Ebooks de historia | Casa del Libro, página 4 de 7

In this vivid blend of memoir, nature writing and social criticism, Rebecca Tamás seeks new answers in old folk ways. Suffering from burn-out and grief both environmental and personal, Tamás sets out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstows May Day, she finds in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world and the flow of time. Intellectually probing and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of ancient ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the seasons. Ecstatic and irreverent, it is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital and encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.

In 1999 my expedition found George Mallorys body on Mount Everest. The intense public interest in his tragic fate obscured the other actors in that dramatic story.The pioneers who attempted the first climbs in 1922 and 1924 knew nothing about the mountain other than its height. They had to learn the hard way about the lack of oxygen, the jet-stream winds, the illnesses of altitude, and the vital importance of the Sherpas. They fought cerebral oedema, frostbite, hypothermia and raging thirst in the cold, thin air. They had to find a route, avoid avalanches, and work out what to do when confronted by an insuperable rock climb at extreme altitude. Many of them died.Howard Somervell was Mallorys closest friend on the mountain in 1922 and 1924. He was an exceptionally gifted man: he had a double first at Cambridge, he was a talented artist and an accomplished musician. He served as a surgeon at the Battle of the Somme during the First World War and was one of the foremost alpinists of the day when he was invited to join the 1922 Mount Everest expedition. After Everest he was awarded an Olympic gold medal for Alpinism in 1924. But in India he will be remembered as a surgeon who dedicated the remainder of his life to healing the sick.Those pioneers showed the way. Somervell took part in the first attempt to climb the mountain, and his oxygen-free height record in 1924 stood for over 50 years. On his descent he sat down alone suffocating from a frost-bitten larynx. He prepared to die, but at the last moment performed a medical manoeuvre which cleared his airway. He survived to struggle back down.Howard Somervell was my cousin, and I am one of the last Everesters left alive to have spoken with a climber from George Mallorys party.

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, posing a singular question: What were you doing on October 7, 2023? She has selected twenty-six of these narratives to share with the world. Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, who have witnessed what history may one day remember as one of the most savage wars of our time. Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated and many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their stories, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate. The title, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, is adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing.

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. Its at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. The era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, Ambivalence is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.

Mary Boleyn has long been dismissed as the "great and infamous whore"her story overshadowed by scandal and myth. But what if everything we thought we knew about her was wrong?Drawing on newly re-translated original sources and rare archival material, this ground-breaking book peels away centuries of rumour to reveal the true Mary Boleyn. Far from the reckless wanton of legend, she emerges as a woman of ambition, resilience, and intelligence. Through meticulous research and fresh analysis, this book challenges out-dated narratives, uncovering the real extent of Marys relationships with Henry VIII and Francis I, her role in the rise and fall of her younger sister Anne, and her life beyond the royal spotlight.A must-read for Tudor history enthusiasts, this revelatory biography rewrites Mary Boleyns storyproving she was far more than "the great and infamous whore" of myth.

"Pierces startling candour makes for tough but cathartic reading, particularly for those whove lost family members too early. The results are both brutal and beautiful" - Publishers WeeklyIn 2017, Sophie Pierces world changed forever when her twenty-year-old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Thrown into this new reality, she had to find a way to keep on living. By writing a series of letters to Felix - composed during walks and swims taken close to his burial place by the River Dart - Sophie gradually learned how to dwell in the landscape of sudden loss, navigating the weather and tides of grief.The Green Hill collects these letters alongside Sophies account of the years following Felixs death, into which she weaves poignant memories of his life. What results is a deeply moving, beautifully captured record of how - amid the plants and rivers of Dartmoor, and in the sea off the South Devon coast - Sophie was able to hold on to and nurture her bond with Felix, both in her mind and through a physical engagement with the landscape: actively mourning, rather than grieving.The book is a celebration of the natural world and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as examining how beauty, a sense of place and the passing seasons can help us contend with our own mortality. Above all, though, The Green Hill is one womans story of navigating through trauma and loss, and towards a fragile, complicated kind of joy.

What is a human being? Where does neurosis begin? Is sexual desire truly the engine of thought? Can fear, trauma and depression ever be cured? And what, by the way, is the meaning of life? In this vivid and gripping account, psychologist Steve Ayan takes us back to fin-de-siecle Vienna, where a bold new idea was born: that psychotherapy could heal the mind. This is the enthralling story of how Freud, Jung, Adler, and their contemporaries revolutionised the way we understand ourselves - giving rise to psychotherapy, a field that would forever reshape Western culture. With captivating storytelling and deep insight, Ayan unpacks the dreams, rivalries, and obsessions of these early visionaries. More than simply a historical account, this book explores the lasting legacy of their work, revealing how the promise of personal transformation became a modern fixture of society - and how the questions they raised still echo in our lives today.

Since we were first able to communicate with each other, stories have formed a basis for our cultures, communities and collaborative ventures. Stories are a fundamental part of what it means to be human. From the oldest known cave paintings found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to the debate about the role of artificial intelligence in our creative endeavors, within these pages lies a concise history of storytelling in Europe, written by a storyteller with a decade of experience in storytelling and a passion for stories in all their forms.

When Titanic left Southampton in 1912, neither the Aristocrat, The Countess of Rothes, nor the Able Seaman, Thomas Jones, imagined meeting, let alone navigating a tiny lifeboat together at night, among towering icebergs. But Jones put Noel Rothes at the tiller of his boat when he realised her calm capability, and for seven long hours they did all they could to shepherd at least twenty-five others to safety. Their ordeal forged an unlikely affinity that lasted until Noel died in 1956. Angela Young, Noels great-granddaughter, tells the stories of these two courageous Titanic survivors and considers why so very few people survived the tragedy.

Henrietta Moraes first discovered Soho when she was eighteen or so she tells us. Her favourite sport was social climbing (heaven knows she enjoyed the exercise) and she was good at it, going to all the right parties and simply gate-crashing others. From the summit of the 1950s bohemian scene she surveyed the life and times of those who broke all the rules, such as the artists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (for whom she became a muse). But thats not all she did as a key counter-culture figure in the 1960s Chelsea Set, no other woman was more indefatigable in becoming a bohemian legend.Through Hen, youll learn how to steal your best friends boyfriend; enchant and ensnare a husband; blossom into a magnificent muse; dress like a comic book superhero; become a connoisseur of every illicit drug known to medical science and dose a Rolling Stones concert with them; join the caravan set and head along the gypsy trail in search of the Holy Grail, before rematerialising as the minder for a mind-blowing pop iconAlong the way youll indulge in the gentle art of cadging drinks; the feline felony of cat burglary; the canny craft of charity shop shoplifting and the haphazardness of steamy sex in second-hand bookshops.Hen, Mistress of Mayhem takes you to the epicentre of Sohos Golden Age; stage by stage it forms a complete guide to a hell-raising companion.

Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter to a P.O. box, Melissa Auf der Maurs first band scored an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins in her bohemian home town, Montreal. Sensing Melissas talent, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love. Whisked from her local scene, Melissa joined Hole just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Holes prior bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with the just-widowed Courtney Love at the centre of it all.That was only the beginning of Melissas journey through alternative rock, a trip she undertook alongside 90s luminaries including Rufus Wainwright, Michael Stipe and her former boyfriend, Dave Grohl. Even the Good Girls Will Cry is a vivid dispatch from the last analogue decade, capturing that bygone era in all its messy, angsty glory.

On 13 March 1996 Thomas Hamilton walked into the gym hall of a primary school in Dunblane armed with four legally owned handguns and in less than four minutes fired 105 bullets, killing 16 young children, their teacher and injuring many more. It was a crime that first shocked the world then changed the nation.Based on original archival research and exclusive interviews with parents, politicians and police, One Morning in March tells for the first time the incredible and powerful true story of how, in their darkest hour, a band of parents used their grief as fuel in a fight to forever ban handguns in Britain, and create the tightest gun laws in the world.

Greenvile Collins (1643-94) is the most important Royal Navy officer you have never heard of. But he was well known to Samuel Pepys, and worked personally for Charles II, James II and William III as hydrographer, navigation instructor and royal yacht captain. The charts by themselves would ensure his place in history, but Collins also made history through his actions. As navigator of the Kings flagship during the Glorious Revolution he perpetrated an ingenious deception, granting the Dutch army crucial extra time to mount their invasion. This has never been written about, perhaps because historians tend not to be navigators, yet its all there, in Collins 1688 journal, hiding in plain sight. This new study both explores for the first time Collins charts as navigation aids, as well as how he changed the course of history.

On a beach near Naples in October 79 CE, more than three hundred people were standing on a beach, hoping for an evacuation. Vesuvius a volcano which needs no introduction in the world of Ancient Rome erupted. They had left it too late, and were all instantly killed in the devastation that followed.Neighbouring the world-renowned Pompeii, the town of Herculaneum is the neglected victim of Vesuvius. It was uniquely preserved in the aftermath of the eruption, and in many ways gives us unparalleled windows into the past.For the first time, this fascinating new history tells the story of Herculaneum and the people who lived there. Through the eyes of the Weaver, the Slave Girl and the Pregnant Lady, the Soldier, the Fisherman and the Boxer, as well as relevant buildings and the archaeological discoveries of the past 20 years it is possible to hear their voices and build a historical picture that is more colourful, complete and alive than has ever been possible before. Essential reading for fans of Pompeii Herculaneum receives 300,000 visitors every year and is one of Italys top ten tourist destinations, yet it has been overshadowed by Pompeii in popular history until now Based on the latest archaeological research and discoveries, Adrian Murdoch explores the ancient Roman town to bring the ancient world to life Herculaneums unrivalled preservation gives us a unique glimpse into Roman life

Throughout LGBTQ+ history, suburbia has been seen as somewhere to escape from: a place where heterosexuality rules; where difference will not be tolerated; where youll never find a soulmate. But for many, those streets of twitching curtains and pebble-dashed semis were - or still are - a place to call home.From Addlestone to Wilmslow, Tales of the Suburbs explores the relatively untold twentieth century tale of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in suburbia. Through remarkable archive material and original interviews, social historian John Grindrod reveals stories that are messy and moving, dark and funny, uplifting and extraordinary. Together, they reclaim suburbia as a space for all - or those that want it - where counter-cultural expression thrives despite the Neighbourhood Watch, and queer love and friendship bloom against the odds.

In 1939, when Ian Burumas epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse.By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not Auf wiedersehen or Heil Hitler but Bleiben Sie ubrig -Stay alive. And by wars end Berlins population had fallen by almost half.Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Burumas own father, a prisoner conscripted into forced labour in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. This is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. Its a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.

The Marquis de Sade, infamous for his obscene writing and his cruelty to women, nonetheless lived a life dominated by them - his charismatic mother, iron-willed mother-in-law, and his wife. A wife who, despite her husbands peccadilloes, and although their marriage was arranged in order for their families to combine financial and social capital, loved him devotedly for thirty years, through betrayal, imprisonment, and national turmoil.This biography reveals how Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil, Marquise de Sade, endured the chaos caused by her frenetically dissolute husband with grace, and how she carved out her own independence in an era when women were entitled to little of their own. She bore the Marquis three children, loved him, put up with his wild behaviour, edited his manuscripts for him, tried to help him escape prison by means legal and illegal, and acted throughout the decades of their marriage as his only reliable friend.Their complex relationship, set against the last years of the Ancien Regime in France, the Revolution and its aftermath, are brought to life with humour and compassion by Margaret Crosland, also the translator of Sades Gothic Tales. She shows how the Sade marriage symbolized the decay of the old aristocracy and conveys the struggle of one individual to establish her personal identity at a time when women in France had virtually no rights of their own.

Whilst the war raged across Flanders fields, an equally horrifying and sometimes more dangerous battle took place underground.Beneath Flanders Fields tells the story of the tunnellers war, which still remains one of the most misunderstood, misrepresented and mystifying conflicts of the Great War.A wealth of personal testimonies reveal the engineering, technology and science behind how this most intense of battles was fought and won. They speak of how the tunnellers lived a relentless existence in the depths of the battlefield for almost two and a half years, enduring physical and mental stresses that were often more extreme than their infantry counterparts. Their lives were reduced to a complex war of silence, tension and claustrophobia, leading up to the most dramatic mine offensive in history launched on 7 June 1917 at Messines Ridge. Yet, Messines was not the end of their story, which continued with the crafting of a whole underground world of headquarters, cookhouses and hospitals, housing the innumerable troops who passed through this part of the Western Front.Here, this extraordinary, hidden world is revealed and the fragile legacy it has left behind on Flanders fields is brought to light.

A Forever War: Israel and Palestine achieves something quite extraordinary. At a time when passions run high and the Israel-Gaza war intensifies, so much coverage is based on prejudice, fear and ignorance. Colin Shindler, Professor of Israel Studies at SOAS, presents a calm, scholarly and dispassionate view of the past and of what might lie ahead.Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has been thrown into conflict. Shindler reflects on the key questions: How did this state of affairs come about? Is it even possible to write an impartial account? Was the Balfour Declaration a disaster? Could all the conflict have been avoided? How is it that Israel itself is a divided nation and even other Arab nations treat the Palestinians so badly?On both sides are the extremists terrorists and ultra-nationalist religious Jews who are determined to seize land from Palestinians and dream of a new Jewish theocracy but A Forever War strives for objectivity and asks how we can best approach the truth in a time of such complex division.

Published ahead of the centenary of the Queens birth, this beautifully illustrated book uncovers the hidden history of the Crown and how it survived a tumultuous era and two world wars. **Features over 100 sumptuous images**From the birth of the house of Windsor in 1917, its leading women - Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Elizabeth II - faced abdication and assassination, revolution and the rise of fascism, the threat of invasion and all-out war. Their sartorial decisions, alongside those of their royal husbands, projected power and perpetuity, diplomacy and defiance. In this cinematic story of espionage and exquisite couture, Justine Picardie reveals the undercover lives of the creators behind the facade - including Hardy Amies, Cecil Beaton, Norman Hartnell and Edward Molyneux - and traces the ways in which visual iconography safeguarded the monarchy even when their reign seemed to be hanging by a thread.Drawing on original research in the Royal Archives and her own experiences at Balmoral, Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, Picardie explores the family feuds and international conflicts that challenged the Crown, and how royal fashion is wielded as a weapon.