Résultats lu par "Jonathan Cowley" dans Toutes les catégories

England—begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, star of beloved period dramas, and home of the House of Windsor—is not quite the stalwart island fortress that many of us imagine. Riven by an ancient fault line that predates even the Romans, its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbors, and for the past millennia, it has harbored a class system like nowhere else. This bracing tour of the most powerful country in the United Kingdom reveals an England repeatedly invaded and constantly reinvented—yet always fractured by its very own Mason-Dixon Line.

Great leaders and teams don't know everything, and they don't get it right every time. What sets them apart is their commitment to continual learning and vertical growth. Vertical growth is about cultivating the self-awareness to see our self-defeating thoughts, assumptions, and behaviors, and then consciously creating new behaviors that are aligned with our best intentions and aspirations.

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous spies of the Cold War era, a member of the infamous "Cambridge Five" spy ring. Yet little is known of this shrewd, secretive man. The full extent of his betrayal has never been documented - until now. Drawing on the recent release of previously classified files, A Spy Named Orphan meticulously documents the extraordinary story of a man leading a chilling double life until his exposure and defection to the USSR.

Little more than 100 years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world's environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the 20th century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremes, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer.

On a cold May morning in 1940, Adrian Vincent arrived in France with his battalion. His war didn’t last long. Within five days the Siege of Calais was over, and nearly all his comrades were killed, wounded or, like him, taken prisoner. After a brutal journey across the breadth of Germany, Vincent and his fellow survivors began their life in Stalag VIIIB, set to work in terrible conditions down a Polish mine. For the next five years, they waged a war not against enemy soldiers but instead versus monotony, disease, cruelty, starvation, and hopelessness.

The second half of the 20th century witnessed a scientific gold rush as physicists raced to chart the inner workings of the atom. The stakes were high, the questions were big, and there were Nobel Prizes and everlasting glory to be won. Many mysteries of the atom came unraveled, but one remained intractable-what Frank Close calls the "Infinity Puzzle."

Thinking about politics has tended to be historical in nature because of the comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn between past and present. Different periods in politics have used the past differently. At times, political thought can be said to have been drawn directly from the study of history; at others, perhaps including our own time, the relationship is more indirect.

From the person behind the popular YouTube channel NameExplain comes the second volume of his best-selling book The Origin of Names, Words and Everything in Between. This new book is a fun, interesting, and educational journey through the world of etymology. It covers a huge array of names from a variety of topic areas and includes a bunch of random facts behind the names. From first names, to bodies of water - there's no name big or small, important or obscure that won't be explained.

James D. Watson, the Nobel laureate whose pioneering work helped unlock the mystery of DNA's structure, charts the greatest scientific journey of our time, from the discovery of the double helix to today's controversies to what the future may hold. Updated to include new findings in gene editing, epigenetics, and agricultural chemistry as well as two entirely new chapters on personal genomics and cancer research. This is the most comprehensive and authoritative exploration of DNA's impact on our society and our world.

What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales - one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon.

Generals during World War II usually stayed to the rear, but not Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor. During D-Day and the Normandy campaign, these commanders of the 82nd "All-American" and the 101st "Screaming Eagle" Airborne Divisions refused to remain behind the lines and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their paratroopers in the thick of combat. Jumping into Normandy during the early hours of D-Day, Ridgway and Taylor fought on the ground for six weeks of combat that cost the airborne divisions more than 40 percent casualties.

Often romanticized in print and on the silver screen, real-life pirates were a brutal menace that plagued the high seas. In this book, Angus Konstam separates myth from reality, tracing the history of piracy through the centuries, from the pirates who plagued the Ancient Egyptians to the Viking raids and on to the era of privateers. He discusses the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" and colorful characters such as Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, before examining the West's initial encounters with Eastern pirates off the Chinese coast and the phenomenon of the modern pirate.

Post-modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: It was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was also the forcing ground of the "post-truth", by means of which Western values got turned upside down. In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continues to today.

Most of us are familiar with probiotics added to milk or yogurt to improve gastrointestinal health. In this ambitious and original work, Jamie Lorimer offers a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches and an insightful critique of their promise and limitations.

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan's grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf - and the doctor's illegitimate son.

In this Very Short Introduction, Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinctions, past and present, and the factors that can make a species vulnerable. Summarizing what we know about all of the major and minor extinction events, he examines some of the greatest debates in modern science, such as the relative role of climate and humans in the death of the Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, and the roles that global warming, ocean acidification, and deforestation are playing in present-day extinctions.

As digital technologies and consumer expectations continue to disrupt almost every industry sector, companies are placing greater emphasis on developing and implementing transformation programs. Changing the Game offers the practical knowledge required to create a dramatic step-change in company performance.

What was the tipping point for Malcolm Gladwell? What unscripted event made Meryl Streep who she is? In this inspiration-packed book, Katie Couric reports from the front lines of the worlds of politics, entertainment, sports, philanthropy, the arts, and business - distilling the ingenious, hard-won insights of leaders and visionaries, who tell us all how to take chances, follow our passions, cope with criticism, and, perhaps most important, commit to something greater than ourselves.

Ed Stafford - adventurer extraordinaire and Guinness World Record holder for walking the length of the Amazon River - likes a challenge. Casting about for an adventure that would top the extraordinary feat he recounts in Walking the Amazon, Stafford decides to maroon himself on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. His mission: to survive for 60 days equipped with nothing - no food, water, or even clothing - except the video cameras he would use to document his time.

What was it like to soar through the night sky fighting enemy aircraft in the Second World War? After completing intensive training Roderick Chisholm was thrust into the height of the Blitz to protect his country in the black of night. Guided by rudimentary radar he, along with his fellow pilots of 604 Squadron, developed the art of night-fighter operations.