Autobiography/Bio/Non-Fiction

//Autobiography/Bio/Non-Fiction
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  • The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from "The Secret History of the Mongols, " leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: Let us reward our female offspring. Only this hint of a father's legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story. The queens of the Silk Route turned their father's conquests into the world's first truly international empire, fostering trade, education, and religion throughout their territories and creating an economic system that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Outlandish stories of these powerful queens trickled out of the Empire, shocking the citizens of Europe and and the Islamic world. After Genghis Khan's death in 1227, conflicts erupted between his daughters and his daughters-in-law; what began as a war between powerful women soon became a war against women in power as brother turned against sister, son against mother. One of the most important warrior queens of history arose to rescue the tattered shreds of the Mongol Empire and restore order to a shattered world. Queen Mandhuhai led her soldiers through victory after victory. In her thirties she married a seventeen-year-old prince and bore eight children throughout a career spent fighting China's Ming Dynasty on one side and a series of Muslim warlords on the other. Her unprecedented success on the battlefield provoked the Chinese into the most frantic and expensive phase of wall building in history. Charging into battle even while pregnant, she fought to reassemble the nation of Genghis Khan and to preserve it for her own children to rule in peace. Despite the efforts to erase them from history, the Mongol queens live on.
  • Bletchley Park was where one of Word War II's most famous and crucial achievements was made: the cracking of Germany's Enigma code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house was home to Britain's most brilliant mathematical brains - including Alan Turing - and the scene of immense advances in technology—...indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa. Plenty has been written about the scientists and the code-breaking, in both fact and fiction, —from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing—. But what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during World War II? This is not only a history of life at Bletchley Park; this is also an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds and the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels - and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other's work. Illustrated with black and white photographs.
  • Guiseppe Balsamo was born in the mid-eighteenth century in the slums of Palermo, Sicily. He would rise from obscurity to become the legendary Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, whose dangerous charm and reputed healing would make him the darling - and bane - of upper-crust Europe. Moving through the period between the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - a time when reason and superstition co-mingled in the minds of even the best educated - Cagliostro earned a reputation for dazzling kings, feeding the poor, healing the ill and - most conspicuously - relieving the careless rich of their money. He was involved with major figures in Europe at that time:  Casanova, Mozart, Goethe and Catherine the Great just to name a few. Eventually a lifetime of political intrigue led him to become the key figure in The Diamond Necklace Affair, which many believe precipitated the French Revolution itself and which would lead to his imprisonment by Louis XVI. Also the leader of an exotic brand of Freemasonry, Count Cagliostro was indisputably one of the most influential and notorious figures of the latter eighteenth century, overcoming poverty and an ignoble birth to become the darling - and bane - of  noble society. Yet in London, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg, he established "healing clinics" for the poorest of the poor, and his dexterity in the worlds of alchemy and spiritualism won him acclaim among the European nobility.
  • This book about the disaster of A.D. 79 is concerned with the impact of Pompeii's rediscovery as well as an introduction to the various excavated sites for those new to this vast and ancient Roman time capsule. Not only Pompeii is of interest here - Herculaneum and other small towns nearby that were overwhelmed in the catastrophe are also covered. Illustrated with beautiful colour and black and white artistic  representations of ancient Roman life inspired by the rediscovery in 1748 as well as photographs of perfectly preserved artifacts.
  • A profoundly original and thought-provoking book - a critical appraisal of the evolution of science fiction and the part it plays in society today.  Intelligent and highly credible, a glimpse of a future in which science fiction has become science fact.  An extraordinary blend of memoir, critical analysis of SF, utopian thinking and essays on the nature of dream and the brain, all of which come together brilliantly. Aldiss writes clearly and with conviction and though this book was written in the early 60s, this is taken into account by Aldiss himself.
  • De Vaca was one of hundreds of men who left Spain in 1527 on an expedition headed by Panfilo de Narvaez. The mission was to explore Florida.  This is the eyewitness account of how an expedition of over 600 men and five ships was reduced to a band of four half-mad survivors who staggered into Mexico City, having unintentionally become the first Europeans to cross the American Southwest via Texas, Ne Mexico and Arizona.  It is the quintessential travel horror story.
  • In Victorian England there was only one fail-safe authority on matters ranging from fashion to puddings to scullery maids: Beeton’s Book of Household Management. This biography pulls back the lace curtains to reveal the woman behind the book - Mrs. Beeton, the first domestic diva of the modern age - and explores the life of the book itself. Isabella Beeton was a twenty-one-year-old newlywed with only six months’ experience running her own home when - coaxed by her husband, a struggling publisher - she began to compile her own book of recipes and domestic advice in a day and age when such books where very few and far between. The aspiring mother hardly suspected that her name would become synonymous with housewifery for generations.  Nor would the women who turned to the book for guidance ever have guessed that its author lived in a simple house in the suburbs with a single maid-of-all-work instead of presiding over a well-run estate. Isabella would die at twenty-eight, shortly after the book's publication, never knowing the extent of her legacy. As her survivors faced bankruptcy, sexual scandal and a bitter family feud that lasted more than a century, Mrs. Beeton’s book became an institution. For an exploding population of the newly affluent, it prescribed not only how to cook and clean but ways to cope with the constant social flux of the emerging consumer culture: how to plan a party for ten, whip up a hair pomade or calculate how much money was needed to permit the hiring of a footman. This is also a vivid picture of Victorian home life and its attendant anxieties, nostalgia, and aspirations - not so different from modern life today.
  • The Australian wool industry has, in large measure, shaped Australian society, the economy and politics. But how important will wool be in coming decades? This is a collection of appraisal, forecast and discussion from experts in the wool industry; from botanists to economists and ecologists to historians.  Illustrated.
  • Like the Beaumont children and the Azaria Chamberlain cases before it, the backpacker murder case in Belanglo State Forest has entered Australian criminal folklore. Seven young people, most of them foreigners backpacking around Australia, brutally murdered, their remains uncovered in 1992 and 1993. It would take scores of police over three years, countless hours of forensic investigation, thousands of false leads and a few precious clues to charge and convict Ivan Milat for their horrific deaths. This is the definitive work on Ivan Milat, his family and the murders. Almost four years in the making, informed by exclusive interviews with members of the Milat family, key police investigators and Crown lawyers, this book reveals a family culture so bizarre it would lead inexorably to murder. It also scrutinises the police investigation – its remarkable success and failures, the dramatic turning point and the backbiting and bitterness that followed Milat's arrest. Thought-provoking, totally unsalacious and an exploration of the darker side of Australian life as a whole.  Photographic illustrations.