Ancient Greece: A Political, Social and Cultural History

Author	Thucydides
ISBN	0140440399

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the long life-and-death struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling its author's ambitious claim. Thucydides himself (c.460-400 BC) was an Athenian and achieved the rank...

Author	Michel-Rolph Trouillot
ISBN	0807043117

If Marx, Foucault, and Howard Zinn wrote a book together, it would probably look something like Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past. This isn't a slur, though; as you can tell from my five-star rating, I obviously appreciated the book, its author's cobbled personal reflections plus broader...

Author	Sadegh Hedayat
ISBN	0802131808

Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And...

Author	Xenophon
ISBN	0140441751

Thucydides' magisterial history told of the unhappy conflict of Greeks against the Greeks in the Peloponnesian War, but his narrative broke off in 411 B.C., seven years before the end, and Greeks were to continue fighting one another for many more years. Xenophon continues the account to 362 B.C. These...

Author	Marc Van De Mieroop
ISBN	1405149116

If the history of the Near East has always seemed a little daunting and confusing, this book by one of the best known writers on the subject should show you the light at the end of the tunnel. Beginning c.3000 BC with the advent of the first writing system, Van De Mieroop traces the emergence and development...