Other books that might interest you

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  Tropical Cowboys - Westerns...

  Ch. Didier Gondola

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  “An innovative and original study that sheds light on masculinity, youth culture, performative violence, and the circuit of global imagery.” —Stephan F. Miescher, author of Making Men in Ghana 
   
  During the 1950s and 60s in the Congo city of Kinshasa, there emerged young urban male gangs known as “Bills” or “Yankees.” Modeling themselves on the images of the iconic American cowboy from Hollywood film, the Bills sought to negotiate lives lived under oppressive economic, social, and political conditions. They developed their own style, subculture, and slang and as Ch. Didier Gondola shows, engaged in a quest for manhood through bodybuilding, marijuana, violent sexual behavior, and other transgressive acts. Gondola argues that this street culture became a backdrop for Congo-Zaire’s emergence as an independent nation and continues to exert powerful influence on the country’s urban youth culture today. 
   
  “Aligns social banditry with popular cultural formations and subcultures. This has been a longstanding feature of Didier Gondola’s scholarship that is of great interest.” —Peter J. Bloom, University of California, Santa Barbara 
   
  “Its approach in terms of poverty and unemployment combined with a subtle interest in performance and the creation of an original culture makes this book an eye-opener. Both the dramatic subject and the author’s vivid style make it a pleasure to read and also food for thought regarding issues that haunt not only Africa but also the world at large.” —American Historical Review

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  The Reign of Emperor Gallienus -...

  Ilkka Syvänne

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  “An unusual history of an unusual soldier of Rome who rose to Emperor . . . an engaging history of a fascinating subject—Very Highly Recommended.” —Firetrench   This is the only fully illustrated military life of the Emperor Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus (253-268). Considered the most blatantly military man of all of the soldier emperors of the third century, Gallienus is the emperor in Harry Sidebottom’s bestselling Warrior of Rome novels.   Gallienus faced more simultaneous usurpations and foreign invasions than any other emperor, but somehow he managed to survive. Dr. Ilkka Syvanne explains how this was possible. It was largely thanks to the untiring efforts of Gallienus that the Roman Empire survived for another 1,200 years. Gallienus was a notorious libertarian, womanizer, and cross-dresser, but he was also a fearless warrior, duelist and general all at the same time. This monograph explains why he was loved by the soldiers, yet so intensely hated by some officers that they killed him in a conspiracy.   The year 2018 was the 1,800th anniversary of Gallienus’ date of birth and the 1,750th anniversary of his date of death. The Reign of Gallienus celebrates the life and times of this great man.   “A beautiful book that investigates the life and works of an emperor undervalued by the ‘general public’ but who deserves to be known for his military and historical legacy.” —Old Barbed Wire Blog

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  Sweet and Low

  Rich Cohen

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  Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family.It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.

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  Two Poets

  Honoré de Balzac

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  Two Poets by Honoré de Balzac. Translated by Ellen Marriage
  
  libreka classics – These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. 
  Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

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  The Spanish Flu Epidemic and Its...

  Jaime Breitnauer

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  A look at the 1918 influenza pandemic from its outbreak to its effects on the global population and its legacy. 
   
  On the second Monday of March, 1918, the world changed forever. What seemed like a harmless cold morphed into a global pandemic that would wipe out as many as a hundred-million people—ten times as many as the Great War. German troops faltered, lending the allies the winning advantage, and India turned its sights to independence while South Africa turned to God. In Western Samoa, a quarter of the population died; in some parts of Alaska, whole villages were wiped out. Civil unrest sparked by influenza shaped nations and heralded a new era of public health where people were no longer blamed for contracting disease. Using real case histories, we take a journey through the world in 1918, and look at the impact of Spanish flu on populations from America to France and the Arctic, and at the scientific legacy this deadly virus has left behind. 
   
  “Breitnauer puts the whole thing into perspective with a fascinating account of the 
   
  origin and extent of the outbreak, at a time when people were returning from the conflict expecting a brave new world and instead confronting one of the deadliest epidemics ever to hit mankind.” —Books Monthly (UK)

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  Jocks in the Jungle - The...

  Gordon Thorburn

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  "In 1943, there was no thought of good times for two battalions of Scottish soldiers. For them, India meant a new and unimaginably arduous kind of training.  Some of the Black Watch boys had seen action in Somaliland, Crete and Tobruk. Some of the Cameronians had fought the Japs in the Burma retreat. Even for these, such training was trial by ordeal. Many more of the Jocks were new, just shipped out from Scotland, but all of them were ordinary men, men from the towns and villages whod taken the Kings shilling in their countrys peril.  These were first-class British infantry, but not the super-selected special forces types that we know today. Nevertheless, it was a special-forces job they were supposed to do and that is what they were called, Special Force.  The challenge in Madhya Pradesh was to turn themselves into jungle fighters as good as the Japanese. They had a few short months to become Chindits.  The two brigades they joined numbered 7,677 officers and men going into the jungle, of whom 531 were killed, captured or missing, and around 1,600 were wounded. By the end, some 3,800 were too sick to fight. Only 1,754 could be classified as 'effective' when they came out and, in truth, half of those were fit for no more than a hospital bed. It was a miracle anybody survived at all.  And that was just two of the five brigades that went in. Was this the greatest medical disaster of World War Two? Who caused it? This new book has the answers."

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