Alberto Miguel Fernandez

The author recounts his long association with Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where he was born, and describes the history, culture, and customs of the nomadic tribes of the region

This is the gripping story of a forgotten Russia in turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism. It tells the tale of how, in the last days of 1917, a fugitive Cossack captain brashly led seven cohorts into a mutinous garrison at Manchuli, a squalid bordertown on Russia's frontier with Manchuria. The garrison had gone Red, revolted against its officers, and become a dangerous, ill-disciplined mob. Nevertheless, Cossack Captain Grigori Semionov cleverly harangued the garrison into laying down its arms and boarding a train that carried it back into the Bolsheviks' tenuous territory. Through such bold action, Semionov and a handful of young Cossack brethren established themselves as the warlords of Eastern Siberia and Russia's Pacific maritime provinces during the next bloody year. Like inland pirates, they menaced the Trans-Siberian Railroad with fleets of armoured trains, Cossack cavalry, mercenaries and pressgang cannon fodder. They undermined Admiral Kolchak's White armies, ruthlessly liquidated all Reds, terrorized the population, sold out to the Japanese, and antagonized the American Expeditionary Force and Czech Legion in a frenzied orchestration of the Russian Empire's gotterdammerung. Historians have long recognized that Ataman Semionov and Company were a nasty lot. This book details precisely how nasty they were.

A comprehensive new history of the Eastern Roman Empire based on the science of the human past. As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome’s power but fear Rome’s ruin―will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome, Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity’s end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire’s densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular “barbarian” invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not. Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire’s transformation into Byzantium.

A beautiful unabridged version translated by W.H.G. Kingston with 67 original illustrations by N. C. Wyeth (16 in color in the SeaWolf Press Kindle version.) NOTE: As a reviewer has pointed out, our original description listed Stephen White as the translator entirely by mistake. This notation has been changed to the correct translator of W.H.G. Kingston. All other details remain the same. SeaWolf Press has just released a new version of this novel translated by Stephen White. Search for Mysterious Island Stephen White and you should find it.Use Amazon's Lookinside feature to compare this edition with others. You'll be impressed by the differences. Don't be fooled by other versions that have no illustrations or contain very small print. Reading our edition will make you feel that you are on the island with the stranded adventurers. Published in French as L'Île Mystérieuse in 1874, this novel is a sequel to Verne's earlier Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It contains three main sections: Dropped From the Clouds, Abandoned, and The Secret of the Island. It was influenced by other books such as Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. During the American Civil War, five Union prisoners of war decide to escape during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, by hijacking a balloon. The balloon lands on an uncharted island in the South Pacific and the men establish a new life on the island.

Written by one of the most important and controversial icons in British post-war fiction, this study represents the late author's last, and often humorous word, on the state of the English language as we close the twentieth century. 15,000 first printing.