Showing results for "History" in Genre Fiction

Timothy Venning's series of alternative histories explores the pathways of British events from the Anglo-Saxon Age to the English Civil War. In this volume, he presents an in-depth analysis of the Tudor period. Venning discusses the fateful moments at which history could easily have taken a different turn. In a fascinating series of "what if" scenarios, Venning presents a detailed look at the possible and likely results. While speculative, the scenarios are all plausible and rooted in a firm understanding of actually events and their context.

With hindsight, the victory of Parliamentarian forces over the Royalists in the English Civil War may seem inevitable, but this outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Timothy Venning explores many of the turning points and discusses how they might so easily have played out differently.

The rivalry between two of the dominant city states of Ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, erupted into a war lasting nearly 30 years and was to have a dramatic effect on the balance of power in the area. Between 431 and 404 BCE, the two cities battled it out on land and sea, aided by their alliances with neighbouring states: Athens’ Delian League vigorously opposed Sparta’s Peloponnesian League in a conflict which effectively involved the whole region. 

The first hundred years of the American Mafia's existence would come to be seen as a golden age. From small-town Sicily to glittering Las Vegas, the mob had carefully expanded and consolidated their power until their influence touched almost every aspect of American society. But in the 1960s...

The Armies of the Night chronicles the famed October 1967 March on the Pentagon, in which all of the old and new Left - hippies, yuppies, Weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and intellectuals - came together to protest the Vietnam War. Alongside his contemporaries, Mailer went, witnessed, participated, suffered, and then wrote one of the most stark and intelligent appraisals of the 1960s.

Timothy Venning's exploration of the alternative paths that British history might easily have taken moves on to the Wars of the Roses. What if Richard of York had not given battle in vain? How would a victory for Warwick the Kingmaker at the Battle of Barnet changed the course of the struggle for power? What if the Princes had escaped from the tower or the Stanleys had not betrayed their king at Bosworth? These are just a few of the fascinating questions posed by this book.

What on earth has PG Wodehouse, the creator of the Inimitable Jeeves and the hapless Bertie Wooster, got to do with a serious topic like the decline and fall of the British Empire? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is Quite a Lot. The British Empire depended on splendid show and display, but...

Taking a similar approach to his successful If Rome Hadn't Fallen, Timothy Venning explores the various decision points in a fascinating period of British history and the alternative paths that it might have taken. Dr. Timothy Venning starts within an outline of the process by which much of Britain came to be settled by Germanic tribes after the end of Roman rule, as far as it can be determined from the sparse and fragmentary sources. He then moves on to discuss a series of scenarios, which might have altered the course of subsequent history dramatically.

Veteran authors Everett and Kincaid present an uproarious send-up of one of America's most controversial American icons. "[A]n outrageously funny satire of race relations and racism, US history, contemporary sexual mores and behavior, academia, and the publishing industry . . . It could become a...

Although not a member of the National Socialist Party, Leni Riefenstahl was the film-maker darling of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. First a successful dancer and actress in Germany, she became more notorious when she produced and directed Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will, the chilling documentaries about Nazi Party congresses at Nuremberg. Glenn Morris was an All-American farm boy from tiny Simla, Colorado, as well as a former college football star and student body president at the school now known as Colorado State University.

Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on the South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings.  

A History of the Present Illness takes listeners into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today....In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson's writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

A brilliantly funny look at the tumultuous recent past from the Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist. Remember when everything was going to go to hell when Y2K struck? That didn’t happen, right? But what did happen? To provide a little perspective on a really messed-up millennium (so far), the...

The Overland Campaign that pitted Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most famous campaigns of the Civil War, and May 1864 witnessed the Civil War’s greatest chess match as Lee skillfully blocked Grant’s attempts to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia only to watch his tenacious opponent keep advancing south toward Richmond. Lee and Grant fought to a standstill in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and along the North Anna. By the time the two armies reached Cold Harbor near the end of May 1864, Grant incorrectly thought that Lee’s army was on the verge of collapse.

The First World War was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, hence the name: the Great War. The Great War was off to a bad start from the German perspective. The plan was to fend off France and Russia while focusing on the main purpose, helping Austria-Hungary deal with Serbia.