A towering work of history examining the world's most pressing problem--the growing gulf between rich and poor. For the last six hundred years, the world's wealthiest countries have been mostly European. Late in our century, the balance has begun to shift toward Asia, where countries such as Japan have grown at astounding rates. Why have these...

Since the introduction of personal computers, software has emerged as a driving force in the global economy and a major industry in its own right. During this time, the U.S. government has reversed its prior policy against software patents and is now issuing thousands of such patents each year, provoking heated controversy among programmers,...

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic...

In Henry Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones, the young hero and his friend Partridge go to see a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a play that had been around for less than 50 years at that point. Partridge, always opinionated and usually wrong, is not impressed by the actor playing Hamlet: “Why, I could act as well as...

In the award-winning AMC television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, a mysterious and massive machine shows up one day in the offices of the advertising agency Stirling Cooper. The machine is a Xerox photocopier, and the workplace is about to change forever. Previously, document duplication was done with a mimeograph, a hand-cranked...

Ever since the former rich girl-turned-Cleveland cemetery tour guide banged her head on a headstone, she sees dead people. Worse still, she hears them—and they won't shut up! Now it's Didi Bowman, a poodle-skirted relic from the Great Beyond, who's bending Pepper's ear, complaining that her famous author sister,...

From prehistoric times, mankind has looked up at the night sky, and puzzled at the changing positions of the stars. How far away they are is a question that has confounded scientists for centuries. Over the last few hundred years, many scientific careers – and considerable resources – have been devoted to measuring their positions...

'Basic Photography' is a longstanding international bestseller and continues to be the introductory textbook for photography courses throughout the world.

Key features:
practical assignments, so you can put into practice what you've learned
chapter summaries for easy revision
a clear and concise approach to...

The motion picture was born in Edison’s New Jersey laboratory in 1889 and spent an innocent childhood at fairground sideshows around the world, amusing and astonishing audiences with its one trick – single-shot representations of events like The Sneeze, The Kiss, Train Arriving at the Station, Workers Leaving the Factory. Then around...

The legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel has resonated among both Jews and Christians down through the centuries: the compelling idea that some core group of humanity was "lost" and exiled to a secret place, perhaps someday to return triumphant. In this fascinating book, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the...