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"A highly original history, tracing civil war, the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggression, from Ancient Rome through the centuries to present day"-- Provided by publisher.

"Douglas MacArthur had a special relationship with the city of Manila. Many years before, when he had decided to make a career in the U.S. Army-like his father-and had bounced around the globe, he kept coming back to the city. He received his first promotion in Manila and contracted malaria so severe, the Army had to send him back to the United States. The city was a constant in a life without many others. He was by any measure an exceptional soldier....

An intelligent and authoritative history of opium--a drug that has both healed and harmed since the beginning of civilization. Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: humankind has been in thrall to the "Milk of Paradise" for millennia. The latex of papaver somniferum is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain--and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport, and refine, and subject...

"In this fresh, eye-opening global history, economist David McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money-from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to cryptocurrency in Silicon Valley. The story of humanity is inextricable from that of money. No innovation has defined our own evolution so thoroughly and changed the direction of our planet's history so dramatically. And yet despite money's primacy, most of us don't truly understand it. As leading...

"A monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony across Europe into a single, sweeping narrative. It's almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just...

"The stunning and decisive battle of Midway was perhaps the most crucial naval battle in the Pacific theater during World War II. Walter Lord explained away the US victory at Midway against a numerically superior and apparently more skilled Japanese fleet due to 'Lady Luck.' In The Silver Waterfall acclaimed historian Brendan Simms and historian and military veteran Steve McGregor show it was no such thing. Luck had little to do with it. Instead the...

"With his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of why civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how some nations successfully recover from crises while adopting selective changes--a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals--ranging...

"The sea had become a mass grave by 1941 as Hitler's four capital warships--Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Tirpitz, and Bismarck, the largest warship on the ocean--roamed the wind-swept waves, threatening the Allied war effort and sending thousands of men to the icy depths of the North Atlantic. Bristling with guns and steeled in heavy armor, these reapers of the sea could outrun and outgun any battleship in the Allied arsenal. The deadly menace kept Winston...

"Today, the dominant narrative of the relationship between Jewish and Muslim peoples assumes a long history of violent hostility. In Children of Abraham, historian Marc David Baer lays this myth to rest, showing how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and...

"From the acclaimed author of No Man's Land and Soldier's Heart, a wide-ranging work of cultural history and criticism that reexamines the impact of post-World War II myths of the "good war.""-- Provided by publisher.