The Secrets of Italy: People, Places, and Hidden Histories by Corrado Augias

$20.00 NZD

Category: Travel | Reading Level: very good

There is Michelangelo, but also the mafia. Pavarotti, but also Berlusconi. The debonair Milanese, but also the infamous captain of the Costa Concordia cruise ship. This is Italy, admired and reviled, a country that has guarded her secrets and confounded outsiders for centuries. At a time when this Itali an paradox is more evident than ever, cultural authority Corrado Augias poses the puzzling questions: how did it get this way? How can this peninsula be simultaneously the home of geniuses and criminals, the cradle of beauty and the butt of jokes? An instant #1 bestseller in Italy, Augias' latest sets out to rediscover the story - different from the history - of his country. Beginning with how Italy is seen from the outside and from the inside, he weaves a geo-historical narrative, passing through principal cities, re-reading classics and biographies of the people that have, for better or worse, made Italians who they are. From the gloomy atmosphere of Cagliostro's Palermo to the elegant court of Maria Luigia in Parma, from the birth of the ghetto of Venice to the heroic blaze of the Neapolitan uprising against the Nazis, Augias sheds light on the true Italian character under the surface, explaining her not only to outsiders, but to Italians themselves. The result is a sort of novel of a nation, whose protagonists are both the figures we know from the history and literature, and characters long-hidden between the cracks of historical narrative and memory. ...Show more

Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by Philip Ball

$25.00 NZD

Category: Science | Reading Level: very good

Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any 'Jewish ideas', many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were three world-renowned physicists: Max Planck, p ioneer of quantum theory, regarded it as his moral duty to carry on under the regime. Peter Debye, a Dutch physicist, rose to run the Reich's most important research institute before leaving for the United States in 1940. Werner Heisenberg, discovered the Uncertainty Principle, and became the leading figure in Germany's race for the atomic bomb. After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. Mixing history, science and biography, Serving the Reich is a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime. Here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility, three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology. ...Show more

Venice Pure City by Peter Ackroyd

$30.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: near fine

In this sumptuous vision of Venice, Peter Ackroyd turns his unparalleled skill at evoking place from London and the River Thames, to Italy and the city of myth, mystery and beauty, set like a jewel in its glistening lagoon. His account is at once romantic and packed with facts, conjuring up the atmosphe re of the canals, bridges and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the fiestas and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and a trading empire, the wars against Napoleon and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the mosaics of St Mark's and the glass blowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; and, the doges and the destitute and the artists with their passion for colour and form - Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. There are wars and sieges, scandals and seductions, fountains playing in deserted squares and crowds thronging the markets. And there is a dark undertone too, of shadowy corners and dead ends, prisons and punishment. The language and way of thinking of the Venetians sets them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. 'The moon rules Venice', Ackroyd writes: 'It is built on ocean shells and ocean ground; it has the aspect of infinity. It is the floating world...changing and variable and accidental. 'This book, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual, surprising realm. We could have no better guide - reading Ackroyd's Venice is, in itself, a glorious journey and the perfect holiday. ...Show more

The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War by Margaret MacMillan

$30.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

This is the definitive history of the political, cultural, military and personal forces which shaped Europe's path to the Great War. The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity, progress and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic conflict which killed millions of its men, bled its economies dry, shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined Europe's dominance of the world. It was a war which could have been avoided up to the last moment - so why did it happen? Beginning in the early nineteenth century, and ending with the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand, award-winning historian Margaret MacMillan uncovers the huge political and technological changes, national decisions and - just as important - the small moments of human muddle and weakness that led Europe from peace to disaster. This masterful exploration of how Europe chose its path towards war will change and enrich how we see this defining moment in our history. ...Show more

Swiss Hotel Pioneers by L. Gaulis and R. Creux

$18.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: very good

The Lost Continent: The BBC's Europe Editor on Europe's Darkest Hour Since World War Two by Gavin Hewitt

$12.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: very good

In THE LOST CONTINENT BBC Europe Editor Gavin Hewitt tells the story of a flawed dream, a noble vision that turned dangerous, and which led Europe into its gravest crisis since World War Two - a crisis for which it was totally unprepared. A pillar of the post-war European dream was a shared currency, an d with it came easy money, seducing some countries into a wild spending binge. After the financial crash in the United States, Europe caught the cold and was left with a debt crisis that came to threaten the entire European project. THE LOST CONTINENT is rich in anecdote, weaving together the stories of ordinary people with the high politics and drama of Europe in crisis to give an unparalleled and vivid portrait of a massive shift in modern history. It includes interviews with top officials and insiders, and dramatic accounts of key meetings. Gavin Hewitt's THE LOST CONTINENT is a clear-eyed book by a distinguished and well-connected journalist which tells the astonishing story of how we got here and where we might be headed. ...Show more

Le Voyage de Laperouse 1785-1788 Recit et Documents Originaux by John Dunmore and Maurice de Brossard

$250.00 NZD

Category: Nautical | Reading Level: very good

The Celts by Aedeen Cremin

$12.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: very good

This attractive volume celebrates 1500 years' of the Celts through colour photographs of artefacts, artworks, jewellery, everyday items and manuscripts, accompanied by an informative discussion of almost every aspect of Celtic culture in Europe.

Red Star Over Russia : A Revolution in Visual Culture, 1905-55 by Matthew Gale and Natalia Sidlina (eds)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Art | Reading Level: very good

In exploring the intersection of art, politics and society, few collections in the world can compare with the David King collection. David King (1943-2016) was not only a passionate collector, but also an artist, designer and historian. Over a lifetime he amassed one of the world's largest collections o f Soviet political art and photographs. Every step of the Soviet journey is documented in visual media, photomontage, photographs, paintings, handwritten notes, books (signed with annotations and marginalia), enclosures and ephemera. The collection is also unique in examples of image manipulation techniques, erasures and deletions, and in the survival, despite the purges, of extremely rare books and manuscripts by the early revolutionaries who died in the `Show Trials' of 1936-38. David King mined this material to produce revelatory and award-winning books on Leon Trotsky and the Stalin era, and in 2017 Tate Modern will draw on this unique resource to present a visual history of Russia from the turn of the twentieth century to Stalin's death. Published to accompany the exhibition, this accessible and highly illustrated publication features key pieces from the collection, accompanied by short explanatory texts. ...Show more

The Flowering of the Renaissance by Vincent Cronin

$20.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: very good

The Florentine Renaissance by Vincent Cronin

$20.00 NZD

Category: Europe | Reading Level: very good

Double Entry by Jane Gleeson-White

$10.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world - and how their invention could make or break the planet. A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned a cultural revolution. Prepare to have your idea of accounting changed forever. 'The rise and metamor phosis of double-entry bookkeeping is one of history's best-kept secrets and most important untold tales ... Through its logic we have let the planet go to ruin-and through its logic we now have a chance to avert that ruin.' Our world is governed by the numbers generated by the accounts of nations and corporations. We depend on these numbers to direct our governments, organisations, economies, societies. But where did they come from-and how did they become so powerful?The answer to these questions begins in the Dark Ages, with the emergence in northern Italy of a new form of accounting called double-entry bookkeeping. The story of double entry reaches from the Crusades through the Renaissance to the factories of industrial Britain and the policymakers of the Great Depression and the Second World War. At its heart stands a Renaissance monk, mathematician and magician, and his celebrated treatise for merchants. With double entry came the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance, a new scientific worldview, and a new economic system: capitalism.Over the past one hundred years accounting has flourished to an astonishing degree, despite the many scandals it has left in its wake. The figures double entry generates have become a sophisticated system of numbers which in the twenty-first century rules the global economy, manipulated by governments, financial institutions and the quant nerds of Wall Street.And the story of double entry is still unfolding-because today it might be our last hope for life on earth. ...Show more