Plumes

ostrich feathers, jews, and a lost world of global commerce

From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from rival Sephardic families whose feathers were imported from the Sahara and traded across the Mediterranean, from New York's Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, Stein explores ...

Philip II of Macedonia

Alexander the Great is probably the most famous ruler of antiquity, and his spectacular conquests are recounted often in books and films. But what of his father, Philip II, who united Macedonia, created the best army in the world at the time, and conquered and ...

Deliberative democracy and Human Rights

In this important collection of writings, leading legal and political thinkers address a wide array of issues that confront societies undergoing a transition to democratic rule. Bridging the gap between theory and practice in international human rights law and policy, the contributors continue discussions that ...

Democracy's privileged few

legislative privilege and democratic norms in the british and american constitutions

This book is the first to compare the freedoms and protections of members of the United States Congress with those of Britain's Parliament. Placing legislative privilege in historical context, Josh Chafetz explores how and why legislators in Britain and America have been granted special ...

What really matters

service, leadership, people and values

The fundamental question in business and in personal life is the same: what really matters? In this book, one of America's most widely admired business leaders distills a lifetime of experience, including failures as well as successes, to reveal his answers. John Pepper, president ...

Principles of general management

the art and science of getting results across organizational boundaries

If you have been looking for the one resource for managing a business of any size, this is it. Based on the extensive business experience of five experts, this authoritative guide provides an in-depth look at what every leader must know about managing across departments ...

Bound together

how traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors shaped globalization

Since humans migrated from Africa and progressively dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with each other. In this entertaining book, Nayan Chanda follows the exploits of traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors throughout history as they have shaped and ...

The unsustainable costs of partial deregulation

Three decades ago, federal policy makers - Republicans and Democrats - embarked on a general strategy of deregulation. In the electricity, gas delivery, and telecommunications industries, the strategy called for restructuring to separate production from transmission and distribution, followed by the elimination of price controls. The expected ...

Innovation and the State

political choice and strategies for growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland

This book is about choice. Its main argument is that, contrary to popular belief, intensified globalization gives emerging economies a larger number of economic development alternatives than they have had since World War II. This is especially true in the case of rapid innovation-based industries ...

The persistence of poverty

why the economics of the well-off can´t help the poor

Why hasn't the poverty rate fallen in four decades, despite society's massive and varied efforts? The notable philosopher Charles Karelis contends that conventional explanations of poverty rest on a mistake. And so do the antipoverty policies they generate. "The Persistence of Poverty" proposes ...

Forgotten continent

the battle for Latin America's soul

Latin America has often been condemned to failure. Neither poor enough to evoke Africa's moral crusade, nor as explosively booming as India and China, it has largely been overlooked by the West. Yet this vast continent, home to half a billion people, the world ...

Goya's last works

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746- 1828) had a prolific career and spent the last four years of his life living in Bordeaux with other political emigres from Spain and South America. In those years and just before his departure from Spain he created ...

Empire and superempire

Britain, America and the world

The present American 'empire' is often compared with the British one of yore - not surprising in view of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were once British imperial stamping grounds, too. But how alike are the two empires really? What are the connections between them ...

On classical economics

Thomas Sowell's many writings on the history of economic thought have appeared in a number of scholarly journals and books, and these writings have been praised, reprinted, and translated in various countries around the world. The classical era in the history of economics is ...

Islamic imperialism

a history

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim ...

Empires of the atlantic world

Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus' arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working ...

Writting on art

While the collected writings of many major 20th- century artists, including Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, have been published, Mark Rothko's writings have only recently come to light, beginning with the critically acclaimed "Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art". Rothko's other ...

The artist's reality

philosophies of art

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting over the course of his career. Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent ...

Simón Bolivar

a life

Simon Bolivar was a revolutionary who freed six countries, an intellectual who argued the principles of national liberation, and a general who fought a cruel colonial war. His life, passions, battles and great victories became embedded in Spanish American culture almost as soon as they ...

1715

the great jacobite rebellion

Lacking the romantic imagery of the 1745 uprising of supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 has received far less attention from scholars. Yet the '15, just eight years after the union of England and Scotland, was in fact a more significant ...