In this "informative and inspiring volume" (Chicago Tribune),Robert Harvey reconstructs in vivid detail the gripping story ofLatin America's independence and those who made it possible.Treated with contempt by their Spanish overlords, given todissipation and grandiose proclamations, these fearless mennonetheless achieved military feats unsurpassed elsewhere inhistory. The aristocratic Simón Bolívar led his guerilla armiesthrough swamp, jungle, and Andean ice to surprise his enemies andliberate most of northern South America. The inarticulate SanMartín joined Bernardo O'Higgins, illegitimate son of a Spanishviceroy, to do the same in the south. These and five others wagedthe war for freedom against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars,the American Revolution, the collapse of the Spanish Empire, andthe revolutionary ferment of the nineteenth century. Despite thesuccess of their revolutions, all seven liberators died in poverty,disgrace, or oblivion. This fascinating and dramatic story takes in a

On General Douglas MacArthur's orders, a force of 12,000 U.S.Marines were marching north to the Yalu river in late November1950. These three regiments of the 1st Marine Division--strung outalong eighty miles of a narrow mountain road--soon found themselvescompletely surrounded by 60,000 Chinese soldiers. Despite beinggiven up for lost by the military brass, the 1st Marine Divisionfought its way out of the frozen mountains, miraculously takingthier dead and wounded with them as they ran the gauntlet ofunceasing Chinese attacks. This is the gripping story that Martin Russ tells in hisextraordinary book. Breakout is an unforgettable portrayal of theterror and courage of men as they face sudden death, making thebloody battles of the Korean hills and valleys come alive as theynever have before. "Magnificent . . . [Russ] seamlessly weaves the stories of manymen, units and battles, day and night, into a coherentpicture."--Chicago Tribune "Engrossing . . . Vivid, at times

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the beginning of theAmerican Civil War. This well-rounded selection of Abraham Lincoln's finest speechescombines the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, andthe inspirational and intellectual to present a historical arcmarking periods of the Civil War-crisis, outbreak, escalation,victory, and Reconstruction. Addressing the conflict's multipleaspects-the issue of slavery, state versus federal power, themeaning of the Constitution, civic duty, death, and freedom-thiselegant keepsake collection will make a wonderful inspirationalgift for professed Lincoln fans, Civil War buffs, and lovers ofrhetorical genius.

The first complete history of the Caribbean islands--updatedthrough the year 2000. This comprehensive volume takes the reader and student throughmore than five hundred years of Caribbean history, beginning withColumbus's arrival in the Bahamas in 1492. A Brief History of theCaribbean traces the people and events that have marked thisconstantly shifting region, encompassing everything from economicbooms and busts to epidemics, wars, and revolutions, and bringingto life such important figures as Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard,Toussaint Louverture, Fidel Castro, the Duvaliers, andJean-Bertrand Aristide. This superbly written history, revised and updated, with newchapters that reflect the islands' most recent social, economic,and political developments, is a work of impeccable scholarship.Featuring maps, charts, tables, and photographs, it remains theideal guide to the region and its people. "A veritable sourcebook of information . . . analysis,de*ion, interpretation . . . interesting and

This celebration of the English countryside does not only focus on the rolling green landscapes and magnificent monuments that set England apart from the rest of the world. Many of the contributors bring their own special touch, presenting a refreshingly eclectic variety of personal icons, from pub signs to seaside piers, from cattle grids to canal boats, and from village cricket to nimbies. First published as a lavish colour coffeetable book, this new expanded paperback edition has double the original number of contributions from many celebrities including Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Eric Clapton, Bryan Ferry, Sebastian Faulks, Kate Adie, Kevin Spacey, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Richard Mabey , Simon Jenkins, John Sergeant, Benjamin Zephaniah, Joan Bakewell, Antony Beevor, Libby Purves, Jonathan Dimbleby, and many more: and a new preface by HRH Prince Charles.

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and culturalhistory, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid andcompelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation.Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages ofthe Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, everyaspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grewrich on the misery of the population, and a growing number ofintellectual luminaries and artists— including Hemingway, Beckett,Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, andPicasso—contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment intime.

From Solon to Socrates is a magisterial narrativeintroduction to what is generally regarded as the most importantperiod of Greek history. Stressing the unity of Greek history andthe centrality of Athens, Victor Ehrenberg covers a rich anddiverse range of political, economic, military and cultural issuesin the Greek world, from the early history of the Greeks, includingearly Sparta and the wars with Persia, to the ascendancy of Athensand the Peloponnesian War.

An epic history of a doomed civilization and a lostempire. The devastating struggle to the death between theCarthaginians and the Romans was one of the defining dramas of theancient world. In an epic series of land and sea battles, bothsides came close to victory before the Carthaginians finallysuccumbed and their capital city, history, and culture were almostutterly erased. Drawing on a wealth of new archaeological research, Richard Milesvividly brings to life this lost empire-from its origins among thePhoenician settlements of Lebanon to its apotheosis as the greatestseapower in the Mediterranean. And at the heart of the history ofCarthage lies the extraordinary figure of Hannibal-the scourge ofRome and one of the greatest military leaders, but a man who alsounwittingly led his people to catastrophe. The first full-scale history of Carthage in decades, CarthageMust Be Destroyed reintroduces modern readers to thelarger-than-life historical players and the ancient glory of thisalmost forgotten civili

"A colorful and gripping portrait of the threeaging leaders at their historic encounter." - The Wall StreetJournal For eight fateful days in 1945, threeof the towering figures of the twentieth century-FDR, Churchill,and Stalin-met at a resort town on the Black Sea to decide on astrategy to defeat Germany and Japan, and to carve up the world.For more than sixty years, opinion has been bitterly divided onwhat they achieved. Did Yalta pave the way to the Cold War? Did FDRgive too much to Stalin? In this groundbreaking book, Harvardhistorian S. M. Plokhy draws on newly declassified Soviet documentsand unpublished diaries and letters of the participants to set therecord straight.

The step-by-step decline into war, with Churchill becoming prime minister as "the tocsin was about to sound." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

There is no story in twentieth-century history more important tounderstand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse ofcivilization 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 masterfulsynthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated withimportant new research and interpretations, Evans’s historyrestores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler andthe Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the ThirdReich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book bywhich all others on the subject will be judged.

The Battle ofNormandy was the greatest offensive campaign the world had everseen. Millions of soldiers struggling for the control of Europewere thrust onto the front lines of a massive war unlike anyexperienced in history. But this greatest of clashes would prove tobe the crucible in which the outcome of World War II would bedecided. It began on D-Day. June 6, 1944-the day that the Allied Forceslaunched Operation Overlord: the great crusade to free Europe fromthe iron grip of Nazi Germany. But only when the troops were ashoredid the real battle begin. With Nazi defenders marshaling to stop the invaders, Hitler and hisgenerals schemed to counterattack. Tightly constricted hedgerowcountry and bitter German resistance held the Allied advance to acrawl. Suddenly the Allies broke through and trapped the Naziarmies. Yet within weeks of this stunning disaster, the Germanssmashed the most dangerous Allied offensive yet. How was this possible? In Normandy Crucible , noted authorJohn Prados offers a penetrating acco

Writing at the time of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, Prussiansoldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this landmarktreatise on the art of warfare, which presented war as part of acoherent system of political thought. In line with Napoleon's ownmilitary actions, he illustrated the need to annihilate the enemyand make a strong display of one's power in an 'absolute war'without compromise. But he was also careful to distinguish betweenwar and politics, arguing that war could only be justified whendebate was no longer adequate, and that if undertaken, its aimshould ultimately be to improve the wellbeing of the nation.

In 1944,eighteen-year-old university student Leo Litwak finds himself in the middle of the waning European war,a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away.instead of a rifle he carries bandages, sulfa powder, morphine_and only a red cross to protect him.This is the true story of real people in war _friende and thieves,dreamers and killers,jokers and heroes_as wellas theper-sonal account of a young American plucked from a sheltered,comfort-asble life and sent to a foreign land to save the men fighting to save the world.Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence,and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier whose mission was saving lives,not taking them.

For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, theItalian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of themodern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and thecompetition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, andpolitics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-statesof Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new formof society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, fromDante to Michelangelo. A fascinating de*ion of an era ofcultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was tobecome the most influential interpretation of the ItalianRenaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept ofthe 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

According to tradition Cervantes first conceived his comic masterpiece in jail - his avowed intent being to debunk the romances of chivalry. From first publication Don Quixote was a best-seller, initially taken as a knockabout account of a mad Spanish gentleman and his cowardly peasant squire, but later reinterpreted as an enlightenment text, a representation of universal human nature, a myth of a tragic hero defending man's nobler aspirations, a study in alienation, a spiritual autobiography, a metaphor for Spain's imperial decline, an experimental novel that shaped later prose fiction, a tragedy and comedy in one, and a demonstration that ambiguity and uncertainty can lie at the centre of great art and that great art can be comic. Smollet's vigorous and lively translation brilliantly catches the feeling and tone of the Spanish original. It is a comic novelist's homage to a comic novelist.

In 1940, as Hitler plotted to conquer Europe, only one nationposed a serious threat to the Third Reich's domination: France. TheGerman command was wary of taking on the most powerful armed forceon the continent. But three low-ranking generals-Eric von Manstein,Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel-were about to change the face ofmodern warfare. By grouping tanks into juggernauts to slam through enemy lines,the blitzkrieg was born. With this aggressive, single-minded plan,the Nazis bypassed the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line,charged into the heart of France, and alerted the world that thedeadly might of Germany could no longer be ignored.

Since its publication twenty years ago, J. M. Roberts'smonumental History of the World has remained the "unrivaled WorldHistory of our day" (A. J. P. Taylor), selling more than a quarterof a million copies worldwide. Now in an equally masterfulperformance, Roberts displays his consummate skills of expositionin telling the tale of the European continent, from its Neolithicorigins and early civilizations of the Aegean to the advent of thetwenty-first century. A sweeping and entertaining history, ThePenguin History of Europe comprehensively traces the development ofEuropean identity over the course of thousands of years, rangingacross empires and religions, economics, science, and the arts.Roberts's astute and lucid analyses of the disparate spheres oflearning that have shaped European civilization and ourunderstanding of it make The Penguin History of Europe a remarkablejourney through the last two centuries.

On 2 August 1944, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in theHouse of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War.'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of HerrHitler, of Corporal Hitler', Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiotsfind it difficult not to see some faults in his actions'. AndrewRoberts' previous book "Masters and Commanders" studied thecreation of Allied grand strategy; "The Storm of War" now analyzeshow Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on everyfront, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-makingprocess and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won.Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler afterthe war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their formerFuhrer once he was safely beyond defending himself? The book isfull of illuminating sidelights on the principle actors that bringtheir characters and the ways in which they reached decisions intofresh focus.

Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining. Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the Battle of Salamis fought between sausage-sellers? Which is the oldest language in the world? Why did Leonidas and his 300 Spartans spend the morning before the battle of Thermopylae combing their hair? Why did every Babylonian woman have to sit in the Temple of Aphrodite until a man threw a coin into her lap, and how long was she likely to sit there? And what is the best way to kill a crocodile? This wide-ranging history provides the answers to all these fascinating questions as well as providing many fascinating insights into the Ancient World.

With a flaming holographic cover, the new GWR 2011 edition explodes with new and updated records. There's 100% new photography and hot new categories and features including TV's 75th anniversary, eye popping 3-D cinema, the historic Space Shuttle and a 270 city record-breaking GPS World Tour.