Mostrando resultados por Editor "Phoenix Books" en Historia

So much of our human body is made up of salt that we'd be dead without it. The fine balance of nature, the trade of salt as a currency of many nations and empires, the theme of a popular Shakespearean play... Salt is best selling author Mark Kurlansky's story of the only rock we eat.

Richard Nixon said he wanted administration to be "the best chronicled in history". But when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of a voice-activated tapind system to a Senate committee in July 1973, Nixon's White House and its recordings quickly became the most infamous in American history. Only 60 hours were actually made public in the 1970s. Many thousands of hours remained secret and Nixon's hands, and he fought fiercely to keep them that way right up to his death.

Charles Bowden writes, “this book is not about how the world ends but how a new world is being born.” Murder City explores this new world, focusing on the idea that Mexico is collapsing into a permanent culture of violence. Bowden focuses on Ciudad Juarez, which lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, last year alone 1,607 people were murdered, a number that is set to accelerate in 2009.

In Hope Is not a Method, Sullivan and co-author Colonel Michael Harper tell us how they kept the army well-trained and equipped for traditional functions while preparing it for a wide range of new and complicated missions, all in the midst of a dramatic reduction in both human and financial resources. Their approach is based on continuity and change: maintaining their focus on the army's historic vision and values while introducing new problem-solving techniques and training methods.

Perhaps no figure in biblical scholarship has been the subject of more controversy and debate than Mary Magdalene. Although she is discussed in the gospels of Philip, Thomas, Peter, and Bartholomew in the collection of writings known as the Gnostic gospels that were rejected by the early Christian church, there is no better insight into this mysterious and influential woman than Mary's own gospel.

Expanded from the original, Yes We Can! offers highlights from speeches by Barack Obama and includes his entire inaugural address as an added bonus. For this collection, speeches were chosen to showcase President Obama's powerful, inspiring rhetoric of hope and change and to represent his stands on issues such as climate, energy, service, and the Iraq war.

This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. The youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong. Ultimately fleeing to the U.S. with her children, she finally found peace, and in 1986, she was reunited with her family in Vietnam. The story of her homecoming, interwoven with her memories of the war years, paints a vivid picture of a noble, optimistic woman and her native country.

Embark on a worldwide journey with renowned scholar of comparative religion, Jacob Needleman, as he gathers together ancient texts and writings of the modern practitioners of essential Christianity. Needleman demonstrates that a more effective, contemplative tradition existed in the early church and continues today in the lives of extraordinary people whose stories he retells in the course of his own personal explorations into the realms of the spirit.

On April 1On April 10, 1912, The RMS Titanic embarked on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. But on the night of April 14, the British passenger liner collided with an iceberg, which resulted in the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Merely one day after the Titanic survivors arrived in New York City, a United States Senate committee began an investigation into the wreck of the great "unsinkable" ship.

Blanche Wiesen Cook recreates Eleanor Roosevelt in all of her roles -- as a visionary, an activist, a political wife, and a woman far more independent than we knew. No other First Lady has had a greater influence in the course of democracy in this century, and no other book about Eleanor Roosevelt captures the complexity of her character - her wit, her passion, her boldness, and her commitment to greater dignity and security for all women and men.

The cod has played a vital part in livelihoods, diets, and health in general — as well as roles in national economies and international wars. Drawing on his love of food and food culture, Mark Kurlansky leaps into history and folklore to explore how this innocuous fish had such an impact over the centuries.

In Stupid Black Men, Larry Elder takes on the mind-set of those people who always capture the most media attention - as well as masses of public money - people who say that racism is the root of all problems and who end up hurting precisely those they claim to be helping.

There is perhaps no more compelling example of the power of words than Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In merely 272 words, Lincoln gave the nation "a new birth of freedom" by tracing its history to the Declaration of Independence, as well as incorporating elements of the Greek revival and Transcendentalism. Garry Wills breathes news life into words we thought we knew and reveals much about a President so easily mythologized but often misunderstood.

At the young age of 16, Andy Adams left his San Antonio home to follow his dream of becoming a cowboy. Going on long drives with some of the 19th century's hardiest cowboys, he learned his trade through many adventurous years of trial and error. This account of his true experiences includes dusty cattle drives, brandings, stampedes, dangerous river crossings, and remarkable encounters with the Blackfoot, Oglala, and Platte Indian tribes.

In 1968, with the publication of Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, the spiritual search was revealed to be as incredibly exciting as any death-defying adventure which human beings may be drawn to undertake. As the years have passed, Dr. Castaneda has come to be seen as an anthropologist of the soul, showing us that the inner world has its own inaccessible mountains, forbidding deserts, and awesomely beautiful dangers which we are all called to confront.

One hot Monday morning in 1976, Albert Spaggiari engineered the European crime of the century. A bank president in Nice, France found his vault welded shut—from the inside. Spaggiari and his gang of 20 men had dug a 25-foot tunnel from the city's sewer system into the bank, where they spent a weekend cooking meals, drinking wine, and clearing millions of dollars in gold, jewelry, gems, and cash. Here is the breathtakingly compelling story of Spaggiari, his “sewer gang,” and the most daring, outrageous theft of the 20th century.

Hazardous Duty is a real-life, hard-hitting nonfiction thriller set in the ruins of Bosnia and the sands of Saudi Arabia, the deadly alleys of Mogadishu and the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince. Colonel Hackworth returns from these new American battlefields to report that the Pentagon is wasting hundred of billions of dollars gearing up to fight the wrong kind of wars, and offers a tough-love critique of American military leadership, interpreting the new post-Cold War conflicts.

Discover an alternate history to the human race as the authors of Forbidden Archeology challenge one of the most fundamental components of the modern scientific world view. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson discuss the work of researchers who, over the past 2 centuries, have found bones and artifacts showing that people like ourselves existed on earth millions of years ago.

During World War II, in a Lithuanian ghetto, three comrades took courageous action against their German invaders: Abba Kovner, a Jewish partisan leader, produced a manifesto that called for his fellow Jews to take up arms against the Nazis; his future wife Vitka Kempner joined the FPO, a resistance organization; their friend, Ruzka Korczak, also joined the FPO, eager to strike back at their oppressors. Together, this trio served at the center of the underground movement in Lithuania.

Legendary folk singer and activist Woody Guthrie left us with this funny, cynical, earthy and tragic account of his life in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, of the Depression that followed, and of his subsequent travels in, on, and under trains, in stolen cars and on his feet, rounding an America going rotten from the top downwards. During the journey of discovery that was his life, Guthrie composed and sang words and music that have become a national heritage. His songs are merely part of his legacy. Woody Guthrie left us this remarkable autobiography.