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...

If any of the great composers have a staying power that defies genre and time period, Frédéric Chopin was most certainly one of them. You can find his work being played with cherished delight by any budding pianist, and his music serves as a constant backdrop and mainstay for piano concertos worldwide. But what do w...

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...

FROM BEGINNER TO BLACK BELT Current, 2017 edition: REPLACES the obsolete "Close Combat" manual. All-new photograph illustrations - not the old version with line drawings. Important: this is a reflowable ebook, not a low-quality fixed-layout edition. Reflowable books adapt to your device and your settings for a super...

Kein Land Asiens erscheint faszinierender als Japan. Das Inselreich hat nicht nur eine einzigartige Kultur und Ästhetik hervorgebracht, es blickt auch auf eine lange Geschichte zurück. Wolfgang Schwentker erzählt auf dem neuesten Forschungsstand die Geschichte Japans von der Ur- und Frühzeit bis in die Gegenwart. Se...

A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the informat...

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up...

The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled t...

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...

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument t...

A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and through the ideas of great thinkers in the field “A whistle-stop introduction to the great works and thinkers of each age, this is a clear and accessible primer.”ーLaura Garmeson, Financial Times What causes ...

⚔️ Master the battlefield of warーand lifeーwith ancient wisdom that never ages. Written over 2,500 years ago, The Art of War by Sun Tzu remains the definitive guide on strategy, competition, and leadership. Whether in war, business, sports, or self-development, Sun Tzu's principles on discipline, timing, deception,...

Drawing on over thirty years of research, this book investigates the intermingling of land and water in the Sahel, analysing landscapes defined by the ebb and flow of rainfall, flooding and population movements, as well as environmental, political and social crises. Exploring both the seasonal flooding of rivers aro...

This book offers an analysis of the wide range of attitudes that communist movements and regimes adopted towards atheism during the 20th century. Despite the well-known violent fight of the Bolsheviks against believers, for example, and religious persecution in communist regimes at different times, being a communist...

"The soul that is within me no man can degrade." In My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass deepens his already powerful life story, moving beyond his escape from slavery to examine the moral, political, and spiritual dimensions of oppression. This second autobiography is not only a record of unimaginable hard...

Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century is a richly detailed thematic study of the history of the piano in Russian society from its beginnings with the European artisans who settled in St. Petersburg in the early decades of the century through the transition to Russian-owned family firms. The piano played a...