In 1945 Britain was the worlds leading designer & builder of aircraft
- a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. &
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In 1945 Britain was the world's leading designer & builder of aircraft
- a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric.
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The story of our navy is nothing less than the story of Britain our culture & our empire. Much more than a parade of admirals & their battles this is the story of how an insignificant island nation conquered the world's oceans to become its greatest trading empire. Few other nations have fallen so deeply in love with a branch of the armed forces as the British did with its Navy. Yet as Ben Wilson shows there was nothing inevitable about this rise to maritime domination nor was it ever an easy path. For much of our history Britain was a third-rate maritime power on the periphery of Europe. EMPIRE OF THE DEEP also reveals how our naval history has shaped us in more subtle & surprising ways
- our language culture politics & national character all owe a great debt to this conquest of the seas. This is a gripping fresh take on our national story.
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The first book in the Empire of the Moghul series: chronicling the rise & fall of the Moghul rulers of India beginning with Babur who swept in from Central Asia to found one of the most powerful dynasties in history. 1494 & the new ruler of Ferghana twelve-year-old Babur faces a seemingly impossible challenge. Babur is determined to equal his great ancestor Tamburlaine whose conquests stretched from Delhi to the Mediterranean from wealthy Persia to the wild Volga. But he is dangerously young to inherit a crown & treasonous plots tribal rivalries rampaging armies & ruthlessly ambitious enemies will threaten his destiny his kingdom even his survival. ...

In the Empire of the Saviours the People are forced to live in fortified towns. Their walls are guarded by an army of Heroes whose task is to keep marauding pagans out as much as it is to keep the People inside. Several times a year living Saints visit the towns to exact the Saviours tithe from all those coming of age
- a tithe often paid in blood. When a young boy Jillan unleashes pagan magicks in an accident his whole town turns against him. He goes on the run but what hope can there be when the Saviours & the entire Empire decide he must be caught? Jillan is initially hunted by just the soldiers of the Saint of his region but others soon begin to hear of his increasing power & seek to use him for their own ends. Some want Jillan to join the fight against the Empire others wish to steal his power for themselves & others still want Jillan to lead them to the Geas the source of all life & power in the world. There are very few Jillan can trust except for a ragtag group of outcasts. His parents threatened his life in tatters his beliefs shaken to the core Jillan must decide which side he is on & whether to fight or run.. .
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In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians & white settlers for control of the American West centering on Quanah the greatest Comanche chief of them all " Empire of the Summer Moon" spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise & fall of the Comanches the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second is the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker & her mixed-blood son Quanah who became the last & greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache & Sioux it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how & when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war & so skillful with their arrows & lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico & halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker a nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped by Comanches in 1836. She grew to love her captors & became infamous as the White Squaw who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah a warrior who was never defeated & whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S.C. Gwynnes account of these events is meticulously researched intellectually provocative & above all thrillingly told." ...

From J.G. Ballard the master of dystopia comes his heartrending story of a British boys four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballards own childhood this is the extraordinary account of a boys life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai
- a mesmerising hypnotically compelling novel of war of starvation & survival of internment camps & death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the authors own disturbing experience of war in our time it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.
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The British Empire wrote Adam Smith has hitherto been not an empire but the project of an empire & John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise & fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire he argues was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was above all a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the white dominions; the commercial empire of the City of London; & Greater India which contributed markets manpower & military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened then weakened & finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic political & geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end. ...

Some people think Jay-Z is just another rapper. Others see him as just another celebrity/mega-star. The reality is no matter what you think Jay-Z is he first & foremost a business. & as much as Martha Stewart or Oprah he has turned himself into a lifestyle. You can wake up to the local radio station playing Jay-Zs latest hit spritz yourself with his 9IX cologne slip on a pair of his Rocawear jeans lace up your Reebok S. Carter sneakers catch a Nets basketball game in the afternoon & grab dinner at The Spotted Pig before heading to an evening performance of the Jay-Z-backed Broadway musical Fela! & a nightcap at his 40/40 Club. Hell profit at every turn of your day. But despite Jay-Zs success there are still many Americans whose impressions of him are foggy outdated or downright incorrect. Surprisingly to many he honed his business philosophy not at a fancy B school but on the streets of Brooklyn New York & beyond as a drug dealer in the 1980s. Empire State of Mind" tells the story behind Jay-Zs rise to the top as told by the people who lived it with him- from classmates at Brooklyns George Westinghouse High School; to the childhood friend who got him into the drug trade; & to the DJ who convinced him to stop dealing & focus on music. This book explains just how Jay-Z propelled himself from the bleak streets of Brooklyn to the heights of the business world. Zack OMalley Greenburg draws on his one-on-one interviews with hip-hop luminaries such as DJ Clark Kent Questlove of The Roots Damon Dash Fred " Fab 5 Freddy" Brathwaite MC Serch; NBA stars Jamal Crawford & Sebastian Telfair; & recording industry executives including Craig Kallman CEO of Atlantic Records. He also

Includes:: new information on Jay-Zs various business dealings such as: the feature movie about Jay-Z & his first basketball team that was filmed by Fab 5 Freddy in 2003 but never released; the Jay-Z branded Jeep that was scrapped just before going into production; the real story behind his association with Armand de Brignac champagne; & the financial ramifications of his marriage to Beyonce. Jay-Zs tale is compelling not just because of his celebrity but because it embodies the rags-to-riches American dream & is a model for any entrepreneur looking to build a commercial empire."

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Empires of the Sea" shows the Mediterranean as a majestic & bloody theater of war. Opening with the Ottoman victory in 1453 it is a breathtaking story of military crusading Barbary pirates white slavery & the Ottoman Empire
- & the larger picture of the struggle between Islam & Christianity. Coupled with dramatic set piece battles a wealth of riveting first-hand accounts epic momentum & a terrific denouement at Lepanto this is a work of history at its broadest & most compelling."
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