempts and eliminate rivals.

The Poison King is a gripping account of one of Rome's most relentless but least understood foes.

"It is philosophy that has the duty of protecting us...without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry."

For  several years of his turbulent life, Seneca was the guiding hand of the  Roman Empire. His inspired reasoning derived mainly from the Stoic  principles, which had originally been developed some centuries earlier  in Athens. This selection of Seneca's letters shows him upholding the  austere ethical ideals of Stoicism—the wisdom of the self-possessed  person immune to overmastering emotions and life’s setbacks—while  valuing friendship and the courage of ordinary men, and criticizing the  harsh treatment  of slaves and the cruelties in the gladiatorial arena.  The humanity and wit revealed in Seneca’s interpretation of Stoicism is a  moving and inspiring declaration of the dignity of the individual mind.

For  more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of  classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than  1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best  works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers  trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by  introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary  authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning  translators.

A masterfully researched history of Iran from 1501 to 2009

“The defiant spirit of [Iran] is brought to life in this monumental history of the past 500 years.”—Richard Spencer, The Times (London)

“A majestic work that goes a long way in unraveling . . . the country’s  enigmas and apparent contradictions.”—Ervand Abrahamian, New York Review of Books

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense  but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a  revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by  currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers  the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran  against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars,  foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

 Abbas Amanat combines chronological and thematic approaches, exploring  events with lasting implications for modern Iran and the world. Drawing  on diverse historical scholarship and emphasizing the twentieth century,  he addresses debates about Iran’s culture and politics. Political  history is the driving narrative force, given impetus by Amanat's  decades of research and study. He layers the book with discussions of  literature, music, and the arts; ideology and religion; economy and  society; and cultural identity and heritage.

Fucking History

TTC - Exploring The Roots Of Religion

The Revenge Of Geography What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

In this inspiring, horrifying, and accessible collection of short,  entertaining, and vivid life stories, Simon Sebag Montefiore—one of our  pre-eminent historians and a prizewinning writer—presents the giant  characters who have changed the course of world history.

 These titans of history—encompassing queens, empresses, and actresses,  kings, sultans, and conquerors, as well as prophets, artists,  courtesans, psychopaths, and explorers—lived lives of astonishing drama,  courage and adventure, debauchery and slaughter, virtue and crime. The  subjects range widely throughout time and geography from Buddha and  Genghis Khan to Nero and Churchill; from Catherine the Great and Anne  Frank to Toussaint l’Ouverture and Martin Luther King; from Mozart to  Mao; from Jesus Christ and Shakespeare to Einstein and Elvis. Through  these lives, Montefiore recounts the most momentous world events—from  ancient times to the Crusades, the Holocaust, and the Gulf Wars.

These are the historical figures that everyone should know and the stories we should never forget.

This definitive  biography of one of history's most influential father-son duos tells the  story of two rulers who gripped the world -- and their rise and fall  from power.

Alexander the Great's  conquests staggered the world. He led his army across thousands of  miles, overthrowing the greatest empires of his time and building a new  one in their place. He claimed to be the son of a god, but he was  actually the son of Philip II of Macedon.

Philip  inherited a minor kingdom that was on the verge of dismemberment, but  despite his youth and inexperience, he made Macedonia dominant  throughout Greece. It was Philip who created the armies that Alexander  led into war against Persia. In Philip and Alexander, classical  historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows that without the work and influence  of his father, Alexander could not have achieved so much. This is the  groundbreaking biography of two men who together conquered the world.

An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's  vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world  around them.

Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all  the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they  changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II,  Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in  sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen,  affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern  Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives  sacrificed.

Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct  experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian.  Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative  portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism,  and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a  jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and  doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious  magnetism of their leadership.

Suetonius  - The Twelve Caesars

Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom  that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle,  Alexander had an inquisitive mind that would serve him well when he  faced formidable obstacles during his military campaigns. Shortly after  taking command of the army, he launched an invasion of the Persian  Empire, and continued his conquests as far south as the deserts of Egypt  and as far east as the mountains of present-day Pakistan and the plains  of India.

In his lively and authoritative biography of  Alexander, Philip Freeman describes Alexander's astonishing achievements  and provides insight into the mercurial character of the great  conqueror. Alexander could be petty and magnanimous, cruel and merciful,  impulsive and farsighted. Above all, he was ferociously, intensely  competitive and could not tolerate losing - which he rarely did.

As  Freeman explains, without Alexander, the influence of Greece on the  ancient world would surely not have been as great as it was, even if his  motivation was not to spread Greek culture for beneficial purposes, but  instead to unify his empire.

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962—1976

"Fascinating, shrewd . . . The book deftly traces the rhythms and patterns of Chinese history."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

In  this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the  first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for  decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal  events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern  European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet  alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing.  With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower’s  twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.

A primer on Democratic Socialism for those who are extremely skeptical of it.

America is witnessing the rise of a new generation of socialist  activists. More young people support socialism now than at any time  since the labor movement of the 1920s. The Democratic Socialists of  America, a big-tent leftist organization, has just surpassed 50,000  members nationwide. In the fall of 2018, one of the most influential  congressmen in the Democratic Party lost a primary to Alexandria  Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old socialist who had never held office before.  But what does all this mean? Should we be worried about our country, or  should we join the march toward our bright socialist future? In Why You  Should Be a Socialist, Nathan J. Robinson will give listeners a primer  on 21st-century socialism: what it is, what it isn’t, and why everyone  should want to be a part of this exciting new chapter of American  politics.

From the heyday of Occupy Wall Street through Bernie Sanders’ 2016  presidential campaign and beyond, young progressives have been  increasingly drawn to socialist ideas. However, the movement’s goals  need to be defined more sharply before it can effect real change on a  national scale. Likewise, liberals and conservatives will benefit from a  deeper understanding of the true nature of this ideology, whether they  agree with it or not.

Robinson’s charming, accessible, and well-argued book will convince  even the most skeptical listeners of the merits of socialist thought.

In early nineteenth-century Russia, the threat of Napoleon’s invasion looms, and the lives of millions are about to be changed forever. This includes Pierre Bezúkhov, illegitimate son of an aristocrat; Andrew Bolkónski, ambitious military scion; and Natásha Rostóva, compassionate daughter of a nobleman. All of them are unprepared for what lies ahead. Alongside their fellow compatriots - a catalog of enduring literary characters - Pierre, Andrew, and Natásha will be irrevocably torn between fate and free will.

Through the bonds of love and family, and all that can break them, Tolstoy examines the effects of war on every strata of society in his masterwork of intimate - and epic - social history.

Revised edition: Previously published as War and Peace, this edition of War and Peace (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

Leo Tolstoy (Author), Louise Maude - translator (Author), Aylmer Maude - translator (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator), Brilliance Audio (Publisher)

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, but once he was called Sparrowhawk, a reckless youth, hungry for power and knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance. An exciting re-launch of the classic Earthsea Cycle, by fantasy literature legend Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of a Newbery Honor, the National Book Award, Pushcart Prize, and six Nebula Awards.

• Basic Economics_A Citizen's Guide to the Economy - Thomas Sowell
• Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell
• The Housing Boom and Bust

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes  reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood  to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.

People have lived and  died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to  world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the  history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.

Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning  author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made  room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and  renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress,  through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I,  Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.

In Energy,  Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each  breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the  steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He  addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their  transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks  at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is  competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He  also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling  towards ten billion by 2100.

Human beings have confronted the  problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of  time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further  challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are  today. In Rhodes’s singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.

Hidden deep within the daily workings of governments and civilizations is a secret world of mystery, danger, and intrigue. A world where deception is a form of art. Where people are never who they say they are. Where the tiniest observation has the power to save an empire or spark a global war.

Welcome to the world of the spy—a world that most of us associate with popular fiction and film but the true story of which is more fascinating, surprising, and important than you could possibly imagine.

For thousands of years, espionage and covert operations have been powerful but shadowy forces. Much of world history has been shaped by the dramatic exploits of men, women, and organizations devoted to the perilous tasks and undercover missions that are part of a spy's life. Consider that covert operations have played critical roles in

• epic conflicts such as the Trojan War, the Crusades, World War II, and the War on Terror;
• political upheavals such as the American, French, and Russian revolutions; and even
• cultural moments such as the quest to colonize the New World, the 19th-century expansion of empires, and
• race to build the world's first atomic bomb.

Indeed, to truly comprehend the forces at work in international politics, whether at the dawn of civilization or among today's sophisticated world powers, one must understand the secret role of espionage and the shadowy world of covert operations.

Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History is your chance to take a detailed and unforgettable tour of the millennia-long history and enduring legacy of this top-secret subject. Delivered by master historian and popular Great Courses Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, these 24 thrilling lectures survey how world powers have attempted to work in the shadows to gain secret information or subvert enemies behind the scenes. Filled with stories that are both marvelous and mysterious, and insights that will change the way you think about some of world history's most defining events, this course lets you peer inside a subject whose truths most people are unaware of.

The definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.

From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.

Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.”―NPR Books
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades,  award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the  origins and rise of a divided nation.

Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review),  Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself―a  devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s  history. The American experiment rests on three ideas―“these truths,”  Jefferson called them―political equality, natural rights, and the  sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself,  delivered on that promise?

These Truths tells this  uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of  events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or  belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of  American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of  inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in  contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,”  Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is  part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

Know thy enemy. That's what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror and fascination still linger. No one is better able to explain the unexplainable about this man and his movement than Professor Thomas Childers. In these lectures, you will see what great teaching is all about.

The first riveting examination of the shocking infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s Soviet intelligence networks during WWII.

Until now, many sinister events that transpired in the clash of the world's superpowers at the close of World War II and the ensuing Cold War era have been ignored, distorted, and kept hidden from the public. Through a careful survey of primary sources and disclosure of formerly secret records, Evans and Romerstein have written a riveting historical account that traces the vast deceptions that kept Stalin's henchmen on the federal payroll and sabotaged U.S. policy overseas. The facts presented here expose shocking cover-ups, from the top FDR aides who threatened internal security and free-world interests by exerting pro-Red influence on U.S.policy, to the grand juries that were rigged, to the countless officials of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who turned a blind eye to the penetration problem. Stalin's Secret Agents convincingly indicts in historical retrospect the people responsible for these corruptions of justice.

The New York Times best-selling author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The War of the Roses,  historian Alison Weir crafts fascinating portraits of England’s  infamous House of Tudor line. Here Weir focuses on Elizabeth I, also  known as the Virgin Queen, who ascended to the throne at age 25 and  never married, yet ruled for 44 years and steered England into its  Golden Age.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE STANDS as the greatest political achievement in the  history of Western civilization. From its humble beginnings as a tiny  kingdom in central Italy, Rome grew to envelope the entire Mediterranean  until it ruled an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to Syria and  from the Sahara to Scotland. Its enduring legacy continues to define the  modern world. Mike Duncan chronicled the rise, triumph, and fall of the  Roman Empire in his popular podcast series "The History of Rome".  Transcripts of the show have been edited and collected here for the  first time. Covering episodes 1-46, The History of Rome Volume I opens  with the founding of the Roman Kingdom and ends with the breakdown of  the Roman Republic. Along the way Rome will steadily grow from local  power to regional power to global power. The Romans will triumph over  their greatest foreign rivals and then nearly destroy themselves in a  series of destructive civil wars. This is the story of the rise of Rome.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The  creator of the award-winning podcast series The History of Rome and  Revolutions brings to life the bloody battles, political machinations,  and human drama that set the stage for the fall of the Roman Republic.

Best-selling author Adrian  Goldsworthy turns his attention to the Pax Romana, the famous peace and  prosperity brought by the Roman Empire at its height in the first and  second centuries AD. Yet the Romans were conquerors, imperialists who  took by force a vast empire stretching from the Euphrates to the  Atlantic coast. Ruthless, Romans won peace not through coexistence but  through dominance; millions died and were enslaved during the creation  of their empire.

Pax Romana examines how the Romans came to control so much of  the world and asks whether traditionally favorable images of the Roman  peace are true. Goldsworthy vividly recounts the rebellions of the  conquered and examines why they broke out, why most failed, and how they  became exceedingly rare. He reveals that hostility was just one  reaction to the arrival of Rome and that from the outset, conquered  peoples collaborated, formed alliances, and joined invaders, causing  resistance movements to fade away.

Prophet Muhammad

A riveting account of ancient  Rome's imperial bodyguard, the select band of soldiers who wielded the  power to make - or destroy - the emperors they served.

Founded by Augustus around 27 BC, the elite Praetorian Guard was  tasked with the protection of the emperor and his family. As the  centuries unfolded, however, Praetorian soldiers served not only as  protectors and enforcers but also as powerful political players.  Fiercely loyal to some emperors, they vied with others and ruthlessly  toppled those who displeased them, including Caligula, Nero, Pertinax,  and many more. Guy de la Bédoyère provides a compelling first full  narrative history of the Praetorians, whose dangerous ambitions ceased  only when Constantine permanently disbanded them.

De la Bédoyère introduces Praetorians of all echelons, from prefects  and messengers to artillery experts and executioners. He explores the  delicate position of emperors for whom prestige and guile were the only  defenses against bodyguards hungry for power. Folding fascinating  details into a broad assessment of the Praetorian era, the author sheds  new light on the wielding of power in the greatest of the ancient  world's empires.

A classic of Japanese history, this audiobook is the preeminent work on the history of Japan. Newly revised and updated, A History of Japan is a single-volume complete history of the nation of Japan. Starting in ancient Japan during its early pre-history period, A History of Japan covers every important aspect of history and culture through feudal  Japan to the post-Cold War period and collapse of the bubble economy in  the early 1990s. Recent findings shed additional light on the origins of  Japanese civilization and the birth of Japanese culture.

Also included is an in-depth analysis of the Japanese religion,  Japanese arts, Japanese culture, and the Japanese people from the sixth  century BC to the present. This contemporary classic, now updated and  revised, continues to be an essential work in Japanese studies.

A History of Japan, Revised Edition includes:

• Archaic Japan - including Yamato, the creation of a unified state, the Nana Period, and the Heian period.
• Medieval Japan - including rule by the military houses, the failure  of Ashikaga rule, Buddhism, and the Kamakura and Muroachi periods.
• Early modern Japan - including Japanese feudalism, administration  under the Tokugawa, and society and culture in early modern Japan.
• Modern Japan - including the Meiji era and policies for  modernization, from consensus to crisis (1912-1937), and solutions  through force.

This contemporary classic continues to be a central work in Japanese  studies and is a vital addition to the collection of any student or  enthusiast of Japanese history, Japanese culture, or the Japanese  language.

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam.  It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes  terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war.  In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of  years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short  history demonstrates that the world’s fastest-growing faith is a much  more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest.

John Brockman (editor) - The Universe

“A cracking read,  combining storytelling of the highest order with a trove of information.  . . . What’s remarkable is that it all fits together.”—Wall Street Journal

“Successful  science writing tells a complete story of the ‘how’—the methodical  marvel building up to the ‘why’—and Randall does just that.”—New York Times Book Review

“[Randall]  is a lucid explainer, street-wise and informal. Without jargon or  mathematics, she steers us through centuries of sometimes tortuous  astronomical history.”—The Guardian

In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs,  Professor Lisa Randall, one of today’s most influential theoretical  physicists, takes readers on an intellectual adventure through the  history of the cosmos, showing how events in the farthest reaches of the  Universe created the conditions for life—and death—on our planet.

Sixty-six  million years ago, an object the size of a city crashed into Earth,  killing off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the planet’s  species. Challenging the usual assumptions about the simple makeup of  the unseen material that constitutes 85% of the matter in the Universe,  Randall explains how a disk of dark matter in the Milky Way plane might  have triggered the cataclysm.

But Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs does more than present a radical idea. With clarity and wit, it  explains the nature of the Universe, dark matter, the Milky Way galaxy,  comets, asteroids, and impacts. This breathtaking synthesis, illuminated  by pop culture references and social and political viewpoints, reveals  the deep relationships among the small and the large, the visible and  the hidden, as well as the astonishing beauty of the connections that  surround us. It’s impossible to read this book and look at either the  Earth or the sky again in the same way.

Who was Muhammad? What do we know historically, and does that differ from how he is seen by his followers and venerated today? Memories of Muhammad presents Muhammad as a lens through which to view both the genesis of  Islamic religion and the grand sweep of Islamic history—right  up to the hot button issues of the day, such as the spread of Islam,  holy wars, the status of women, the significance of Jerusalem, and  current tensions with Jews, Hindus and Christians. It also provides a  rare glimpse into how Muslims spiritually connect to God through their  Prophet, in the mosque, in the home, and even in cyberspace.

This definitive biography of the founder of Islam by a leading  Muslim-American scholar, Omid Safi, will reveal invaluable new insights,  finally providing a fully three-dimensional portrait of Muhammad and  the one billion people who follow him today.

From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.

Space  and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the  most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a  direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we  travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain  non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg  Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn  from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space  and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to  quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can  instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all,  regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and  revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has  discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

The bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos tackles perhaps the most mind-bending question in modern physics and cosmology: Is our universe the only universe?

There  was a time when "universe" meant all there is. Everything. Yet, a  number of theories are converging on the possibility that our universe  may be but one among many parallel universes populating a vast  multiverse. Here, Briane Greene, one of our foremost physicists and  science writers, takes us on a breathtaking journey to a multiverse  comprising an endless series of big bangs, a multiverse with duplicates  of every one of us, a multiverse populated by vast sheets of spacetime, a  multiverse in which all we consider real are holographic illusions, and  even a multiverse made purely of math--and reveals the reality hidden  within each.

Using his trademark wit and precision, Greene  presents a thrilling survey of cutting-edge physics and confronts the  inevitable question: How can fundamental science progress if great  swaths of reality lie beyond our reach? The Hidden Reality is a remarkable adventure through a world more vast and strange than anything we could have imagined.

The international bestseller that inspired a major Nova special and sparked a new understanding of the universe, now with a new preface and epilogue.

Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away  layers of mystery to reveal a universe that consists of eleven  dimensions, where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all  matter―from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas―is  generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. The Elegant Universe makes some of the most sophisticated concepts ever contemplated  accessible and thoroughly entertaining, bringing us closer than ever to  understanding how the universe works.

Best-selling author, superstar physicist, and cofounder of the World Science Festival Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos) and an ensemble cast led by award-winning actor Paul Rudd (Ant-Man)  perform this dramatic story tracing Albert Einstein's discovery of the  general theory of relativity. Featuring an original score by composer  Jeff Beal (House of Cards, Pollock), Einstein’s electrifying journey toward his greatest achievement is brought vividly to life.

The theatrical version of Light Falls was first performed at the World Science Festival in New York City.

Full list of narrators includes Graeme Malcolm.

Jim Kwik - Limitless Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

World’s First Superpower The Rise of the British Empire 1497 To 1901

World’s First Superpower From Empire to Commonwealth 1901 to Present

World War I - the Great War and the World It Made

Winston Churchill Man of the Century

Way With Words - Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion

The Literature of C. S. Lewis

Rethinking our Past - Recognizing Facts Fictions and Lies in American History

Wars That Made the Western World - The Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, and the Punic Wars

Visions of Utopia - Philosophy and the Perfect Society

Waking Dragon - The Emerging Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the World

Upon This Rock - A History of the Papacy from Peter to John II

Unseen Diversity (The World of Bacteria)

Understanding The Holocaust

The Tiber and the Potomac - Rome, America, and Empires of Trust