New World History

Conflicts over specific rules lie at the heart of the disputes, which are about much more than sovereignty over islands and rocks in the South and East China Seas. Instead, the main contests concern the strategic maritime space associated with those islands. To consolidate control over this vital maritime space, China's leaders have begun to implement "China's law of the sea": building domestic legal institutions, bureaucratic organizations, and a naval and maritime law enforcement apparatus to establish China's preferred maritime rules on the water and in the diplomatic arena.

The history-making development of the Chinese economy has entered a new phase: China is moving aggressively from a strategy of imitation to one of innovation. Driven both by domestic needs and by global ambition, China is establishing itself at the forefront of technological innovation. Western businesses need to prepare for a tidal wave of innovation from China that is about to hit Western markets, and Chinese businesses need to understand the critical importance of innovation in their future.

In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.

March 1945. A handful of very young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island's Indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most speak next to no Borneo languages and know little about Dayaks, other than that they were once headhunters who might kill them on arrival. For their part, some Dayaks have never before seen a white face.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

In this book filled with exclusive interviews with Canadian astronauts and key players in the Canadian space program, Elizabeth Howell showcases how a little space program is making it big in the universe.

In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes listeners on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.

Imagine your shock at waking up one morning to a fleet of enormous, otherworldly craft looming over you. And when bizarre aliens begin to emerge - speaking strange gibberish - your heart races even faster. Similar fears may have gripped New World inhabitants when diverse civilizations - separated by a vast ocean - first met. American natives once knew nothing of towering ships, galloping horses, thundering guns, or smallpox. From 1492 onward, however, waves of adventurers would give them a cruel introduction.

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

We are in the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions ever, and it's a brave new world indeed. Who better to guide us through it than Michael Lewis, whose subversive, trenchant humor is the perfect match to his subject matter. Here is an audiobook as fresh as tomorrow's headlines, and as entertaining as its best selling predecessors.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is a crucial examination of one of history’s most horridly significant epochs, detailing its impact on the world, particularly in West Africa. You will be taken on an emotional and intellectual voyage, examining the horrifying ocean passages suffered by millions, the sociopolitical tides in West Africa, and the ultimate act of abolition.

Ever since Jurassic Park we thought we knew how dinosaurs lived their lives. In this remarkable new book, Brian J. Ford reveals that dinosaurs were, in fact, profoundly different from what we believe, and their environment was unlike anything we have previously thought. In this meticulous and absorbing account, Ford reviews the latest scientific evidence to show that the popular accounts of dinosaurs’ lives contain ideas that are no more than convenient inventions: how dinosaurs mated, how they hunted and communicated, how they nursed their young, even how they moved....

Born into the Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after 20 years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture, East and West - joining them with a fierce moral clarity and a propulsive style.

The New Organon is the second part of Bacon's philosophical work, The Great Instauration on the renewal of the sciences, which was published in 1620. The title refers to Aristotle's work Organon - meaning “trumpeter” - a treatise on logic and syllogism. Bacon’s work offers a new method of investigating nature, named “the Interpretation of Nature”.

This book welcomes listeners to appreciate the origins of Christianity within the Roman world in which early Christianity got its first foothold. It does that by immersing listeners in the life and culture of two thriving first-century towns—Pompeii and Herculaneum. Those towns (destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE) act as showpieces of the world into which the early Christian movement was spreading.

Lysander Spooner was one of slavery’s fiercest enemies. As a lawyer, he offered free legal services to escaped slaves, defending them in court. He advocated smuggling guns to slaves, with which to overthrow their masters, and take possession of their property. “Give the Slave-holders, then, a taste of their own whips.”

The original book on the black helicopter phenomenon! What is the meaning of black choppers? Movement of troops? Creation of Detention centers? National police force? The Surrender of U.S. military authority to the U.N.? Why are foreign troops secretly moving war equipment across America? The first book to explore the truth behind the war within our borders!

Long before Australia started to be considered one of the best places in the world to live, it was thought to be completely unlivable. In the 15th century, the European race to claim land began. Despite the fact that Australia was a large landmass, no nation believed it was worth colonizing. The land was claimed by the Netherlands. However, little exploration happened there. Many countries actually believed it to be uninhabitable. However, the Aboriginal populations had already been thriving on the land for millennia.

A unique collection of poignant, horrific, sad and sometimes dryly humorous stories and yarns from the bloody battlefield of Gallipoli. This is not a history, nor is it an individual soldier's story. Rather Jim Haynes has done what he does so well and pulled together the many yarns and stories and verses written about Gallipoli - everything from the firsthand accounts of being recruited to memories of ordinary soldiers written from the trenches and accounts of the aftermath.