Other books that might interest you

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  Men of Action

  Howard Akler

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  After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate.
     
  'Like Harley J. Spiller’s Keep the Change, Howard Akler’s Men of Action similarly compresses a great deal – whole lives – into a very few pages … As might be expected, Men of Action delves into the father-son relationship, while also encompassing the father’s life, the parents’ marriage and the son’s youth in Toronto, where Mr. Akler still lives. But its more submerged subject is the act of writing itself, which is demonstrated with the carefully observed, resonant economy of poetry.'
     
  – The New York Times Holiday 2015 Gift Guide
     
  ‘What makes someone who they are? What details and actions explain their inner thoughts? What moments matter in the telling of a life? These are futile questions, but what matters is that Akler is asking them in a way we haven’t previously seen. Men of Action not only gracefully succeeds in depicting the nature of human tragedy, but the inherent failures of language to capture it. The book’s brevity is its strength – a genuine testament to the writer’s talent that he is able to take us so far with so little.'
     
  – Stacey May Fowles, The Globe and Mail
     
  ‘Men of Action is an insightful and heartbreaking exploration of consciousness, familial relationships, and the sense of self. As he and his family stand a restless vigil through his father's post-operative coma, Howard Akler explores and reorganizes the past, present, and future of his relationship with his father. Immensely relatable, this collection of essays delves fearlessly into loss, grief, and the understanding that often the moments in which we choose to be completely still are when we take the most important actions.’
     
  – 2016 Toronto Book Awards Jury Citation

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  History of Marathas EP15 - 1761...

  Vikrant Pande

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  The flat plains of Panipat had seen the battle in 1526 and 1555 where Babar defeated Ibrahim Lodi and Akbar defeated the Afghan army led by Hemchandra, aka Hemu, who was captured and beheaded by Behram Khan.
  Now two and half centuries later, two mega armies stood waiting for a battle.
  What kind of enemy's strength are we talking of? There are many records, one of them is written by Kasiraj, a sixty year old man, who was part of Bhau's huge army. He wrote his Kasiraj bakhar, nearly nineteen years after the war. He estimates Abdali's men to be around eighty thousand while the Marathas had seventy thousand. There are many historians who have given different figures but what we are looking is the fact that they two armies were well matched.

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  Roy Lichtenstein: A short...

  5 Minutes, 5 Minute Biographies,...

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  Roy Lichtenstein, American painter and pop art icon: Life and work in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best!

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  Roman Empire The: The History...

  Editors Charles River

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  Possibly the most important man of antiquity, and even all of history, was Julius Caesar. Alexander Hamilton, the famous American patriot, once remarked that “the greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar”. Such a tribute, coming from one of the Founding Fathers of the quintessential modern democracy in reference to a man who destroyed the Roman Republic, is testament to the enduring mark that Caesar left upon the world. The ultimate conqueror, statesman, dictator, visionary, and opportunist, during his time in power Caesar expanded the borders of Rome to almost twice their previous size, revolutionized the infrastructure of the Roman state, and destroyed the Roman Republic for good, leaving a line of emperors in its place. His legacy is so strong that his name has become, in many languages, synonymous with power: the Emperors of Austria and Germany bore the title Kaiser, and the Czars of Russia also owe the etymology of their title to Caesar. His name also crept further eastward out of Europe, even cropping up in Hindi and Urdu, where the term for “Emperor” is Kaisar. 
  Even in his time, Caesar was in many ways larger than life, and because of his legacy as virtual founder of the Roman Empire, much of what was written about – and by – him during his life and immediately after his assassination was politically motivated. His successor, Octavian Augustus, had a strong interest in ensuring that Caesar’s life be painted in a favorable light, while Caesar’s political enemies attempted to paint him as a corrupt, undemocratic dictator who was destroying the old order of the Republic.  
  As Roman leaders vied with each other for power and constantly fought civil wars, Rome’s famous roads fall into disrepair, the economy was crippled, the continent-wide trade system that had flourished in the previous years was replaced with a basic barter system, and there was a reduction in international trade.

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  New Jersey and the Medal of...

  Peter Zablocki

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  Awarded by the President of the United States in the name of Congress, the Medal of Honor commemorates those who have shaped our nation's history and continue to inspire its future with their acts of valor, humanity, patriotism, and sacrifice. New Jersey has been credited with ninety-three honors in the state's military history. Robert Augustus Sweeney was the recipient of two non-combatant medals when he jumped into stormy waters to save a fellow sailor twice becoming one of only nineteen double Medal of Honor recipients of all time and the only African American to do so. On the infamous day of December 7, 1941, Peter Tomich, serving on the USS Utah, sprung to action when it became evident his ship would capsize from the two Japanese torpedoes, staying behind to man the fireroom to ensure the boilers were secured to prevent an internal fire and saving countless additional deaths.Author Peter Zablocki reveals the harrowing stories of New Jersey's most valorous moments in the defense of our nation and freedom around the world.

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  Family Romance - John Singer...

  Jean Strouse

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  Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age. 
   
   
   
  In commissioning this grand series of paintings, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became Sargent's greatest private patron and close friend. The Wertheimers worked with Rothschilds and royals, plutocrats and dukes—as did Sargent. Asher left most of his Sargent portraits to the National Gallery in London, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise: it was a new thing for a family of Jews to appear alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats and dignitaries painted by earlier masters. 
   
   
   
  Strouse's account, set primarily in England around the turn of the twentieth century, takes in the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy and the dramatic rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. It travels back through hundreds of years to the Habsburg court in Vienna and forward to fascist Italy in the 1930s. Its depictions of Sargent, his sitters, their friendships and circles, and the portraits themselves light up a period that saw tumultuous social change and the birth of the modern art market.

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