TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD by JOHN REED

$35.00 AUD

Category: SECONDHAND BOOKS

THE SHADOW OF VESUVIUS : POMPEII AD 79 by RALEIGH TREVELYAN

$20.00 AUD

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EMPIRES OF EARLY LATIN AMERICA - 3 VOLUME SET : THE AZTECS, THE MAYA AND THE INCAS by NIGEL DAVIES AND NORMAN HAMMOND

$115.00 AUD

Category: RARE AND COLLECTIBLE

Murder by the Book: A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime by Claire Harman

$22.99 AUD

Category: HISTORY

'A fascinating portrait of Victorian London' Observer 'I devoured it in one sitting' Alison Weir 'Excellent' Dan Snow Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, on an ultra-respectable Mayfair street, the elderly Lord William Russell was discovered in bed with his throat cut so deeply that the head was almo st severed. When Lord William's assassin claimed to having been inspired by a recent sensational novel, it sent shock waves through literary London, and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. The crime, the investigation, the city's fevered fixation and the mores of the Victorian age are all brilliantly evoked and scrutinized in Claire Harman's spellbinding account of a surprisingly literary crime. 'A scandalous Victorian mystery' Guardian 'Fascinating, entertaining. Harman's tale is never less than rip-roaring' Daily Telegraph 'Vivid and punchy' Spectator ...Show more

Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present by Christopher Harding

$24.99 AUD

Category: HISTORY

Japan Story is a fascinating, surprising account of Japan's culture, from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid 19th century to the present, through the eyes of people who always had their doubts about modernity - who greeted it not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's familiar mode rnizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms'- both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new masonry and mortar of mainstream Japan. ...Show more

Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson

$100.00 AUD

Category: RARE AND COLLECTIBLE

The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events. Wilson's great strength is in allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying results. The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay alive under impossible circumstances. The extraordinary narrative of the war haunted Europe's leaders into the twentieth century (comparisons with 1939-45 were entirely appropriate) and modern Europe cannot be understood without reference to this dreadful conflict. ...Show more

Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance by Catherine Fletcher

$35.00 AUD

Category: HISTORY

The Italian Renaissance shaped western culture - but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise. We revere Leonardo for his art but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We visit Florence to see Michelangelo's David but see nothing of the thousands who were massacred at the republic's downfall. In focusing on the Medici in Florence and the Borgias in Rome, we miss the vital importance of the Genoese and Neapolitans, the courts of Urbino and Mantua. Rarely do we hear of the women writers, Jewish merchants, the mercenaries, engineers, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day. In fact, many of the most celebrated artists and thinkers that have come to define the Renaissance - Leonardo and Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, Machiavelli and Castiglioni - emerged not during the celebrated 'rebirth' of the fifteenth century but amidst the death and destruction of the sixteenth century. For decades, a series of savage wars dominated Italy's political, economic and daily life, generating fortunes and new technologies, but also ravaging populations with famine, disease and slaughter. In this same short time, the birth of Protestantism, Spain's colonisation of the Americas and the rise of the Ottoman Empire all posed grave threats to Italian power, while sparking debates about the ethics of government and enslavement, religious belief and sexual morality. In The Beauty and the Terror, Catherine Fletcher provides an enrapturing narrative history that brings all of this and more into view. Brimming with life, it takes us closer than ever before to the lived reality of this astonishing era and its meaning for today. ...Show more

50 People Who Stuffed up South Africa by Alexander Parker

$20.00 AUD

Category: SECONDHAND BOOKS

Part history and part social commentary, 50 People Who Stuffed Up South Africa is an engrossing and edifying read that delves into South African politics, war, sport, and culture on its way to answering the question, Who are the greatest villains, the direst leaders, the foulest corrupters, and the most offensive personalities to have spread their regrettable influence throughout the land? From Jan van Riebeeck in 1652 to Jacob Zuma in 2012--via Wouter Basson, P. W. Botha, Shaka, and Schabir Shaik--the book focuses on men (and three women) of infamy who jeopardized the nation by virtue of their ruinous megalomania (Thabo Mbeki, Cecil Rhodes), foul convictions (Hendrik Verwoerd, Eug ne Terre'Blanche), or, in the author's opinion, general idiocy (Julius Malema, Alec Erwin). Beyond the obvious political manipulators and historical figures, however, this collection also includes statesmen and sportsmen of dubious distinction, as well as nonpareil social delinquents such as minibus taxi drivers. ...Show more

RANDFONTEIN ESTATES : THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS - SIGNED by ANTHONY HOCKING

$70.00 AUD

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The Seven Wonders of Ancient World by PETER CLAYTON AND MARTIN PRICE (eds)

$16.00 AUD

Category: SECONDHAND BOOKS

A HISTORY OF THE INDIANS OF THE UNITED STATES by ANGIE DEBO

$25.00 AUD

Category: SECONDHAND BOOKS

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE by DEE BROWN

$85.00 AUD

Category: RARE AND COLLECTIBLE