Penguin Books strana 280 z 485

Tamerlane, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Manchus, the British, the Soviets, the Japanese and the Nazis. All built empires they hoped would last forever: all were destined to fail. But, as John Darwin shows in his magnificent book, their empire building created the world we know today. From the death of Tamerlane in 1405, last of the 'world conquerors', to the rise and fall of European empires, and from America's growing colonial presence to the resurgence of India and China as global economic powers, After Tamerlane provides a wonderfully intriguing perspective on the past, present and future of empires.

***Special anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Erin Kelly*** You have an affair. You finish it. You think it's over. You're dead wrong . . . Miranda Cotton thinks she's put boyfriend Brendan out of her life for good. But two weeks later, she discovers that he's intimately involved with her sister. What began as an embarrassment becomes threatening - then utterly terrifying. Because Brendan will stop at nothing to be part of Miranda's life - even if it means taking it from her . . . 'Too few novelists can combine this level of page-turning suspense with character care and pin-sharp prose' Erin Kelly, bestselling author of He Said/She Said

With an afterword by E. L. Doctorow the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of one man s pursuit of intellectual freedom in the face of ignorance and corruption, from the author of" Babbit Arrowsmith, "the most widely read of Sinclair Lewis s novels, is the incisive portrait of a man passionately devoted to science. As a bright, curious boy in a small Midwestern town, Martin Arrowsmith spends his free time in old Doc Vickerson s office avidly devouring medical texts. Destined to become a physician and a researcher, he discovers that societal forces of ignorance, greed, and corruption can be as life-threatening as the plague. Part satire, part morality tale, Lewis s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the mystery and power of science while giving enduring life to a singular American hero s struggle for integrity and intellectual freedom in a small-minded world. With an Introduction by Sally E. Parry and an Afterword by E. L. Doctorow"

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters through to him of mounting problems left behind in Chicago.Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanizing.

The story behind The Actual belongs to Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman who has never belonged anywhere.

In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and "To Jerusalem and Back" is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints - from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow's hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow's exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.

Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire.Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.

Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell's entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a critic, from freedom of the press to what patriotism really means.

Sergio Vieira de Mello - a humanitarian, peacemaker and state builder - was at centre of the most significant geopolitical crises of the last half-century. Born in 1948, just as the post-World War II order was taking shape, he died in a terrorist attack on UN headquarters in Iraq in 2003 as the battle lines in the twenty first-century's first great polarizing struggle were being drawn. This is a dual biography: the story of a man who never stopped learning and the biography of a perilous world whose ills are too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Even as Vieira de Mello arranged food deliveries, organized refugee returns, or negotiated with warlords, he pressed his colleagues to join him in grappling with such questions as: When should killers be engaged and when should they be shunned? When is military force justified? How can outsiders play a role in healing broken people and broken places? He did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions, he had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.

Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author's original text word for word.

Possibly the best student of hypocrisy since Voltaire This portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist-who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and self-indulgence-is also the chronicle of a reign of vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself.

Recently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature. Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more than our parenting practices. To acknowledge our innate abilities, Pinker shows, is not to condone inequality, but to understand the very foundations of humanity.

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in Penguin Classics. Roubaud is consumed by a jealous rage when he discovers a sordid secret about his young wife's past. The only way he can rest is by forcing her to help him murder the man involved, but there is a witness - Jacques Lantier, a fellow railway employee. Jacques, meanwhile, must contend with his own terrible impulses, for every time he sees a woman he feels the overwhelming desire to kill. In the company of Roubaud's wife, Severine, he finds peace briefly, yet his feelings for her soon bring disasterous consequences. A key work in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, The Beast Within is one of Zola's most dark and violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind. Roger Whitehouse's vivid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing Zola's depiction of the railways, politics and the legal system and the influence of the studies of criminology and the Jack the Ripper murders on his novel. This edition also includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading and notes. Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years, including Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), The Beast Within (1890), Nana (1880), and The Drinking Den (1877). If you enjoyed The Beast Within, you might like Zola's The Drinking Den, also available in Penguin Classics.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS tells a compelling story, using original papers from Einstein, Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler and Newton. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking explains how these works changed the course of science, ushering astronomy and physics out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world.