Friedrich Nietzsche was a born philosopher. It seems that ever since he crawled out of the cradle, he questioned the world around him. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Where are we headed as a society? These were things that Nietzsche would endlessly speculate about, probing the depths in order to find ...

The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis tha...

In the glittering world of high society, everything has a price. In this sharp and witty short story, Virginia Woolf explores the intersecting lives of Oliver Bacon, London's most successful jeweller, and a titled but financially troubled Duchess. When the Duchess offers Oliver a chance to buy a set of pearlsーalong...

Across four centuries, the Parthian Empire expanded its dominion over vast territories, boasting some of the most effective military units of the ancient world. Still, this is one of the forgotten empires of the ancient world. The reason is principally that, for the last two hundred years of its history, the Parthia...

Forming a critical introduction to the history of women's autobiography from the mid 18th-century to the present, this book analyses the most important changes in women's autobiography, exploring their motivation, context, style, and the role of life experiences. Caine effortlessly segues across three centuries of h...

One of the most powerful men who ever lived was a Holy Roman Emperor and controlled vast swathes of the planet. Quite a bit has been written over the centuries about Charles V, but even so, historical texts do not always reveal the complex personality that this man possessed. He was a man of purpose who felt destine...

When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, it seemed as if much of the world didn't quite know what to make of the revolutionary leader. The images of loyal Cubans in Havana openly crying in the streets stood in stark contrast to the Cuban exiles and their descendants just 90 miles away in Miami, Florida. While Cu...

This second volume takes the reader through the agonies of World War Two, the call to America to assume global responsibilities in the rising Cold War ... and with that, the rise to greatness in the 1950s and early 1960s of "Middle America" (the American Middle Class). The narrative then turns to the effort by Presi...

This two-volume American history represents simply a restructuring (plus some new material) of an earlier three-volume study - making the study better suited as text for a two-semester college course. This particular volume begins with the period in the early 1600s when two very different English societies were esta...

The Boxer Rebellion saw impoverished Chinese peasants strike a blow against the Western powers, particularly the British, who had come to challenge China's sovereignty. The uprising was both a harbinger of things to come for China and a by-product of simmering decades of friction between the Chinese and the British....

Joan Crawford was a legend. Few could compare to the charm and grace that she brought to the silver screen. Little did anyone know, however, of the charmed yet ultimately tragic life she led away from the camera and the main stage. Crawford was married four times and ended up disinheriting two of her children from h...

J. R. R. Tolkien, an orphan in love with words, spent most of his life as an unassuming Professor of Literature at Oxford studying and teaching old languages. During his time there, he created his very own languages and a mythological world, Middle-earth. Middle-earth was inhabited by Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, and ot...

Nicht weniger als ein ganzes Leben erzählt Annett Gröschner mit der Geschichte der Blumenbinderin und Kranfahrerin Hanna Krause - mit einer Wucht und Poesie, wie sie nur dort entstehen können, wo die Literatur wirklichkeitssatt ist. Hanna Krause war Blumenbinderin, bevor das Leben sie zur Kranführerin machte. Sie ha...

Ketchup seems iconically American, but the word comes from a Southeast Asian anchovy sauce, and today it is made largely from Chinese tomato paste. Japan’s beloved ramen arose from the meeting of Chinese noodles and American wheat flour before attaining worldwide popularity in both gourmet and convenience-food forms...

Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational effor...

Bad Lieutenants is a riveting account of how the Khmer Rouge remained a force to be reckoned with even after the fall of Democratic Kampucheaーand of the men behind the movement's strange durability. In 1979, the Vietnamese army seized Phnom Penh, toppling Pol Pot's notoriously brutal regime. Yet the Khmer Rouge did...