Download or read book The Mental Floss History of the World written by Erik Sass and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-10-28 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History is . . . (a) more or less bunk. (b) a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. (c) as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis. Match your answers: (1) Stephen Daedalus of James Joyce's Ulysses (2) Henry Ford (3) Arthur Schopenhauer It turns out that answer need not be bunk, nightmarish, or diseased. In the hands of mental_floss, history's most interesting bits have been handpicked and roasted to perfection. Packed with little-known stories and outrageous—but accurate—facts, you'll laugh yourself smarter on this joyride through 60,000 years of human civilization. Remember: just because it's true, doesn't mean it's boring!
Download or read book English History Made Brief Irreverent and Pleasurable written by Lacey Baldwin Smith and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight the armchair traveler, the tourist or just about anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so much censure as the English: extolled as the Athenians of modern times, yet hammered for their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. But their history has been a spectacular one. The guiding principle of this book's heretical approach is that "history is not everything that happened, but what is worth remembering about the past.. . .". Thus, its chapters deal mainly with "Memorable History" in blocks of time over the centuries. The final chapter "The Royal Soap Opera," recounts the achievements, personalities and idiocies of the royal family since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Spiced with dozens of hilarious cartoons from Punch and other publications, English History will be a welcome and amusing tour of a land that has always fascinated Anglophiles and Anglophobes alike.
Download or read book Printer s Error written by J. P. Romney and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A funny and entertaining history of printed books as told through absurd moments in the lives of authors and printers, collected by television’s favorite rare-book expert from HISTORY’s hit series Pawn Stars. Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn’t been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer’s Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing, and makes clear that we’ve succeeded despite ourselves. Rare-book expert Rebecca Romney and author J. P. Romney take us from monasteries and museums to auction houses and libraries to introduce curious episodes in the history of print that have had a profound impact on our world. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on it. Today, Johannes Gutenberg is recognized as the father of Western printing. But for the first few hundred years after the invention of the printing press, no one knew who printed the first book. This long-standing mystery took researchers down a labyrinth of ancient archives and libraries, and unearthed surprising details, such as the fact that Gutenberg’s financier sued him, repossessed his printing equipment, and started his own printing business afterward. Eventually the first printed book was tracked to the library of Cardinal Mazarin in France, and Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible was finally credited to him, thus ensuring Gutenberg’s name would be remembered by middle-school students worldwide. Like the works of Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, and Ken Jennings, Printer’s Error is a rollicking ride through the annals of time and the printed word.
Download or read book Irreverent History written by Kesavan Veluthat and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irreverent History brings together essays inhonour of Professor M.G.S. Narayanan, a historian who brought about a veritable shift in the paradigm of historiography in Kerala through his painstaking epigraphical research that led to the publication of his classic Perumals of Kerala (1972). A former Member- Secretary and Chair of the Indian Council of Historical Research, he has also made lasting contributions to Indian history and epigraphy more broadly. In all of his work, Narayanan has pursued a relentless quest for truth apart from fads in theory and expediencies in politics. That pursuit was carried out with a charm, originality, and boldness that nettled some, but, more importantly, encouraged many.
Download or read book Color Scheme written by Edith Young and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change the way you see color forever in this dazzling collection of color palettes spanning art history and pop culture, and told in writer and artist Edith Young's accessible, inviting style. From the shades of pink in the blush of Madame de Pompadour's cheeks to Prince's concert costumes, Color Scheme decodes the often overlooked color concepts that can be found in art history and visual culture. Edith Young's forty color palettes and accompanying essays reveal the systems of color that underpin everything we see, allowing original and, at times, even humorous themes to emerge. Color Scheme is the perfect book for anyone interested in learning more about, or rethinking, how we see the world around us.
Download or read book Imperial Intimacies written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.
Download or read book An Irreverent Curiosity written by David Farley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read David Farley's posts on the Penguin Blog.A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town in search of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus Christ In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: the pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican. In 2006, travel writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German solider before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Blending history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale of conspiracy and misadventure.
Download or read book Art Money written by Aubrey Menen and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1980 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rogues Gallery written by Matthew Blackman and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you reckon corruption in South Africa began with Zuma or even with apartheid, it’s time to catch a wake-up call. Rogues’ Gallery tells the story of some of the biggest skelms to grace our (un)fair shores, showing that dodgy dealings have been a national pastime for as long as South African history has been written down. The action starts with the machinations of three colonial governors: rotten Willem Adriaan van der Stel and the ‘twaddling’ British duo, Sir George Yonge and Lord Charles Somerset. Added to this is Cecil John Rhodes’s unparalleled success in poisoning the land with theft, fraud and war, and Oom Paul Kruger’s corrupt and compromised Volksraads (official and unofficial). Readers are then treated to apartheid’s finest feats in corruption: from the Broederbond’s perfect ten in state capture to the Department of Information’s peddling of fake news and the apartheid state’s manufacture of – no, not illegal cigarettes – Class A drugs! And let’s not forget the hotbed of corruption that was the ‘independent’ homelands. Add to this a few murders, plenty of nepotism and a state president who started out as a Nazi spy, and the gallery of rogues is complete. On the flipside, every chapter also features at least one brave whistle-blower – the true heroes of this book. Irreverent, entertaining and impeccably researched, Rogues’ Gallery busts the myth that the Zuptas were the first to capture the South African state, showing that corruption has always been around – and that the tricks politicians play haven’t changed a jot.
Download or read book Travel as a Political Act written by Rick Steves and published by Rick Steves. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change the world one trip at a time. In this illuminating collection of stories and lessons from the road, acclaimed travel writer Rick Steves shares a powerful message that resonates now more than ever. With the world facing divisive and often frightening events, from Trump, Brexit, and Erdogan, to climate change, nativism, and populism, there's never been a more important time to travel. Rick believes the risks of travel are widely exaggerated, and that fear is for people who don't get out much. After years of living out of a suitcase, he still marvels at how different cultures find different truths to be self-evident. By sharing his experiences from Europe, Central America, Asia, and the Middle East, Rick shows how we can learn more about own country by viewing it from afar. With gripping stories from Rick's decades of exploration, this fully revised edition of Travel as a Political Act is an antidote to the current climate of xenophobia. When we travel thoughtfully, we bring back the most beautiful souvenir of all: a broader perspective on the world that we all call home. All royalties from the sale of Travel as a Political Act are donated to support the work of Bread for the World, a non-partisan organization working to end hunger at home and abroad.
Download or read book Bury the Chains written by Adam Hochschild and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first great human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.
Download or read book An Irreverent and Almost Complete Social History of the Bathroom written by Frank Muir and published by Henry Holt & Company. This book was released on 1982 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of baths and bathing, looks at how the concept of cleanliness has changed, and describes social customs related to personal hygiene
Download or read book The Delectable Burg written by Phillip Ray Buntin and published by Kansas Heritage Center. This book was released on 2009 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This popular coloring book is now revised and updatedand includes four more pages with new drawings! Artwork of the Oklahoma state symbols is by artist Phillip R. Buntin, and a short paragraph describes each symbol.The reproducible drawings include: American Indians, mistletoe, Oklahoma Rosestate flower, Seal of Oklahoma, Oklahoma capitol, Oklahoma flag, scissor-tailed flycatcherstate bird, collared lizardstate reptile, buffalostate mammal, white bassstate fish, Indian blanketstate wildflower, wild turkeystate game bird, raccoonstate furbearer, white-tailed deerstate game animal, honeybeestate insect, black swallowtailstate butterfly, bullfrogstate amphibian, Mexican free-tailed batstate flying, mammal, strawberrystate fruit, watermelonstate vegetable, map of Oklahoma counties.
Download or read book The Madams of San Francisco written by Curt Gentry and published by Comstock Publishing. This book was released on 1977-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unquiet Souls written by Angela Lambert and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1984 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thius book describes the rise, and fall, of the Souls, an elite groups that flourished in England from the 1880s until the First World War. Its members included Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, Willy Grenfell, George Wyndham, Alfred Lyttelton, Harry Cust and Hug, Lord Elcho. Some of its most influential members were women: Margot Asquith and the Tennant sisters, Ettie Grenfell, Lady Elcho and the Duchess of Rutland. The Souls adorned and scandalized society, cultivating an enjoyment of books, games, leisure and hsopitality in London and on country-house weekends. Above all they enjoyed each other. Unconventional and high spirited, they brough elegance, wit and exuberance of sentiment to all the engaged in, from the creation of thei own special language to their endless flirtations and complicated love affairs. The arrival of World War I say many of them off to fight for England and many died. The frivolity of their earlier lives was over.--From the dust jacket.
Download or read book Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door written by Rick Steves and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 1115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can count on Rick Steves to tell you what you really need to know when traveling through Europe. With Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door, you'll learn how to: Plan your itinerary and maximize your time Pack light and right Find good-value hotels and restaurants Travel smoothly by train, bus, car, and plane Avoid crowds and tourist scams Hurdle the language barrier Understand cultural differences and connect with locals Save money while enjoying the trip of a lifetime After 30+ years of exploring Europe, Rick considers this travel skills handbook his life's work, and with his expert introductions to the top destinations in Europe, choosing your next trip will be easy and stress-free. Using the travel skills in this book, you'll experience the culture like a local, spend less money, and have more fun.
Download or read book Europe Through the Back Door written by Rick Steves and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
