Engelska

<b>A radical retelling of human history through collapse - from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twentieth-first century and beyond - based on the latest research and a database of more than 440 societal lifespans over the last 5,000 years.</b><br/><br/><b>Why do civilisations collapse? </b><br/><br/>For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering <i>Homo sapiens</i> lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change.<br/><br/>Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires - with vast bureaucracies and militaries - carved up and dominated the globe.<br/><br/>What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.<br/><br/>Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.<br/><br/><b>'A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse - and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins' JOHANN HARI</b><br/><br/><b>'Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate' LEWIS DARTNELL</b>

Pomerantsev is emerging as the pre-eminent war reporter of our time. <i>Observer</i><br/><br/><b>From one of our leading experts on disinformation, the incredible true story of the complex and largely forgotten WWII propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer - and what we can learn from him today. </b><br/><br/>In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat the powerful Nazi propaganda machine, which crowed victory and smeared its enemies.<br/><br/>But inside Germany, there was one notable voice of dissent from the very heart of the military machine, Der Chef, a German whose radio broadcasts skilfully questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens. American officials and even the President tried to to decipher what it meant for the future of the war. But what these audiences didn't know was that Der Chef was a fiction, a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, just one player in Delmer's vast counter-propaganda cabaret, a unique weapon in the war.<br/><br/>As author Peter Pomerantsev uncovers Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the global response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern-day investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to seduce and inspire the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of information wars.

<b>'Gripping, moving and important' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of <i>The World: A Family History</i></b><br/><br/>This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo, told here for the very first time. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the 'Silent Unseen'. She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then the only female member of these SOE affiliated forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo who arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.<br/><br/>After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women's agency in the Second World War.

In this book, the author analyzes the role that the Nordic-Baltic region has played in US strategy in the 60 years since the end of World War II. How has the US viewed the strategic and political situation in the Nordic and from the end of the Cold War, the Nordic-Baltic region? What role will the region play in future US policy, as this becomes increasingly preoccupied with problems far from the shores of the Baltic Sea? Nowhere is the transformation of the international system more striking than in the destiny of the three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania locked up behind the Iron Curtain as Soviet Republics after World War II, and sovereign members of the Western defense alliance half a century later. It was actually there, in this northernmost corner of Europe, that the design of the entire international system was determined after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The new Nordic-Baltic region emerged as key to the stability of a much ­wider global area.

Aphrodite - The Making Of A Goddess [Bok / Häftad]

The main building of the Nordic Museum on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm is an architectural landmark. The huge edifice can be seen from far off, from all angles, and when one comes closer one can discern fascinating details of artistic expression, material, and craft skill. The architect Isak Gustaf Clason made allusions to several different historical styles when he designed the building at the end of the nineteenth century. Today the building is instead historical in the sense that it so clearly manifests its own time. This book, based on notes, drawings and pictures from the museums archives, tells of the entire structure, its character, its construction history, and its world of references.

<b>#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - From the #1 <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>The Splendid and the Vile</i> comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.  </b><br/><br/><b>"As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find." -<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b><br/><br/>Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.<br/><br/>Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds-a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.<br/><br/>  Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. <br/><br/><i>The Devil in the White City </i>draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson's gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.