The Alexiad

Author	Edward Abbey
ISBN	0452265630

"Be of good cheer," the war-horse Edward Abbey advises, "the military-industrial state will soon collapse." This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.

Along the way, Abbey makes time for Thoreau while he takes...

Author	Suetonius
ISBN	0140449213

As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, Suetonius gained access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eye-witness accounts) to produce one of the most colorful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded...

Author	Gerald Durrell
ISBN	0140043853

"Gollys, Mrs Durrells," he said, his face red with wrath. "Why don'ts yous lets Masters Leslies shoot the son of a bitch?"

In life, Gerald Durrell would light up a room. His books elicit that same warm feeling.
His affection for the natural world lives on in the minds of those of us, who...

Author	Marina Tsvetaeva
ISBN	0140187596

Under normal circumstances with poetry I always like an in-depth read up on the writer prior to reading if it's somebody that I know nothing about, in the case of Marina Tsvetaeva my knowledge of her was non-existent, but hastily threw myself into the deep end instead of getting my feet wet first, so I had...

Author	Torquato Tasso
ISBN	0801863236

Arguably the greatest Italian poet after Dante, Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento in 1544 and died in Rome in 1595, having served as the court poet in Ferrara, been confined for years in a madhouse after attacking a servant with a knife, and composed one of the great works of Renaissance literature....

Author	Procopius
ISBN	0140441824

Having dutifully written the official war history of Justinian's reign, Procopius turned round and revealed in The Secret History the other faces of the leading men and women of Byzantium in the sixth century. Justinian, the great law-giver, appears as a hateful tyrant, wedded to an ex-prostitute,...

Author	Judith Herrin
ISBN	0713999977

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism - gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium - long history, she identifies the fundamental...

Author	Dylan Thomas
ISBN	0811202097

Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milk Wood too, is better appreciated read aloud.

Try it for yourself. A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at...

Author	G.B. Edwards
ISBN	1590172337

Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France...

Author	Anonymous
ISBN	0292776233

In A.D. 986, Earl Hakon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjorunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the...

Author	Ammianus Marcellinus
ISBN	0140444068

He was not a professional man of letters but an army officer of Greek origin born at Antioch and contemporary with the events described in what remains of his work. He set himself the task of continuing the histories of Tacitus from A.D. 96 down to his own day. The first thirteen of his thirty-one books are...

Author	Dean Young
ISBN	0822958724

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.

Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea...

Author	Michael Psellus
ISBN	0140441697

A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0375707352

From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.

From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation...

Author

Charles William Chadwick Oman

This history of medieval warfare, originally written in 1885 when its author later one of the great medievalists was still an undergraduate at Oxford, remains for students and general readers one of the best accounts of military art in the Middle Ages between Adrianople in 378 A.D. (the most fearful...

Author	Theodore Ayrault Dodge
ISBN	0306813610

Coinciding with the release of two films about Alexander by directors Oliver Stone and Baz Luhrmann, here is the classic study of Alexander, his predecessors, and his influence on the art of war--still fascinating and relevant over one hundred years after its initial publication. Dodge here vividly...

Author	Anthony Kaldellis
ISBN	0190253223

In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests: first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally in the Georgian and Armenian lands. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. It...