An Eclectic List of Overlooked Non-Fiction Books
Discover a curated selection of overlooked non-fiction books in this eclectic list. Unearth hidden gems and expand your reading horizons with these underrated must-reads.
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Medici Money
by Tim Parks
Their name is a byword for immense wealth and power, but before their renown as art patrons and noblemen, the Medicis built their fortune on banking. Banking in the fifteenth century, even at the height of the Renaissance, meant running afoul of the Catholic Church's prohibition against usury. It required more than merely financial skills to make a profit, and the legendary Medicis--most famously Cosimo and Lorenzo ("the Magnificent")--were masterly at the political, diplomatic, military, and even metaphysical tools that were needed to maintain their family's position. Parks uncovers the intrigues, dodges, and moral qualities that gave the Medicis their edge. Evoking the richness of the Florentine Renaissance and the Medicis' glittering circle, replete with artists, popes, and kings, Medici Money is a look into the origins of modern banking and its troubled relationship with art and religion. --From publisher description.
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Catastrophe
by David Keys
An archaeologist presents a radical new view of history, maintaining that a climatic catastrophe around 535 A.D. resulted in chaos, famine, migration, war, and massive political change on every continent.
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Rites of Spring
by Modris Eksteins
Looks at the origins and impact of World War I, discusses the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet, and analyzes public opinion of the period.
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New City
by John Lorinc
Shaped by immigration, and demographics, our hub cities demonstrate what’s best about Canada: our commitment to education, tolerance, culture, and innovation. Since the early 1990s, however, troubling trends have threatened to undermine our much-envied quality of life. In The New City, award-winning urban affairs writer John Lorinc offers a compelling vision of how to make Canada’s metropolitan centres sustainable, livable, and competitive. Incisive and broad-ranging, this is a timely reminder that all Canadians must confront urban issues if the country is to succeed in the tumultuous economy of the 21st century.
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From the Holy Mountain
by William Dalrymple
In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes "an evensong for a dying civilization" --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
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The Arcanum
by Janet Gleeson
The #1 bestseller in England tells the story of the obsessive pursuit of the secret formula to 18th-century Europe's most precious commodity -- fine porcelain.
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War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
by Chris Hedges
Looks at the appeal of war, arguing that the ideas of combat are noble and glorious, providing a purpose for living for some people.
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Watermark
by Joseph Brodsky
Originally published in hardcover: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.
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Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
by Neil Postman
In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, acclaimed cultural critic Neil Postman offers a cure for the hysteria and hazy values of the postmodern world. Postman shows us how to reclaim that balance between mind and machine in a dazzling celebration of the accomplishments of the Enlightenment-from Jefferson's representative democracy to Locke's deductive reasoning to Rousseau's demand that the care and edification of children be considered an investment in our collective future. Here, too, is the bold assertion that Truth is invulnerable to fashion or the passing of time. Provocative and brilliantly argued, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century illuminates a navigable path through the Information Age-a byway whose signposts, it turns out, were there all along.
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A Life in Secrets
by Sarah Helm
From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain’s premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of war, A Life in Secrets is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism.
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Route 66 A.D.
by Tony Perrottet
The ancient Romans were responsible for many remarkable achievements--Roman numerals, straight roads--but one of their lesser-known contributions was the creation of the tourist industry. The first society in history to enjoy safe and easy travel, Romans embarked in droves on the original Grand Tour, traveling from the lost city of Troy to the top of the Acropolis in Athens, from the fallen Colossus at Rhodes to the Pyramids of Egypt, ending with the obligatory Nile cruise to the very edge of the Empire. And as travel writer Tony Per-rottet discovers, the popularity of this route has only increased with time. Perrottet first discovered the origins of this ancient itinerary when he came across the world's oldest surviving guidebook in the New York Public Library. Intrigued by the possibility of re-creating the tour, and wanting to seize the opportunity for one last excursion with Les, his pregnant girlfriend, before their lives changed forever, Perrottet set off to rediscover life as an ancient Roman. He was armed for travel with only the essentials--a backpack full of ancient texts and a second-century highway map reproduced on a twenty-foot-long scroll. As he retraced the historic route, fighting the crowds and reading aloud to Les two-thousand-year-old descriptions of bad food, inadequate accommodations, and pushy tour guides, it became clear to him that tourism has actually changed very little since Caesar's day. A lively blend of fascinating historical anecdotes and hilarious personal encounters, interspersed with irreverent and often eerily prescient quotes from the ancients, Route 66 A.D. vividly recaptures the magic of the Roman Empire in all its complexity and wonder.
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Among the Believers
by V. S. Naipaul
In this account of his journeys through Asia, the believers are the Muslims Naipaul met on these jouneys. He shows young people battling to regain the original purity of their faith, and offers an insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism.
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The Lost Executioner
by Nic Dunlop
In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Twenty years later, not one member had been held accountable for the genocide. Haunted by the image of one of them, Comrade Duch, photographer Nic Dunlop set outt
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Are We Rome?
by Cullen Murphy
Esteemed editor and author Murphy draws nuanced lessons for how America might avoid Rome's fate. In lively, richly detailed historical stories based on the latest scholarship, the ancient world leaps to life and casts the contemporary world in a provocative new light.
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Occidentalism
by Ian Buruma
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision
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Bad Elements
by Ian Buruma
In this enlightening and often moving book, critically acclaimed essayist Buruma conducts readers on a global tour of Chinese dissidence. Panoramic and intimate, disturbing and inspiring, "Bad Elements" is a profound meditation on the themes of national identity and political struggle. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.