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Fiasco and survival

In 1880, the French government ordered a surveying expedition for a railway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu, in French Sudan, to Paris. This trek should have heralded a new era of French prosperity. Instead, it was a deadly fiasco. Under-armed in hostile territory, and foolishly employing the enemy as guides, the one hundred men of the expedition were ambushed and stranded without camels or supplies in the deserts of southern Algeria. Many were killed outright, and for four months the survivors were menaced by the Tuareg, the "lords of the desert," robbed, starved, and tricked into eating poisoned fruit. To escape, the men hid in the wastelands of the Sahara with little hope of finding food or water. They were finally forced to eat their own dead, or, worse, the merely weak. Only a dozen malnourished men lived to tell their tale. The story of their 1,000 mile journey is one of the most astonishing narratives of survival ever recorded.

General history

Ever since the attacks of September 11th, Western leaders have described a world engaged in "a fight for civilization." But what do we mean by civilization? We believe in a Western tradition of openness and freedom that has produced a fulfilling existence for many millions of people and a culture of enormous depth and creative power. But the history of our civilization is also filled with unspeakable brutality-for every Leonardo there is a Mussolini, for every Beethoven symphony a concentration camp, for every Chrysler Building a My Lai massacre.

War and belief

Plumbing millennia of conflict between European civilizations and those of the Near East, historian Pagden outlines historical antecedents to present frictions between the secular West and the Muslim world. If the collisions between Greek and Persian, Roman and barbarian, Christian and pagan, Christian and Muslim, and imperialist and nationalist have something in common, according to Pagden, it is the rivalry of universalistic ideas about humanity and providence. Through each of these pairs of opposites, Pagden introduces intellectuals of the age who puzzled over their cultural adversary, often in response to a calamity, such as the Crusaders' capture of Jerusalem in 1099 or the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Their analyses, whose realism or logic Pagden critiques, for returning humanity to its providential destination, be it Christianity, Islam, or liberal democracy, slot into the author's chronological narrative of major exacerbations of West-East animosity, from the Trojan War to the Iraq War. Inquisitive and incisive about the sweep of history, Pagden will connect with readers wanting to deepen their grasp of contemporary news.

History of trade

Adam Smith wrote that man has an intrinsic “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” But how did trade evolve to the point where we don’t think twice about biting into an apple from the other side of the world? In this sweeping narrative history of world trade, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports readers from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the sixteenth; from the American trade battles of the early twentieth century to the modern era of televisions from Taiwan, lettuce from Mexico, and T-shirts from China. Lively, authoritative, and astonishing in scope, A Splendid Exchange is a riveting narrative that views trade and globalization not in political terms, but rather as an evolutionary process as old as war and religion--a historical constant--that will continue to foster the growth of intellectual capital, shrink the world, and propel the trajectory of the human species.

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Cultural history and biography

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Nixon

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