Books similar to Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final …
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The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over …
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The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
What difference did printing make? Although the importance of the advent of printing for the Western world has long been recognized, it was Elizabeth Eisenstein in her monumental, two-volume work, The…
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Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. Bourdieu's subject is the study of culture, and his objective is most ambitious: to provide an …
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Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World
The ancient world of the Mediterranean and the Near East saw the birth and collapse of great civilizations. While several of these are well known, for all those that have been recorded, many have been…
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Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires
Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endange…
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The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny
The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality, and authority. Yet it remains an elusive, perplexing historical event. It…
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Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
4.30 avg. rating
· 10377 Ratings
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick reveals how the strain of militant Islam now raising its banner across Iraq and Syria spread from a remote Jordanian prison with the unwitting aid of Ameri…
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MP3: The Meaning of a Format
3.82 avg. rating
· 87 Ratings
MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place…
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Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of our Times
Charlie Wilson's War was a publishing sensation and a New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times bestseller. In the early 1980s, a Houston socialite turned the attention of maverick Texas …
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Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service
The Mossad is widely recognized today as the best intelligence service in the world. It is also the most enigmatic, shrouded in secrecy. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service unv…
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The Assassination of King Shaka: Zulu History's Dramatic Moment

In this riveting new book, John Laband, pre-eminent historian of the Zulu Kingdom, tackles some of the questions that swirl around the assassination in 1828 of King Shaka, the celebrated founder of th…

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Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa
4.41 avg. rating
· 1226 Ratings
The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the…
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Afgantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan, 1979-1989
In a timely and eye-opening book Rodric Braithwaite examines the Russian experience in that most recent war in Afghanistan (after Alexander's conquests and the many British imperial wars and skirmishe…
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The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Imagine you could get into a time machine and travel back to the 14th century. This text sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking the reader to the Middle Ages,…
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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on A…
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The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an …
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The First Wall (The Siege of Terra #3)
3.70 avg. rating
· 1001 Ratings
Siege of Terra Book 3

The outer defences have fallen, but the walls of the Imperial Palace stand. To break them, the Traitors need their most devastating weapons – and so the Lion’s Gate Spaceport must…
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Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment―its rise, fall, and enduring legacy

In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown sto…
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Legion (The Horus Heresy, #7)
4.12 avg. rating
· 8125 Ratings
A Great War is coming, and it will engulf the Imperium of Man. The Space Marines of the Alpha Legion, the last and most secretive of all the Astartes brotherhoods, arrive on a heathen world to support…
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Brothers of the Snake (Warhammer 40,000)
4.05 avg. rating
· 1792 Ratings
The war-torn far-future is laid bare as Brothers of the Snake follows the exploits of the Iron Snakes Space Marines as they battle against the enemies of mankind.

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Descent of Angels (The Horus Heresy, #6)
The next novel in the ground-breaking, bestselling series that tells the story of the Horus Heresy – the civil war that nearly tore the human Imperium apart, ten thousand years ago. This novel explore…
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Saturnine (The Siege of Terra #4)
4.58 avg. rating
· 1025 Ratings
Siege of Terra Book 4

As the traitors tighten their grip on Terra, Rogal Dorn must marshal the Imperial hosts to weather the storm. But not all of the defenders will survive the onslaught…

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The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
The late 19th century saw a surge of technological advancement, but probably nothing as important as Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Here, University of Tennessee history professor Freeberg, aut…
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Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries: A Dissertation

These mysteries once represented the spiritual life of Greece, and were considered for 2,000 years the appointed means for regeneration through an interior union with the Divine Essence. Details on th…

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A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry is the world’s most famous textile–an exquisite 230-foot-long embroidered panorama depicting the events surrounding the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is also one of history’s most my…
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Adam of the Road
3.78 avg. rating
· 8637 Ratings
"A road's a kind of holy thing," said Roger the Minstrel to his son, Adam. "That's why it's a good work to keep a road in repair, like giving alms to the poor or tending the sick. It's open to the sun…
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The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind
C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Many readers know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Other…
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The Whipping Boy
3.59 avg. rating
· 25087 Ratings

A shout comes echoing up the stairway. "Fetch the whipping boy!"

A young orphan named Jemmy rouses from his sleep. "Ain't I already been whipped twice today? Gaw! What's the prince done now?" It was f…

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Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth
Ever since the Greeks coined the language we commonly use for scientific description, mythology & science have developed separately. But what came before the Greeks? What if we could prove that all my…
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God's Lavish Grace
4.50 avg. rating
· 136 Ratings
This concise survey of the impact and outworking of God's grace in the life of the believer will revitalize the most threadbare faith.
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