World Art History

The violin has formed an important aspect of Jewish culture for centuries, both as a popular instrument with classical Jewish musicians—Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman—and also a central factor of social life as part of the enduring Klezmer tradition. But during the Holocaust, the violin assumed extraordinary new roles within the Jewish community. For some musicians, the instrument was a liberator; for others, it was a savior that spared their lives. Music historian James A. Grymes tells the amazing, horrifying, and inspiring story of the violins of the Holocaust.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.

With origins 8,000 years in the past, beer brewing has held a prominent place in many and diverse cultures the world over. A university professor with more than 30 years' experience in the brewing industry, Professor Charles W. Bamforth is ideally suited to lead these engaging lectures on beermaking.

The Ninth Symphony, a symbol of freedom and joy, was Beethoven’s mightiest attempt to help humanity find its way from darkness to light, from chaos to peace. Yet the work was born in a repressive era, with terrified Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Romanovs using every means at their disposal to squelch populist rumblings in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars. Ironically, the premiere of this hymn to universal brotherhood took place in Vienna, the capital of a nation that Metternich was turning into the first modern police state.

The Power of Art is an epic work of non-fiction that will transform our understanding of the world by unlocking the human stories behind millennia of art. Taking listeners from ancient Babylon to contemporary Pyongyang, the eminent curator Caroline Campbell explains art's power to illuminate our lives, and inspires us to benefit from its transformative and regenerative power.

Alexander the Great endures as one of the most admired and emulated leaders in world history. In our time, his example of unprecedented and unparalleled success has inspired leaders of business and government, from media mogul Ted Turner (who keeps a bronze bust of Alexander in his office) to Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf (who credits Alexander's tactical innovations for his dramatic flanking maneuver against the Iraqi army in the liberation of Kuwait).

Captured by History is an autobiography like none other, for few historians have interviewed as many men and women who helped shape the most momentous events of our century than John Toland. Here, for the first time, Toland reveals how he found these key players and how he persuaded them to talk to him. From disgraced Japanese generals to the German doctor who nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, Toland’s sources are remarkable for what they reveal about their subjects, along with the secrets and stories they would tell no one else.

With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.

Imagine the impact on world history if Robert E. Lee had listened to General Longstreet at Gettysburg and withdrawn to higher ground instead of sending Pickett uphill against the entrenched Union line. Or if Napolon, at Waterloo, had avoided mistakes he'd never made before. The advice that would have changed the outcome of these crucial battles is found in a book on strategy written centuries before Christ was born.

The Gutmanns, as they were known, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.

In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.

Convencido de que quizá la Ciudad de México no sea el lugar más aconsejable para vivir, pero también de que es tan intrincada y apasionante que resulta imposible abandonarla, Villoro propone este libro escrito desde la devoción del urbanita recalcitrante y maravillado que se despliega como un rompecabezas infinito: los atajos viales, el cine de luchadores, los héroes nacionales, el comercio tepiteño, la tramitología gubernamental, el enigma de las vulcanizadoras, las incontables multitudes, la ingesta de chile, los templos ancestrales.

Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.

At the core of this ancient strategy manual is the understanding that conflict is an inescapable part of human life. Since, as Sun Tzu teaches, aggression and response in kind can lead only to destruction, we must learn to work with conflict in a more profound and effective way. Crucial to this strategic vision is knowledge - especially self-knowledge - and a view of the whole that seeks to bring conflicting views into a larger perspective.

Sex. Drugs. Loud music. Wild costumes. Dazzling light shows. These words can all describe a great rock concert or a hot dance club, but they were also part and parcel of the ancient cultural phenomenon known as the "Mystery religions". In this book, author Christopher Knowles shows how the long-dead Mystery religions got a secular reincarnation when a new musical form called rock 'n' roll burst onto the scene.

Now tell us - did you ever like Japan? Do you know anything about its history, or just what you learned from television and anime, in general? That's a good starting point, anyway. If you want to delve deeper into Japanese history, in chronological order, and see the main events that transformed Japan into what it is today, you've just hit the jackpot.

We all get dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of clothes in our world? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can a philosophy of living be wrapped up in a winter coat? Can we see a handbag not just as an object, but as an idea? Dressed is the thinking person’s book about clothes. Ranging freely from suits to shoes, from Marx’s coat to Madame X’s gown, philosopher Shahidha Bari unveils the hidden power of what we wear, addressing the deepest questions of who we are and how we choose to face the world.

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and stresses the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic.