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From the Yangtze to the Yellow River, China is traversed by great waterways, which have defined its politics and ways of life for centuries. Water has been so integral to China's culture, economy, and growth and development that it provides a window on the whole sweep of Chinese history. In The Water Kingdom, renowned writer Philip Ball opens that window to offer an epic and powerful new way of thinking about Chinese civilization.
Water, Ball shows,...
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What was it like to be a gladiator? How many people died in the destruction of Pompeii? How did Roman children spend their days? Find out the answers to these questions and more in Magic Tree House Research Guide: Ancient Rome and Pompeii. This is the nonfiction companion to Vacation Under the Volcano (Magic Tree House #13).
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"The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement--precision--in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were...
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"What's it like to be the first to enter an Egyptian burial chamber that's been sealed for thousands of years? What horrifying secret was found among the prehistoric ruins of the American Southwest? Who really was the infamous Monster of Florence? Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him from the haunted country of Italy to the jungles of Honduras. He was granted exclusive journalistic access to the largest tomb in Egypt's Valley...
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"From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution--a #1 international bestseller--that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human." One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one--homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most...
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Francis Schaeffer's Classic Analysis of the Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
Civilizations throughout history have built societies around their own limited value systems including rulers, finite gods, or relativism-only to fail. The absence of a Christian foundation eventually leads to breakdown, and those signs are visible in present-day culture as well. Can modern society avoid the same fate?
In this latest edition of How Should We...
10) Forbidden
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Many years have passed since civilization's brush with apocalypse. The world's greatest threats have all been silenced. There is no anger, no hatred, no war. There is only perfect peace... and fear. But a terrible secret has been closely guarded for centuries: Every single soul walking the earth, though in appearance totally normal, is actually dead, long ago genetically stripped of true humanity. Fleeing pursuit, with only moments to live, a young...
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A history of Western civilization's rise to global dominance offers insight into the development of such concepts as competition, modern medicine, and the work ethic, arguing that Western dominance is being lost to cultures who are more productively utilizing Western techniques.
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"For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by...
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The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a rediscovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome. But now bestselling historian Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that in the year 1434, China--then the world's most technologically advanced civilization--provided the spark that set the European Renaissance ablaze. From that date onward, Europeans...
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In 1995, Iowa native Bill Bryson took a motoring trip around Britain to explore that green and pleasant land. The uproarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute portrayals of the United Kingdom ever written. Two decades later, Bryson-now a British citizen-set out again to rediscover his adopted country. In these pages, he follows a straight line through the island-from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath-and shows us every...
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In his first major book, concervative columnist Steyn takes on the anti-Americanism that fuels both Old Europe and radical Islam. America, Steyn argues, will have to stand alone. The future, Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. The Islamists are both, while the West--wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it...
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"Scientific methods, tools, and discoveries have shaped modern civilization and created the landscape we've built for ourselves on which to live, work, and play. Tyson shows how an infusion of science and rational thinking renders worldviews deeper and more informed than ever before-and exposes unfounded perspectives and unjustified emotions. With crystalline prose and an abundance of evidence, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette...
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People who are anonymous and whose lives are usually ignored in traditional historical accounts are no less important than more prominent individuals in influencing the flow of events. These ordinary, but often heroic, people are the focus of this course. Each of the 48 lectures looks at history from a nontraditional perspective, that of the weak and marginalized-- the poor, sick, disabled, and elderly, as well as the refugees, slaves, women, children,...
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"A writer and mom with decades of experience working in Silicon Valley, Jessica Carew Kraft grew fed up with her life filled with digital screens and deep anxieties about the future of humanity and nature. She quit her job and set out to learn about 'rewilding' from people who reject the comforts and convenience of civilization to live in nature using Stone Age tools and skills. A suburbanite with a husband, kids, and a mortgage, she learned to turn...
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How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now? Combining "a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's craft"(San Jose Mercury News), distinguished cultural...