Countries & Cultures
It's a very big world after all, with thousands of cultures to learn about and explore. Browse cultural commentary, history, maps, atlases and more!
Subcategories in Countries & Cultures
Top Sellers in Countries & Cultures
A People's History Of the United States
by Howard Zinn
A People's History of the United States is a non-fiction book by historian Howard Zinn, first published in 1980. The book presents a critical analysis of American history from the perspective of marginalized groups, including Native Americans, African Americans, women, and working-class people. It challenges traditional narratives of US history and highlights the often-overlooked struggles and achievements of ordinary people. The book covers topics such as slavery, the Civil War, the labor movement, and...
Read more about this item
Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.” Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly...
Read more about this item
Endurance
by Alfred Lansing
Ernest Shackleton defined heroism in 1915 when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice and then destroyed on its way to Antarctica. This tense week-by-week, month-by-month reconstruction charts the incredible journey undertaken by his crew of 27 men through 850 miles of the southern Atlantic's heaviest seas.
Anam Cara
by John O'donohue
Discover the Celtic Circle of BelongingJohn O'Donohue, poet, philosopher, and scholar, guides you through the spiritual landscape of the Irish imagination. In Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," the ancient teachings, stories, and blessings of Celtic wisdom provide such profound insights on the universal themes of friendship, solitude, love, and death as:Light is generousThe human heart is never completely bornLove as ancient recognitionThe body is the angel of the soulSolitude is luminousBeauty likes...
Read more about this item
The Death and Life Of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city's many working districts, which fascinated her. In 1952, after a number of writing and editing jobs ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to a geography of the...
Read more about this item
How the Irish Saved Civilization
by Thomas Cahill
How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe is a non-fiction historical book written by Thomas Cahill. Cahill argues a case for the Irish people's critical role in preserving Western Civilization from utter destruction by the Germanic tribes. The book retells the story from the collapse of the Roman Empire and the pivotal role played by members of the clergy at the time.
The Tibetan Book Of Living and Dying
by Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, gives a comprehensive presentation of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, exploring: the message of impermanence; evolution, karma and rebirth; the nature of mind and how to train the mind through meditation; how to follow a spiritual path in this day and age; the practice of compassion; how to care for and show love to the dying, and spiritual practices for the moment of death.
Distant Mirror
by Barbara W Tuchman
Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August—a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute.
The Making Of the English Working Class
by E P Thompson
The Making of the English Working Class is an influential and pivotal work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson, a notable 'New Left' historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. It concentrates on English artisan and working class society "in its formative years 1780 to 1832.
The Power Broker
by Robert a Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, "New York City's Master Builder", by Robert Caro. In the years since its publication, and especially since Moses's death in 1981, it has been central to discussion of Moses and the history of 20th-century New York.
Founding Brothers
by Joseph J Ellis
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book written by Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. This text explores how a group of individuals both gifted and flawed coped with the challenges of founding the United States.
A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil Sheehan
One of the most acclaimed books of our time--the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the...
Read more about this item
The Rape Of Nanking
by Iris Chang
In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this horrifying episode. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: of the...
Read more about this item
No Ordinary Time
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.
King LeopoldS Ghost
by Adam Hochschild
In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the...
Read more about this item
The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues,...
Read more about this item
Mein Kampf
by Hitler- Adolf/ Manheim- Ralph
Mein Kampf, in English: My Struggle, is a book by Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. Hitler began the dictation of the book while imprisoned for what he considered to be "political crimes" after his failed revolution in Munich in November 1923. Though Hitler received many visitors earlier on, he soon devoted himself entirely to the book.
The Committee
by Sean McPhilemy
Subtitle: Political Assassination in Northern Ireland. This is one of the most important books to emerge from the Northern Ireland conflict. It disproves the myth that the violence emanates largely from Nationalists, and names leading figures in the Unionist community who operate loyalist death squads. These murder gangs are part of a carefully orchestrated counter-insurgency plot aimed at terrifying the Nationalist community into....abandoning the entire struggle for human rights...
Countries & Cultures Books & Ephemera
Scott and Amundsen
by Huntford, Roland
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Pole was the most coveted prize in the fiercely nationalistic modern age of exploration. In the brilliant dual biography, the award-winning writer Roland Huntford re-examines every detail of the great race to the South Pole between Britain's Robert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen. Scott, who dies along with four of his men only eleven miles from his next cache of supplies, became Britain's beloved failure, while Amundsen, who not only beat Scott to...
Read more about this item
Unsung Hero
by Smith, Michael
One hundred years ago, in March 1909, Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition came home safely. When Scott heard the news, he immediately contacted Tom Crean with the intention of planning his own adventure. And thus the Terra Nova Expedition was born. The remarkable Tom Crean ran away to sea aged fifteen and spent more time in the unexplored Antarctic than Scott or Shackleton, and was one of the few to serve and outlive both. Michael Smith's original biography of this enigmatic figure spawned a Guinness ad, a...
Read more about this item
The Voyages Of the Discovery
by Savours, Ann
Includes index.
Originally published: London: Virgin, 1992.
"Abridged from 'The Voyages of the Discovery' [London : 1992]"--T.p. verso.
"Reprinted 2005"--T.p. verso.
Originally published: London: Virgin, 1992.
"Abridged from 'The Voyages of the Discovery' [London : 1992]"--T.p. verso.
"Reprinted 2005"--T.p. verso.