Showing results for "peter mercer"

by

Nathan Mercer, Peter Hollins

You got dressed this morning without knowing you were putting on an empire.The jeans gone soft at the knee. The watch on your wrist. The waterproof coat by the door, the ring on your finger, the heels at the back of the closet. Every one of them began as a weapon, a conquest, or a crime — and then quietly moved into your wardrobe.The Empire Is the Tailor tells the true story of ten everyday garments and the wars, empires, and fortunes that cut them. This is history you can ...

by

Peter Mercer

Pete Mercer takes us on an unforgettable journey through the dangerous backstreets of 21st-century Iraq, and reveals that the realities of the ongoing War on Terror are not all that they seem.Northern Iraq, 2004 - a lawless region so dangerous the regular coalition armies were reluctant to put their soliders in harm's way. Enter the 'civilian contractors': private armies in all but name. Working alongside the US Army, men from all corners of the globe volunteered to risk their lives day af...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Every bottle behind the bar is a relic of a conquest. Not one of them will tell you so.Around 1898, on the hot southeast coast of Cuba, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox ran an iron works at a place called Daiquirí. He had cheap Cuban rum, limes that grew like weeds, sugar, and, on a good day, ice. He mixed them and named the drink after the town. In June 1898, about sixteen thousand American soldiers came ashore on that very beach to fight a war. The cocktail in your ...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Europe did not simply emerge from the Middle Ages. It was reinvented.In the cities of Florence and Rome, artists, scholars, architects, merchants, and rulers began looking backward—to ancient Greece and Rome—to imagine something entirely new. Their ideas transformed painting, politics, science, literature, religion, and the very meaning of human potential.The Renaissance: The Rebirth of Civilization tells the dramatic story of one of history’s greatest cultural revolutions....

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Around six thousand years ago, communities between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers began building some of the world’s earliest cities. In Mesopotamia, systems of writing, law, government, trade, religion, and warfare developed in forms that would influence later civilizations.This book traces the rise and decline of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. It explores the growth of cities such as Uruk and Babylon, the development of cuneiform writing, the laws associat...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

The Roman Republic had crushed every enemy it ever faced. It had never faced an enemy like this.In the gladiator schools of Capua, men were bought to bleed and die for the pleasure of the crowd. In 73 BC, seventy of them seized kitchen knives, broke for the gates, and vanished onto the slopes of Vesuvius. Led by a Thracian slave named Spartacus, they would become the deadliest uprising the ancient world had ever known—an army of the enslaved that shattered Roman legions and marched...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

They were told the reactor could not explode. At 1:23 in the morning, it did just that.April 26, 1986. In a routine safety test pushed past every limit, the core of Reactor No. 4 tore itself apart and hurled a plume of radiation across a sleeping continent. The men in the control room did not believe their own instruments. The state would not admit what had happened. And as officials assured the public that all was well, an invisible poison drifted over villages, cities, and border...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

History is usually told as a story of kings and armies. Its real author was the land.Why did civilization rise on some rivers and never on others? Why did some peoples build empires while their neighbors—no less clever or brave—vanished from the record? For most of human history, the answer was not character or destiny. It was terrain: the mountains, coastlines, rivers, and soil that quietly decided who would rise and who would be forgotten.Terrain of Empire: How Geography ...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Empires don't only fall to armies. They fall to the sky.For ten thousand years, the weather has been the quietest and deadliest force in human history. A few degrees of warming built Rome. A few degrees of cooling starved dynasties, emptied cities, and toppled the mightiest empires on earth — and the people living through it almost never knew why.Weather of Empire, Book Two of The Forces That Shaped Us, is the true story of how shifting climate built empires, toppled dynast...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Two titans. One room. A duel history tried to erase.Florence, 1504. The city commissions the two greatest artists alive to paint the facing walls of its grandest hall — at the same time, in full view of each other. Leonardo da Vinci: fifty-two, famous, untouchable. Michelangelo Buonarroti: twenty-nine, and hungry to dethrone him. They already despise each other. Now the Republic has handed them the perfect weapon — a wall, a rival, and an audience.What followed was the most...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

This morning, before you were fully awake, you held a conquest in your hand. It was just the cup.The white porcelain of your mug was a secret Europe couldn't crack for a thousand years. The shine on your spoon came out of a silver mountain fed with human lives. The red of your table was a felled rainforest, the shell of your buttons was hauled up by divers who never came up right. None of it announced itself. Every object in the room had a mouth, and kept it shut.The Empire...

by

Peter Hollins, Nathan Mercer

Hitler had never lost. He had also never fought for a city that carried his greatest enemy's name.In the summer of 1942, the German army rolled east toward the Volga, unstoppable and certain of victory. What waited for them in Stalingrad was not a battle but a slaughter without end—two hundred days of fighting in cellars and stairwells, sewers and shattered factories, where the front line moved room by room and a soldier's life was measured in hours.The Battle of Stalingrad...