Renaissance World

Toby Lester, author of the award-winning The Fourth Part of the World, masterfully crafts yet another century-spanning saga of people and ideas in this epic story of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Over time, the nearly 550-year-old ink-on-paper sketch has transformed into a collective symbol of the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit.

Nous sommes à Paris en 1609, Henri IV règne sur la France pacifiée. Le chevalier de Pardaillan, qui n'a pas retrouvé son fils, rencontre un jeune truand, Jehan-le-Brave, en qui il ne tarde pas à reconnaître l'enfant de Fausta. Or, Jehan-le-Brave, qui ignore tout de ses origines, est amoureux de Bertille de Saugis, fille naturelle d'Henri IV.

Évidemment, Pardaillan père et fils se sont retrouvés et reconnus. Une fois encore, les chevaliers de Pardaillan se montrent dépourvus d'avidité, eux pour qui la réussite n'est jamais matérielle. Dans ce nouvel épisode, Michel Zévaco nous brosse un tableau attachant du fils de Pardaillan qui fait honneur à son père. En France, la menace pèse toujours sur Henri IV et un certain Ravaillac entre en scène et le trésor de la Fausta reste introuvable.

Au cours de son ambassade à la Cour d'Espagne, Pardaillan devra protéger une jeune bohémienne, La Giralda, fiancée d'El Torero, Don César, qui n'est autre que le petit-fils secret et persécuté de Philippe II. Or, Fausta a jeté son dévolu sur El Torero pour mener à bien ses intrigues, et elle bénéficie de l'appui du Grand Inquisiteur Don Espinoza dans ses criminelles manœuvres.

Al-Hasan al-Wazzan - born in Granada to a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco - became famous as the great Renaissance writer Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the Pope; when he was released and baptized, he lived a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone....

Groundhog Day meets Ling Ma’s Severance in this “brilliant” (PopSugar) and “exhilarating” (The Millions) comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them. Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a...

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden. This is a new audiobook of Thoreau's masterpiece, expertly read by Daniel Adam Day.

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, after he was forced to leave Florence as a political exile. Dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the work is Machiavelli’s advice to the ruler of Florence on how to stay in power.

Throughout history, events and people have shaped the world we live in today. Some are famous, whilst others are merely distant figures rarely acknowledged for their contributions. Bringing the periods and events together, seeing them through the lives of such individuals, is illuminating, informative, and enjoyable. This book has all three. History at its most enjoyable. Paul Henke. The History of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs is an essential addition to the personal library of anyone who has the entrepreneurial spark.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

In the middle of the XVI century, when he abandoned his town, the Exiled knew that the only thing he could aspire to was survival. He would not begin at zero but under zero. He was going to a strange country, up north, in search of a place where thinking or feeling was not punishable by death. In this journey towards life and freedom, the Exiled has to distinguish between two paths: one that leads to survival and the one that leads to death. It’s a vital choice, the same one that individuals, cultures, and nations must also make if they wish to advance and not become extinct.