The gym is often seen as an emblem of modernity, but its origins date back 2,800 years to the very beginnings of Western civilization. The Temple of Perfection charts the gym’s long history, exploring its enduring appeal and growing popularity in a world increasingly obsessed with physical perfection, and attracted by the quick fixes of plastic surgery and miracle diet pills.How we look after our bodies is based on the complex interplay of spiritual beliefs, moral discipli...

‘Pleasure beckons at the water’s edge.’ With these words, Eric Chaline celebrates the physicality and sensuality of swimming – attributes that might have contributed to the evolution of the human species. Chaline’s comprehensive account surveys swimming from prehistory to the present day. He decodes the earliest human myths to reconstruct swimming’s prehistory and history; he explains its role in religious rituals, trade and manufacture, warfare and medicine, and chronicles its transformat...

The Third Book of General Ignorance gathers together 180 questions, both new and previously featured on the BBC TV programme's popular 'General Ignorance' round, and show why, when it comes to general knowledge, none of us knows anything at all.Who invented the sandwich? What was the best thing before sliced bread? Who first ate frogs' legs? Which cat never changes its spots? What did Lady Godiva do? What can you legally do if you come across a Welshman in Chester...

This entertaining Very Short Introduction reflects the enduring popularity of archaeology - a subject which appeals as a pastime, career, and academic discipline, encompasses the whole globe, and surveys 2.5 million years. From deserts to jungles, from deep caves to mountain tops, from pebble tools to satellite photographs, from excavation to abstract theory, archaeology interacts with nearly every other discipline in its attempts to reconstruct the past.In this new edition, Paul Bahn brin...

Chapter from Blue Guide Greece the Aegean Islands: what to see, where to stay and eat, history, archaeology, art, culture, leisure. With superb, award-winning maps.Written and edited by a team of three experts: historian, art historian and archaeologist, two of whom lead cultural tours in Greece."Blue Guides still hold the cultural high ground" Sunday Times.

Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much.Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet.A Short History of Progress argues that t...

ABOUT THE BOOKIn this book, we cover over 200,000 years of Black history. For many of us, that sounds strange. We can’t even imagine what the Black past was like before the slave trade, much less imagine that such a history goes back 200,000 years or more. Can you imagine what that does to a person? To grow up believing their people started out as slaves? Perhaps some of us know a little about Africa, but how much do we really know? How much do we know about the extent of the ancient ...

For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - are now living in cities. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world's population were urbanites, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for about 1000 years. By 2030, 60 per cent of us will be urban dwellers.City is the ultimate handbook for the archetypal city and contains main sections on 'History', 'Customs and Language', ...

"[A] tour de force examination of the history of ivory . . . and the demise of the elephant and human decency in the process of this unholy quest." — The Huffington PostPraised for the nuance and sensitivity with which it approaches one of the most fraught conservation issues we face today, John Frederick Walker's Ivory's Ghosts tells the astonishing story of the power of ivory through the ages, and its impact on elephants. Long before gold and ge...

How much of the folk tales of our ancestors is rooted in fact, and what can they tell us about the future?In today's society it is the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend – after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge, they were passing it o...

Discover North America's real prehistory through evidence of foreign influences at work centuries and millennia before the arrival of modern Europeans.While digging out a new basement near Los Angeles, homeowners accidentally unearth a 3,000-year-old Phoenician altar.A treasure-hunter in Ohio finds more than he expected, when his metal detector locates an Eastern Mediterranean pendant from 1000 BC.Two caches of coins minted in Imperial Rome surface alo...

Green City: People, Nature, and Urban Places looks at eleven cities the world over to see how people and nature have interacted over the course of history, and how people attempt to bring nature into cities. In each of these locations, Soderstrom examines how people have tried to make a connection with naturehow well theyve done is both a lesson in hope and, often, a warning. Featuring chapters on Babylon, Provins (France), London and Bloomsbury, Hamilton, Chicago, Irvine, Singapore, Tanga...