Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Home I Worked to Make -...

  Wendy Pearlman

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  War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. 
   
   
   
  In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria's refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting "refugee crises" as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges listeners to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.

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  Carthage - Its Carnage Its...

  Kelly Mass

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  Carthage was an ancient city-state located in what is now modern-day Tunisia. Founded by Phoenician settlers in the ninth century BC, Carthage would rise to become one of the most influential and powerful empires of the ancient Mediterranean world, only to be destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. Despite its destruction, the Romans later lavishly rebuilt it, cementing its place in history. During its peak in the fourth century BC, Carthage was the capital of the Carthaginian Empire, a force that dominated the western Mediterranean with unmatched power and influence. 
  The origins of Carthage can be traced back to around 814 BC, when settlers from Tyre, a prosperous Phoenician city-state in modern Lebanon, arrived on the northern coast of Africa. Following the fall of Phoenicia to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BC, Carthage emerged as an independent entity. Over time, it expanded its influence, securing political and economic control over vast territories across the western Mediterranean. By 300 BC, Carthage controlled a sprawling empire that included the coastal regions of northwest Africa, southern Iberia (modern-day Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar), and a series of key islands such as Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and the Balearic Islands. This expansion was achieved through a complex network of colonies, vassal states, and satellite territories. 
  Carthage’s strategic location played a significant role in its success. Its access to fertile agricultural lands and critical maritime trade routes allowed the city to thrive economically and become one of the wealthiest and most powerful centers of commerce in the ancient world. Carthage’s trade network extended across the Mediterranean and beyond, reaching as far as West Asia, West Africa, and northern Europe.

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  France and England’s Most Famous...

  Editors Charles River

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  When people think of the British Royal family, and more specifically where they live, the first image that often pops into mind is that of stately Buckingham Palace, with its changing of the guard and the occasional royal coach leaving or entering. Others may think of the royal country estate of Windsor Castle, a favorite of both Britain’s longest-reigning and second longest-reigning monarchs. And there was a time when both royal residences played second fiddle to a much better known home, the elegant Kensington Palace. Buckingham Palace is not different, for though it was originally built as a home of a private citizen, once a king bought it, its future was sealed.  
  	For the French, and those who study their history, Versailles is a symbol of, as Charles Dickens once put it, “the best of times…the worst of times.” It was here that the Sun King, Louis XIV, built a palace worthy of a great nation during a time when peace was, at best, short-lived. It was at Versailles that Russian Tsar Peter the Great studied the palace’s architecture and gardens so that he could recreate them in his home country. Indeed, the greatest minds and artistic geniuses of the later stages of the Renaissance came to Versailles to build and paint, and it was here that Madame de Pompadour and her successor, Madame du Barry, used their wit and beauty to charm a king into doing their bidding. However, as history constantly demonstrates, nothing good lasts forever, and so it was with Versailles.  
  	France, like all European countries, has had its fair share of palaces over time, but none suffered the rise and fall of fortune like the Tuileries. Built by a widow with a flair for architecture, it grew for more than a decade, along with the royal family that it housed. Then, during the French Revolution, it fell from grace with that family and even became a sight of execution, its famous gardens providing the background for the infamous guillotine. 

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  Deborah and the War of the Tanks...

  John A. Taylor

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  Deborah is a British First World War tank that rose from the grave after taking part in one of the most momentous battles in history. In November 1917, she played a leading role in the first successful massed tank attack at Cambrai. Eighty years later, in a remarkable feat of archaeology, the tank's buried remains were rediscovered and excavated, and are now preserved as a memorial to the battle and to the men who fought in it. John Taylor's book tells the tale of the tank and her crew and tracks down their descendants to uncover a human story every bit as compelling as the military one.

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  Spirit Voices - The Mysteries...

  David J. Shi

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  Provides a clear and accessible guide to the many different North Asian shamanic traditions, past and present.What is shamanism? Where is it from? How does one become a shaman? What are the requirements to become one? Anthropologists tell us that the word shaman derives from the Tungus language and traditions, but few people understand the full scope of what that means. In his groundbreaking book, Spirit Voices, David Shi answers all these questions and more.Drawing upon his own ancestral traditions, Shi explores the history and practice of shamanism. He guides readers through what may be the unfamiliar landscapes of North Asia—the place where shamanism was born—as well as the largely hidden and unfamiliar traditions of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungus shamanism, exploring the subtle and unique aspects of each tradition. Shi provides a clear and accessible guide that explores the many different North Asian shamanic traditions.So, what exactly is shamanism? David Shi suggests that the most accurate definition derives from shamanologist Nicholas Breeze Wood, who writes, “A shaman is someone chosen by the spirits [typically at or before birth] and who can go into a controlled and repeatable deliberate trance state, during which they A) experience ‘spirit flight,’ where they go to the spirit worlds and meet spirits, who they either fight with, negotiate with, or trick, in order to create change in this physical world, or B) are often taken over/possessed by the spirits (normally ancestral shaman spirits, or local land spirits) while in this physical world—the spirits using the shaman’s voice and body to heal, or give advice to members of the shaman’s community. Without the spirits and their blessing, a shaman cannot exist or function. Without the trance state, it is not shamanism.”Featuring history, firsthand experiential reports, mythology, and folklore, Spirit Voices explores the spirits, spirituality, tools, and practices of true shamanism, past and present. Shi also provides practical information for those readers seeking to implement shamanic practices, including those that are appropriate to noninitiates and outsiders to the culture. As the author points out, “the purpose of shamanism can be summed up in two words: coexistence and balance—coexistence with our spirits and our communities, and the balance that must be preserved between all of us and within ourselves.”

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  Across the Board - How Games...

  Tim Clare

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  Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they're everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers. They fill the activity pages of children's magazines and the halls of senior centers. They appear as smartphone apps and in luxury editions and as game boards scratched into the dirt. 
   
   
   
  And they're extraordinary for precisely the same reason: they're everywhere, in every civilization, everywhere in the world across all recorded human history. 
   
   
   
  In Across the Board, tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare takes us through that history and across those civilizations. We learn how the same games emerge over and over and how they've evolved and spread, as well as about the contemporary culture of gaming: with rousing enthusiasm, Tim explores games as familiar to us as Monopoly or chess, as niche as Magic: The Gathering, and as unexpected as the Japanese poetry-matching card game karuta. We learn about games as recreation and as ritual, and above all, we see how they can be a way for us to come together—because of all the things that make us human, there's nothing quite so set up for connection as sharing a round of cards or the roll of a d20.

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