• Presents over 150 sources in translation.
  
• Captures the political, social, economic and religious dynamism of the Hellenistic kingdoms and cities.
  
• Covers the entire Hellenistic world, with extensive coverage of the Ptolemaic kingdom.

• Covers society and culture, people and movements, politics and foreign policy.
  
• Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic.
  
• Includes book review section on essential readings.

In this riveting and fast-paced book, Romesh Ratnesar provides an account of how Reagan arrived at his defining moment and what followed from it. The book is based on interviews with numerous former Reagan administration officials and American and German eyewitnesses to the speech, as well as recently declassified State Department documents and East German records of the president's trip. Ratnesar provides new details about the origins of Reagan's speech and the debate within the administration about how to issue the fateful challenge to Gorbachev. Tear Down This Wall re-creates the charged atmosphere surrounding Reagan's visit to Berlin and explores the speech's role in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall less than two years later.

At the heart of the story is the relationship between two giants of the late twentieth century: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Departing from the view that Reagan "won" the Cold War, Ratnesar demonstrates that both Reagan and Gorbachev played indispensable roles in bringing about the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was the trust that Reagan and Gorbachev built in each other that allowed them finally to overcome the suspicions that had held their predecessors back. Calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Wall, in Reagan's mind, might actually encourage him to do it. Reagan's speech in Berlin was more than a good sound bite. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we can now see the speech as the event that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Elegant and dramatic, Tear Down This Wall is the definitive account of one of the most memorable speeches in recent history and a reminder of the power of a president's words to change the world. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439170052/Ratnesar,-Romesh-Tear-Down-This-Wall:-A-City,-a-President,-and-the-Speech-that-Ended-the-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439170052/Ratnesar,-Romesh-Tear-Down-This-Wall:-A-City,-a-President,-and-the-Speech-that-Ended-the-(Mobipocket).html
Magic or spycraft? In 1953, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the CIA initiated a top-secret program, code-named MKULTRA, to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques. Realizing that clandestine officers might need to covertly deploy newly developed pills, potions, and powders against the adversary, the CIA hired America's most famous magician, John Mulholland, to write two manuals on sleight of hand and undercover communication techniques. In 1973, virtually all documents related to MKULTRA were destroyed. Mulholland's manuals were thought to be among themuntil a single surviving copy of each, complete with illustrations, was recently discovered in the agency's archives. The manuals reprinted in this work represent the only known complete copy of Mulholland's instructions for CIA officers on the magician's art of deception and secret communications. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061943331/Wallace,-Robert---Melton,-H.-Keith-The-Official-CIA-Manual-of-Trickery-and-Deception-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061943331/Wallace,-Robert---Melton,-H.-Keith-The-Official-CIA-Manual-of-Trickery-and-Deception-(Mobipocket).html
The world would end in 1492so the prophets, soothsayers, and stargazers said. They were right. Their world did end. Ours began.In this extraordinary, sweeping history, Felipe Fernndez-Armesto traces key elements of the modern world back to that single, fateful year. Everything changed in 1492: the way power and wealth were distributed around the globe, the way major religions and civilizations divided the world, and the increasing interconnectedness of separate economies that we now call globalization. Events that began in 1492 transformed the whole ecological system of the planet. Our individualism and the very sense we share of inhabiting one world, as partakers in a common humanity, took shape and became visible in 1492.In search of the origins of modernity, 1492 takes readers on a journey around the globe of the time, in the company of real-life travelers, drawing together the threads that came to bind the planet. The tour starts in Granada, where the last Islamic kingdom in Europe collapsed, then moves to Timbuktu, where a new Muslim empire triumphed. With Portuguese explorers, we visit the court of the first Christian king in the southern hemisphere. We join Jews expelled from Spain as they cross the Mediterranean to North Africa, Italy, and Istanbul. We see the flowering of the Renaissance in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and go to the corrupt Rome of Alexander Borgia. We see the frozen frontiers of the dynamic, bloody Russia of Ivan the Great and hear mystical poets sing on the shores of the Indian Ocean. We sail the Atlantic with Columbus. In the depths of an old volcanic crater in the Canary Islands, we witness the start of the first European overseas empire. We observe the Aztecs and Incas laying the foundations of a New World in the Americas. Wars and witchcraft, plagues and persecutions, poetry and prophecy, science and magic, art and faithall the glories and follies of the time are in this book. Everywhere, new departures marked the start of a new configuration for humankind, revealing how and why the modern world is different from the worlds of antiquity and the Middle Ages.History seems a patternless labyrinthbut a good guide can trace our paths through it back to the moment when some of the most striking features of today's world began. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061959097/Fernandez-Armesto,-Felipe-1492-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061959097/Fernandez-Armesto,-Felipe-1492-(Mobipocket).html
For the last two decades, The New York Observer has documented the Platinum Age of New York, when the city's new elite rose and dominated society, media, business, and culture with an amusing arrogance that redefined the power capital of the world. The Kingdom of New York jauntily chronicles the Rise and Fall and Rise of New York City, as personified by the protagonists and antagonists of the past twenty years, told in archival pastichea breathtaking sprint of headlines, great reporting, witty writing, and stories in fashion, ideas, real estate, style, media, movies, politics, sex, and finance.All of New York's major players are hereincluding Bill and Hillary, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Graydon Carter, Katie Couric, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Tina Fey, J. Lo, Seinfeld, Tina Brown, Anderson Cooperas well as essays by Cynthia Ozick, Gay Talese, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese. Here, too, are many of the country's finest journalists reporting on the high opulence of the 1990s; the wry irony of the Seinfeld years; the poignant loss of John Kennedy Jr.; and the inconceivable assault of September 11, 2001, and New York's rallying return. Among it all are signature featuresfrom Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" columns as they initially appeared to the couples counseling of "George and Hilly"as the Observer grew into one of the city's most influential papers.Handsomely designed and filled with the paper's trademark attention to politics, status, and wealth, this is a rollicking insider's account of contemporary New York. At once wickedly funny and astute, The Kingdom of New York is a striking tribute to an unforgettable era in the city's history. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061959660/New-York-Observer,-The-The-Kingdom-of-New-York-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9780061959660/New-York-Observer,-The-The-Kingdom-of-New-York-(Mobipocket).html
"Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseemüller world map of 1507." So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name.

For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth -- until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemüller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus's contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemüller and Ringmann printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci's honor they gave this New World a name: America.

The Fourth Part of the World is the story behind that map, a thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach, Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend, Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration, imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester's telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe's early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity's worldview.

One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, The Fourth Part of the World is the story of that map: the dazzling story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have helped us decipher our world. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160428/Lester,-Toby-The-Fourth-Part-of-the-World:-The-Race-to-the-Ends-of-the-Earth,-and-the-Epic-Story-of-the-Map-That-Gave-America-Its-Name-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160428/Lester,-Toby-The-Fourth-Part-of-the-World:-The-Race-to-the-Ends-of-the-Earth,-and-the-Epic-Story-of-the-Map-That-Gave-America-Its-Name-(Mobipocket).html
When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, the United States was locked in a bitter diplomatic struggle with Britain over the rich lands of the Oregon Territory, which included what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Texas, not yet part of the Union, was threatened by a more powerful Mexico. And the territories north and west of Texas -- what would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado -- belonged to Mexico. When Polk relinquished office four years later, the country had grown by more than a third as all these lands were added. The continental United States, as we know it today, was established -- facing two oceans and positioned to dominate both.

In a one-term presidency, Polk completed the story of America's Manifest Destiny -- extending its territory across the continent, from sea to sea, by threatening England and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico that Abraham Lincoln, in Congress at the time, opposed as preemptive.

Robert Merry tells this story through powerful debates and towering figures -- the outgoing President John Tyler and Polk's great mentor, Andrew Jackson; his defeated Whig opponent, Henry Clay; two famous generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; Secretary of State James Buchanan (who would precede Lincoln as president); Senate giants Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass; Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun; and ex-president Martin Van Buren, like Polk a Jackson protégé but now a Polk rival.

This was a time of tremendous clashing forces. A surging antislavery sentiment was at the center of the territorial fight. The struggle between a slave-owning South and an opposing North was leading inexorably to Civil War. In a gripping narrative, Robert Merry illuminates a crucial epoch in U.S. history. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160459/Merry,-Robert-W.-A-Country-of-Vast-Designs:-James-K.-Polk,-the-Mexican-War-and-the-Conquest-of-the-American-Continent-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160459/Merry,-Robert-W.-A-Country-of-Vast-Designs:-James-K.-Polk,-the-Mexican-War-and-the-Conquest-of-the-American-Continent-(Mobipocket).html
For almost 500 years the Jews of Europe were kept apart, confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside. Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution, the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had begun. What happened next would change the course of history.

Emancipation tells the story of how this isolated minority emerged from the ghetto and against terrible odds very quickly established themselves as shapers of history, as writers, revolutionaries, social thinkers, and artists. Their struggle to create a place for themselves in Western European life led to revolutions and nothing less than a second renaissance in Western culture.

The book spans the era from the French Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century. The story is told through the lives of the people who lived through this momentous change. Some are well-known: Marx, Freud, Mahler, Proust, and Einstein; many more have been forgotten. Michael Goldfarb brings them all to life.

This is an epic story, and Goldfarb tells it with the skill and eye for detail of a novelist. He brings the empathy and understanding that has marked his two decades as a reporter in public radio to making the characters come alive. It is a tale full of hope, struggle, triumph, and, waiting at the end, a great tragedy.

This is a book that will have meaning for anyone interested in the struggle of immigrants and minorities to succeed. We live in a world where vast numbers are on the move, where religions and races are grinding against each other in new combinations; Emancipation is a book of history for our time. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160480/Goldfarb,-Michael-Emancipation:-How-Liberating-Europe's-Jews-from-the-Ghetto-Led-to-Revolution-and-Renaissance-(Mobipocket).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/9781439160480/Goldfarb,-Michael-Emancipation:-How-Liberating-Europe's-Jews-from-the-Ghetto-Led-to-Revolution-and-Renaissance-(Mobipocket).html
The greatest political story ever told-the epic clash between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, as captured in Theodore White's dramatic and groundbreaking chronicle The Making of the President 1960 is the book that revolutionized-even created-modern political journalism. Granted intimate access to all parties involved, Theodore White crafted an almost mythic story of the battle that pitted Senator John F. Kennedy against Vice-President Richard M. Nixon-from the decisive primary battles to the history-making televised debates, the first of their kind. Magnificently detailed and exquisitely paced, The Making of the President 1960 imbues the nation's presidential election process with both grittiness and grandeur, and established a benchmark against which all new campaign reporters would measure their work. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction-and the first entry in White's influential four-volume ""narrative history of American politics in action""-this classic account remains the keystone of American political journalism. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780061900600/White,-Theodore-H.-The-Making-of-the-President-1960-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780061900600/White,-Theodore-H.-The-Making-of-the-President-1960-.html
It will soon be close to a century since the outbreak of the First World War, yet as military historian Hew Strachan argues in this brilliant and authoritative one-volume history, the legacy of the "war to end all wars" is with us still. Written in crisp, compelling prose and enlivened with vivid photographs-including early color photographs-The First World War re-creates this world-altering conflict both on and off the battlefield. Strachan offers a fresh and truly global perspective on how the Great War not only redrew the map of the world but also set in motion the most dangerous conflicts of today, especially in such hot spots as the Middle East and the Balkans. Deeply learned and powerfully written, The First World War is a landmark work of contemporary history. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780143035183/Strachan,-Hew-The-First-World-War-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780143035183/Strachan,-Hew-The-First-World-War-.html
A comprehensive treatment of the significant symbols and institutions of Roman religion, this Companion places the various religious symbols, discourses, and practices, including Judaism and Christianity, into a larger framework to reveal the sprawling landscape of the Roman religion.

• An innovative introduction to Roman religion
  
• Approaches the field with a focus on the human-figures instead of the gods
  
• Analyzes religious changes from the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD
  
• Offers the first history of religious motifs on coins and household/everyday utensils
  
• Presents Roman religion within its cultural, social, and historical contexts