Showing results for "peter watson"

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Peter Watson

The acclaimed author of The German Genius presents a sweeping intellectual historian of human civilization: "[An] extraordinary book" ( Sunday Telegraph, UK).In Ideas, Peter Watson has undertaken a hugely ambitious study, charting the evolution of human history from deep antiquity to the present day through the lens of intellectual development. Here is the grand story of human thought from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, an...

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Peter Watson

A "compelling" history of German cultural and intellectual development from 1750 to the twentieth century ( Financial Times).From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Ado...

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Peter Watson

A mysterious painting holds the clues to a cache of priceless relics in this treasure hunt of "deepening suspense" à la The Da Vinci Code ( Library Journal).In financial trouble, Isobel Sadler considers selling a painting that's been in her family for generations. She can't imagine it's worth much . . . until someone tries to steal it.Mystified, Isobel turns to art dealer Michael Whiting for advice. He identifies the painting as a sixteent...

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Peter Watson

"Splendidly readable and hugely informative. . . . Episode after episode from the cultural life of the twentieth century springs to vivid life." — Boston GlobeFrom Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson ...

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Peter Watson

“Those seeking a grand overview of science’s greatest hits over the past century will find it here.” —The Washington PostFrom the bestselling author of Ideas and The Modern Mind comes a bold history of science offering a groundbreaking and powerful argument: the many disparate scientific disciplines are converging on the same truths.Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significa...

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Peter Watson

Stolen gold and forbidden love intertwine in this riveting novel set during the last days of the Third Reich by "a superb writer and a masterful storyteller" ( Houston Chronicle).Walter Wolff, an officer in the US Army's art recovery unit, has been assigned to track down a priceless collection of gold coins stolen from a monastery in Austria. General Eisenhower believes the treasure could be melted down and used to finance the escape plans of high-ranking ...

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Peter Watson

Reflecting on the Enlightenment, Henry Steele Commager began The Empire of Reason by noting the paradox of societies that “preached liberty and practiced slavery.” The movement differed across Europe and America and unfolded amid war, slavery, and empire. Any modern history of the Enlightenment must confront this tension.A radical rethinking of the Enlightenment, this book reveals how the age of reason coexisted with empire, slavery and deep inequality. While Enlightenment...

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Peter Watson

This "ingenious work about the course of human history" examines why civilizations evolved so differently in the Americas and Eurasia ( Kirkus, starred review).By 15,000 BC, humans had migrated from northeastern Asia across the frozen Bering land bridge to the Americas. When the last Ice Age came to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water, dividing America from Eurasia. This division continued until Christopher Columbus voyaged to the New World in the...

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Peter Watson

Queen’s Witness is a tense political thriller set on the edges of London’s criminal underworld that overlaps with Fleet Street and Westminster. After it appears that the government’s Witness Protection Programme has been broken, investigative journalist, Matthew Kent, is lured into making a dangerous error of judgment, when the ensuing spiral of violence and mystery threatens not only his life but also those of both his lovers.

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Peter Watson

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different.Fallout dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didn't share their knowledge wit...

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Peter Watson

A young Sicilian immigrant rises through the ranks of the Mafia in this "mesmerizing" novel that "gives Puzo a run for his money" ( Publishers Weekly).Sicily, 1879: After successfully smuggling a severed human ear past the police, Silvio Randazzo completes his dangerous first rite of passage—from peasant boy to Mafia soldier. The ear is a chilling ransom demand from Antonino Greco, Italy's most famous and feared Mafioso. But it's not until Randazzo commits...

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Peter Watson

**A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014From one of England’s most distinguished intellectual historians comes “an exhilarating ride…that will stand the test of time as a masterful account of” (The Boston Globe) one of the West’s most important intellectual movements: Atheism.**In 1882, Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is dead” and ever since tens of thousands of brilliant, courageous, thoughtful individuals have devoted their creative energies to devi...