MVR 390
John Julius Norwich―“the very model of a popular historian” (Wall Street Journal)―is acclaimed for his distinctive ability to weave together a fascinating narrative through vivid detail, colorful anecdotes, and captivating characters. Here, he has crafted a bold tapestry of Europe and the Middle East in the early sixteenth century, when four legendary rulers towered over the era.
Francis I of France was the personification of the Renaissance, and a highly influential patron of the arts and education. Henry VIII, who was not expected to inherit the throne but embraced the role with gusto, broke with the Roman Catholic Church and appointed himself head of the Church of England. Charles V was the most powerful industrious man of the time, and was unanimously elected Holy Roman Emperor. Suleiman the Magnificent―who stood apart as a Muslim―brought the Ottoman Empire to its apogee of political, military, and economic power.
Against the vibrant background of the Renaissance, these four men collectively shaped the culture, religion, and politics of their respective domains. With remarkable erudition, John Julius Norwich delves into this entertaining and layered history, indelibly depicting four dynamic characters and how their incredible achievements―and obsessions with one another―changed European history.
ISBN: 9780802126634
Published on 11 April 2017.
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
Common Sense is the book that created the modern United States, as Paine’s incendiary call for Americans to revolt against British rule converted millions to the cause of independence and set out a vision of a just society. Published anonymously in 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense was a radical and impassioned call for America to free itself and set up an independent republican government. Savagely attacking hereditary kingship and aristocratic institutions, Paine urged a new beginning for his adopted country in which personal freedom and social equality would be upheld and economic and cultural progress encouraged. His pamphlet was the first to speak directly to a mass audience—it went through fifty-six editions within a year of publication—and its assertive and often caustic style embodied the democratic spirit he advocated.
ISBN: 9780143122005
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
Written at a time when furious arguments were raging about the best way to govern America, The Federalist Papers had the immediate practical aim of persuading New Yorkers to accept the newly drafted Constitution in 1787. In this they were supremely successful, but their influence also transcended contemporary debate to win them a lasting place in discussions of American political theory. The Federalist Papers make a powerful case for power-sharing between State and Federal authorities and have only risen in legal influence over the last two centuries. Beeman’s analysis helps clarify the goals, at once separate and in concert, of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay during their writing, and his selection of some of the most important papers show the array of issues—both philosophical and policy-specific—covered by this body of work.
ISBN: 9780143121978
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
The Supreme Court is one of America's leading expositors of and participants in debates about American values. Legal expert Jay M. Feinman introduces and selects some of the most important Supreme Court Decisions of all time, which touch on the very foundations of American society. These cases cover a vast array of issues, from the powers of government and freedom of speech to freedom of religion and civil liberties. Feinman offers commentary on each case and excerpts from the opinions of the Justices that show the range of debate in the Supreme Court and its importance to civil society. Among the cases included will be Marbury v. Madison, on the supremacy of the Constitution and the power of judicial review; U.S. v. Nixon, on separation of powers; and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a post-9/11 case on presidential power and due process.
ISBN: 9780143121992
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
In one portable volume, with accessible annotations and modernizing commentary throughout, Richard Beeman presents The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Beeman has created a fascinating apparatus for understanding the most important document in American history—and why it’s as central in the America of today as it was in creation of the country.
ISBN: 9780143121961
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize—the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address—to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered: the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress.
ISBN: 9780143121985
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
American Political Speeches includes the best American rhetoric from inside and outside the White House. Some of the greatest words spoken in American history have come from men and women who lacked the biggest bully pulpit in the country, but who nevertheless were able to move the nation with words. Frederick Douglass explained the irony of Independence Day from the perspective of a slave. Martin Luther King, Jr. described his dream of an interracial America. William Jennings Bryan gave voice to social discontent with a single phrase, “a cross of gold.” Barbara Jordan summoned the nation”s outrage during the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon. And the best presidents, not by coincidence, have tended to be those with an appreciation for the use of language: Lincoln explaining a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg; John Kennedy voicing moral outrage at the Berlin Wall; Franklin D. Roosevelt chatting to a nation gathered in front of radios; Ronald Reagan addressing Congress freshly healed from an assassination attempt.
ISBN: 9780143121954
MVR 470
The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth’s secret alliance with the Ottoman sultan and outreach to the Muslim world.
Long before Thomas Jefferson confronted the Barbary Pirates, Queen Elizabeth sent a secret message to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, inviting him to open his markets to her merchants. Islam and the West crossed paths much earlier than we think—and originally the Muslims had the upper hand.
When Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, she found herself in an awkward predicament. England had always depended on trade. Now its key markets were suddenly closed to her Protestant merchants, while the staunchly Catholic king of Spain vowed to take her throne. In a bold decision with far-reaching consequences, she set her sights on the Muslim powers. She sent an emissary to the shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the powerful Ottoman, setting the stage for England’s transformation from a peripheral player on the cold fringes of Europe to the hub of a global empire.
By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia. These included the resourceful mercer Anthony Jenkinson, who met both Suleyman and the Magnificent and the Persian Sah Tahmasp in the 1560s, William Harborne, the Norfolk merchant who became the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1582, and the adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley, who spent much of 1600 at the court of Shah Abbas.
This marked the beginning of an extraordinary alignment with Muslim powers and of economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. By the late 1580s, thousands of English merchants, diplomats, sailors, and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia. To finance these expeditions, they created the first ever joint stock company, a revolutionary new business model that balanced risk and reward.
Londoners were gripped with a passion for the Orient. Elizabeth became hooked on sugar as new words like candy, turquoise, and tulip entered the English language. Marlowe offered up Tamburlaine and Shakespeare wrote Othello six months after the first Moroccan ambassador’s visit. Jerry Brotton reveals that Elizabethan England’s relationship with the Muslim world was far more amicable—and far more extensive—than we have ever appreciated as he tells the riveting story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes.
Published on 20 September 2016.
ISBN: 9780525428824
MVR 320
Most people think hotel employees are effortlessly cheerful, naturally helpful, and genuinely like their work.
Most people are wrong.
Find out what really goes on in the world of hospitality with this hilarious book full of funny and absurd stories, anecdotes told in dialogue, factoids, and hoax pop quizzes by two veteran concierges who paid their way while working at a combined 50 hotels in and around Times Square. They are very pleased to help you learn:
· The Truth About Bed Bugs
· The Mythology of “Loyalty Programs”
· The 411 on Hotel Residents
· And so much more
Filled with photographs and infographics, How May We Hate You? is both romp and commentary on the hospitality industry and life behind the nametag.
Published on 17 May 2016.
ISBN: 9780553448344
MVR 470
In Empires of the Sea and City of Fortune, New York Times bestselling author Roger Crowley established himself as our generation’s preeminent historian of the great European seafaring empires, and the go-to author for post-Crusade clashes of East and West.
Now, in Conquerors, Crowley gives us the epic story of the emergence of Portugal, a small, poor nation that enjoyed a century of maritime supremacy thanks to the daring and navigational skill of its explorers—a tactical advantage no other country could match. Portugal’s discovery of a sea route to India, campaign of imperial conquest over Muslim rulers, and domination of the spice trade would forever disrupt the Mediterranean and build the first global economy.
Crowley relies on letters and eyewitness testimony to tell the story of tiny Portugal’s rapid and breathtaking rise to power. Conquerors reveals the Império Português in all of its splendor and ferocity, bringing to life the personalities of the enterprising and fanatical house of Aviz. Figures such as King Manuel “the Fortunate,” João II “the Perfect Prince,” marauding governor Afonso de Albuquerque, and explorer Vasco da Gama juggled their private ambitions and the public aims of the empire, often suffering astonishing losses in pursuit of a global fortune. Also central to the story of Portugal’s ascent was its drive to eradicate Islamic culture and establish a Christian empire in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese explorers pushed deep into the African continent in search of the mythical Christian king Prester John, and they ruthlessly besieged Indian port cities in their attempts to monopolize trade.
The discovery of a route to India around the horn of Africa was not only a brilliant breakthrough in navigation but heralded a complete upset of the world order. For the next century, no European empire was more ambitious, no rulers more rapacious than the kings of Portugal. In the process they created the first long-range maritime empire and set in motion the forces of globalization that now shape our world. At Crowley’s hand, the complete story of the Portuguese empire and the human cost of its ambition can finally be told.
Published on 1 December 2015.
ISBN: 9780812994001