Revered as a general and trusted as America's first elected leader, George Washington is considered a great many things in the contemporary imagination, but an intellectual is not one of them. In correcting this longstanding misconception, George Washington: A Life in Books offers a stimulating literary biography that traces the effects of a life spent in self-improvement.
The 27 first-century compositions that became the New Testament are more famous than well-known. For those seeking an adult approach to ancient religious literature, this introduction provides a fresh perspective on the basic facts, and helps show why such profoundly human writings became a sacred book.
Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influential in the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs.
In this addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know (R) series, ecologist and conservationist Mark Plotkin offers an overview of Amazonia, the largest and most important rainforest and ecosystem in the world.
The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing brings together research on the development and operation of policing in the United States and elsewhere. Accomplished policing researchers Michael D. Reisig and Robert J. Kane have assembled a cast of renowned scholars to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the institution of policing.
Ethnomusicology, an academic discipline founded in 1950, has been defined as the study of the music of others. This definition, at once whimsical and very nearly true, is incomplete. Many of its strongest threads have emerged because a person or a people have wanted to understand themselves, their history, and their identity.
Thousands of Irish peasants fled the country in the famine winter of 1847-48 to make the dangerous passage across the Atlantic. This book tells of the lives of the emigrants on each stage of their journey to New York and offers insights into the character and mentality of the immigrants.