Mostrando resultados por narrador "Cameron James Stewart" en Todas las categorías

In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. For almost a year, rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. Historians would come to call it tulipomania.

In the great wars of modern history, maritime powers have always prevailed over land-based empires, whether Habsburg, Napoleonic, Nazi, or Soviet. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies and centralization of land-based empires, those nations attaining mastery at sea have been distinguished by liberty, flexibility, and enterprise. The 17th-century Dutch were the first to achieve naval and trading dominance.

From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political and cultural. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world.

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo began work on a painting that became one of the most famous pieces of art in the world - the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Every year millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork.

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps 500 body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit men to gun down 41 police officers and prison guards in two days. In Southern Mexico a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans.

From peasants to princes, no one was untouched by the spiritual and intellectual upheaval of the 16th century. Martin Luther's challenge to church authority forced Christians to examine their beliefs in ways that shook the foundations of their religion. The subsequent divisions, fed by dynastic rivalries and military changes, fundamentally altered the relations between ruler and ruled. Geographical and scientific discoveries challenged the unity of Christendom as a belief community.

The wind screams. The dark night is freezing. Vossk, a Vostroyan Firstborn, shrinks into a rock against a howl of memories. Having disgraced himself by deserting his post during a terrifying encounter, Vossk had resigned himself to penal servitude, though yearned for the chance to redeem himself. But in the 41st Millennium, such dreams are hollow when a man’s reality has been shaken to his core. Found in the shadows of a pitiless cave, Vossk relives his tale to his rescuer....

Command of the oceans was crucial to winning World War II. By the start of 1942 Nazi Germany had conquered mainland Europe, and Imperial Japan had overrun Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific. How could Britain and distant America prevail in what had become a "war of continents"? In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counterattack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea.

In 1706, war still rages in Europe, and the tobacco planters of the Virginia colony's tidewater struggle against shrinking markets and pirates lurking off the coast. But American seafarers have found a new source of wealth: the Indian Ocean and ships carrying fabulous treasure to the great Mogul of India. Faced with ruin, former pirate Thomas Marlowe is determined to find a way to the riches of the East. Carrying his crop of tobacco in his privateer, Elizabeth Galley, he secretly plans to continue on to the Indian Ocean to hunt the Mogul's ships.

An account of the last three hundred years of Scottish history offers a look at Scottish identity and culture.

Hadrian's Wall is the largest and one of the most enigmatic historical monuments in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running seventy-three miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least twenty-six miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain's most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of the Wall, the vallum, is larger than any surviving prehistoric earthwork.

Disraeli once declared that "assassination never changed anything", and yet the idea that World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust might have been averted with a single bullet or bomb has remained a tantalizing one for half a century. What historian Roger Moorhouse reveals in Killing Hitler is just how close - and how often - history came to taking a radically different path between Adolf Hitler's rise to power and his ignominious suicide.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

During World War II, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia found themselves trapped between the giants of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Over the course of the war, these states were repeatedly occupied by different forces, and local government organizations and individuals were forced to choose between supporting the occupying forces or forming partisan units to resist their occupation. Devastated during the German invasion, these states then became the site of some of the most vicious fighting during the Soviet counterattack and push towards Berlin.

Towards the end of his life, Seneca the Younger (c4 BCE-65 CE) began a correspondence with a friend in Sicily, later collected under the title The Moral Epistles. In these 124 letters, Seneca expresses, in a wise, steady and calm manner, the philosophy by which he lived - derived essentially from the Stoics. The letters deal with a variety of specific topics - often eminently practical - such as 'On Saving Time', 'On the Terrors of Death', 'On True and False Friendships', 'On Brawn and Brains' and 'On Old Age and Death'.

In a blind rage, King James, ex-slave and now Marlowe's comrade in arms, slaughters the crew of a slave ship and makes himself the most wanted man in Virginia. The governor gives Marlowe a choice: Hunt James down and bring him back to hang or lose everything Marlowe has built for himself and his wife, Elizabeth. Marlowe sets out in pursuit of the ex-slave turned pirate, struggling to maintain control over his crew—rough privateers who care only for plunder—and following James's trail of destruction.

Until the publication of this captivating biography, no such volume on Trajan's life has been tailored to the general listener. The unique book illuminates a neglected period of ancient Roman history. Trajan rose from fairly obscure beginnings to become the emperor of Rome. He was born in Italica, an Italic settlement close to modern Seville in present-day Spain, and is the first Roman Emperor to be born outside of Rome. His remarkable rise from officer to general and then to emperor in just over twenty years reveals a shrewd politician who maintained absolute power.

Two contrasting reflections by Aristotle which cover very particular ground. In 'On the Soul', Aristotle presents his view of the 'life essence' which, he argues, is possessed by living things whether plants, animals or humans. Not a 'soul' in the generally accepted Western use of the term, this 'soul', he says, is a life force that is indivisible from the organism that possesses it.

This book offers a fresh insight into the conquests of Alexander the Great by attempting to view the events of 336-323 BCE from the vantage point of the defeated.

Poetics and Rhetoric are the two major works by Aristotle which, after more than 2,000 years, remain key behavioural handbooks for anyone interested in story, performance, presentation and indeed psychology. The continuing influence of Poetics, for example, is readily discernible even among the scriptwriters of Hollywood!