Showing results by narrator "Robert Blumenfeld" in All Categories

In the sulphurous The High Place, the amoral hero Florian enters the sleeping-beauty story and (unlike Jurgen with Helen) does not draw back at the sight of excessive beauty. Complications ensue: Beauty is realistically diminished during pregnancy, the first-born child is forfeit to Satan under the pact that guaranteed Florain's success, and an irascible saint is eager to call down holy fire on transgressors. Florian treads close to damnation and is saved only when Satan and the angel Michael conspire to let recent events become, again, a dream: he has a rare second chance and learns better.

This Very Short Introduction provides both the believer and non-believer with a balanced survey of the central questions of theology. David Ford's approach draws us in to considering the principles underlying religious belief, including the centrality of salvation to most major religions; the concept of God in ancient, modern, and postmodern contexts; the challenge posed to theology by prayer and worship; and the issue of sin and evil. He also probes the nature of experience, knowledge, and wisdom in theology, and discusses what is involved in interpreting theological texts.

Sultan Mehmet II, known to his countrymen as -the Conqueror- and to much of Europe as -the Terror of the World,- was once Europe's most feared and powerful ruler. Now, Turkey's most beloved American scholar, John Freely, brings to life this charismatic hero of one of the richest histories in the world. Mehmet reigned for thirty years, during which time his armies extended the borders of his empire halfway across Asia Minor and as far into Europe as Hungary and Italy.

Paris has long been a storied center of art and culture, and of romance, but in the 1920s its magnetism was especially irresistible. From around the world writers, artists, and composers steamed in, to visit or linger, some to reside. This book - a work of immense erudition spiced with anecdotes and gossip - documents their haunts and habits, their comings and goings, their relationships intimate and artistic.

Figures of Earth, subtitled "A Comedy of Appearances", follows the vicissitudes of Dom Manuel the Redeemer from his lowly swineherd origins through his unlikely elevation to the Count of Poictesme, and beyond. Published in 1921, it was the second volume of “The Biography of Manuel”, Cabell’s great work about an imaginary land that also managed to skewer the world of his upbringing as a Southern Gentleman of Virginia, and nearly everything else, besides!

Renowned through four award-winning stories for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance. In riveting prose, Shacochis builds a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world.

In Resistance, Tec draws on first hand accounts, interviews, and other sources to reveal the full range of tactics employed to resist the Nazi regime in Poland. She tells of those who escaped to hide and fight as partisans in the forests, and considers the crucial role played by women who acted as couriers, carrying messages and supplies between the ghetto and the outside world. Tec also discusses resistance in concentration camps, vividly recounting the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp uprising on October 7, 1944.

This groundbreaking book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín argues that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' disempowers them.

Already infamous for the arbitrary, paranoid persecution of its own citizens throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union - as is revealed in John Koeher’s revelatory, eye-opening exposé - also waged a vicious espionage campaign against the Catholic Church and its followers. From the persecution of local priests to an assassination order against Pope John Paul II, the KGB viewed Catholicism as a threat to stability in Eastern Europe and treated the church as an enemy of the State. Lifetime journalist and former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer John Koehler has written the definitive book on this startling history.

The waters rose, submerging New York City. But the residents adapted, and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever. Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides. And how we, too, will change.

Beijing presents a clear and gathering threat to Washington, but not for the reasons you think. China's challenge to the West stems from its transformative brand of capitalism and an entirely different conception of the international community.

Guys & Dolls...The Boyfriend...How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...Can-Can... These are just a few of the many Broadway shows produced by the legendary Cy Feuer, who, in partnership with the late Ernest H. Martin, brought to life many of America's most enduring musicals. Cy Feuer was at the center of these creations, as well as the films based on two of Broadway's most exceptional musicals, Cabaret and A Chorus Line. He was the man in charge, the one responsible for putting everything together, and - almost more important - for holding it together.

From the survivor of 10 Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, an inspiring memoir about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring 19, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

This invaluable collection of Avram Davidson's resonant, witty short stories describes some incidents in the career of many-times-Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy, loyal subject of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania, located in a 19th-century Europe whose political landscape will be, after a little reflection, familiar to most fantasy listeners. Enquire with Doctor Eszterhazy into curious matters: the lurley, the old woman who lived with a bear, gingerbread men, dancing goats, and more.

Sure, everyone gets sick sometimes, but do you realize that plenty of those folks also die slow, unpleasant deaths from diseases that stumped even the experts at top-notch (still privately run) hospitals? That's right: There are plenty of illnesses that even physicians have never heard about. Nodding Disease, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and Cutaneous Horn (yes, you grow a horn) are all featured here in pithy, energetic entries. You won't have to worry about socialized medicine if you have this book....

More Americans have been killed by well-meaning liberal policies than by all the wars of the last century combined. J. R. Dunn not only analyzes the unintended consequences of liberal policies, but argues that these consequences have resulted in millions of fatalities in the United States and around the world.

Could the killing of Germanicus Julius Caesar - the grandson of Mark Antony, adopted son of the emperor Tiberius, father of Caligula, and grandfather of Nero - while the Roman Empire was still in its infancy have been the root cause of the empire's collapse more than four centuries later? This brilliant investigation of Germanicus Caesar’s death and its aftermath is both a compelling history and first-class murder mystery with a plot twist Agatha Christie would envy.

"Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." Napoleon's words seem eerily prescient today, as the shock waves from China's awakening reverberate across the globe. In China Shakes the World, James Kynge, traces these tremors from Beijing to Europe to the Midwest as China's ravenous hunger for jobs, raw materials, energy, and food - and its export of goods, workers, and investments - drastically reshape world trade and politics.

"Aquitaine is mine. It will never belong to anyone else."

With these words, 15-year-old Eleanor seals her fate. Aquitaine is under the French king’s safekeeping, and Eleanor, the Duke of Aquitaine’s eldest daughter, knows she must wed Prince Louis in order to insure the future of her beloved duchy. Fiercely independent, filled with untapped desire, the woman who would be queen must provide Louis VII, her monkish husband, with heirs. But it is young Henry of Anjou who catches Eleanor’s eye - and sets fire to her heart.