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Author: Adam Zamoyski
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-11-29
Total Pages: 658
ISBN-13: 0007368720
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Following on from his epic ‘1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow’, bestselling author Adam Zamoyski has written the dramatic story of the Congress of Vienna.
Author: Adam Zamoyski
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2008-06-24
Total Pages: 660
ISBN-13: 006077519X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Following Napoleon's defeat and exile in 1814, the future of the European continent hung in the balance. Eager to negotiate a lasting, workable peace, representatives of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—along with a host of lesser nations—gathered in Vienna for an eight-month-long political carnival, combining negotiations with balls, tournaments, picnics, artistic performances, and other sundry forms of entertainment for the thousands of assembled aristocrats. While the Congress of Vienna resulted in an unprecedented level of European stability, the price of peace would be shockingly high, with many crucial questions ultimately decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war. Internationally bestselling author Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace is a meticulously researched, masterfully told account of these extraordinary events and their profound historical consequences, featuring a cast of some of the most influential and powerful figures in history.
Author: Adam Zamoyski
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2007-07-03
Total Pages: 662
ISBN-13: 0060775181
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Traces the epic events following Napoleon's exile in 1814 and the subsequent Treaty of Paris, examining how the eight-month Viennese carnival brought thousands of aristocrats to the Austrian capital and established the Congress of Vienna.
Author: David King
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-03-11
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 0307407365
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“Reads like a novel. A fast-paced page-turner, it has everything: sex, wit, humor, and adventures. But it is an impressively researched and important story.” —David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer Vienna, 1814 is an evocative and brilliantly researched account of the most audacious and extravagant peace conference in modern European history. With the feared Napoleon Bonaparte presumably defeated and exiled to the small island of Elba, heads of some 216 states gathered in Vienna to begin piecing together the ruins of his toppled empire. Major questions loomed: What would be done with France? How were the newly liberated territories to be divided? What type of restitution would be offered to families of the deceased? But this unprecedented gathering of kings, dignitaries, and diplomatic leaders unfurled a seemingly endless stream of personal vendettas, long-simmering feuds, and romantic entanglements that threatened to undermine the crucial work at hand, even as their hard-fought policy decisions shaped the destiny of Europe and led to the longest sustained peace the continent would ever see. Beyond the diplomatic wrangling, however, the Congress of Vienna served as a backdrop for the most spectacular Vanity Fair of its time. Highlighted by such celebrated figures as the elegant but incredibly vain Prince Metternich of Austria, the unflappable and devious Prince Talleyrand of France, and the volatile Tsar Alexander of Russia, as well as appearances by Ludwig van Beethoven and Emilia Bigottini, the sheer star power of the Vienna congress outshone nearly everything else in the public eye. An early incarnation of the cult of celebrity, the congress devolved into a series of debauched parties that continually delayed the progress of peace, until word arrived that Napoleon had escaped, abruptly halting the revelry and shrouding the continent in panic once again. Vienna, 1814 beautifully illuminates the intricate social and political intrigue of this history-defining congress–a glorified party that seemingly valued frivolity over substance but nonetheless managed to drastically reconfigure Europe’s balance of power and usher in the modern age.
Author: Vladimir Megre
Publisher: Ringing Cedars Press LLC
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780980181289
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Over 10 million copies sold in 20 languages
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 2020-01-07
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1455543713
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A New York Times Notable BookAn ALA Notable Book "Original and illuminating." --The Washington Post What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued in paperback, Blood Rites takes readers on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place -- not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experiences of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception and rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that continues to transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.
Author: Adam Zamoyski
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-10-16
Total Pages: 638
ISBN-13: 1541644557
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The definitive biography of Napoleon -- hailed as "magnificent" by The Economist. "What a novel my life has been!" Napoleon once said of himself. Born into a poor family, the callow young man was, by twenty-six, an army general. Seduced by an older woman, his marriage transformed him into a galvanizing military commander. The Pope crowned him as Emperor of the French when he was only thirty-five. Within a few years, he became the effective master of Europe, his power unparalleled in modern history. His downfall was no less dramatic. The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Here, historian Adam Zamoyski cuts through the mythology and explains Napoleon against the background of the European Enlightenment, and what he was himself seeking to achieve. This most famous of men is also the most hidden of men, and Zamoyski dives deeper than any previous biographer to find him. Beautifully written, Napoleon brilliantly sets the man in his European context.
Author: Adam Zamoyski
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 658
ISBN-13: 0007203063
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"In the wake of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, the French emperor's imperious grip on Europe began to weaken, raising the question of how the continent was to be reconstructed after his defeat. While the Treaty of Paris that followed Napoleon's exile in 1814 put an end to a quarter century of revolution and war in Europe, it left the future of the continent hanging in the balance." "Eager to negotiate a workable and lasting peace, the major powers - Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia - along with a host of lesser nations, began a series of committee sessions in Vienna: an eight-month-long carnival that combined political negotiations with balls, dinners, artistic performances, hunts, tournaments, picnics, and other sundry forms of entertainment for the thousands of aristocrats who had gathered in the Austrian capital. Although the Congress of Vienna resulted in an unprecedented level of stability in Europe, the price of peace would be high. Many of the crucial questions were decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war. And the proceedings in Vienna itself were not as decorous as is usually represented." "Adam Zamoyski draws on a wide range of original sources, which include not only official documents, private letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, but also the reports of police spies and informers, to reveal the steamy atmosphere of greed and lust in which the new Europe was forged. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, and featuring a cast of some of the most influential and powerful figures in history, including Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Talleyrand, and the Duke of Wellington, Rites of Peace tells the story of these extraordinary events and their profound historical consequences."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Patrick R. Query
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-08
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1317062442
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →While most critical studies of interwar literary politics have focused on nationalism, Patrick Query makes a case that the idea of Europe intervenes in instances when the individual and the nation negotiate identity. He examines the ways interwar writers use three European ritual forms-verse drama, bullfighting, and Roman Catholic rite-to articulate ideas of European cultural identity. Within the growing discourse of globalization, Query argues, Europe presents a special, though often overlooked, case because it adds a mediating term between local and global. His book is divided into three sections: the first treats the verse dramas of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden; the second discusses the uses of the Spanish bullfight in works by D.H. Lawrence, Stephen Spender, Jack Lindsay, George Barker, Cecil Day Lewis, and others; and the third explores the cross-cultural impact of Catholic ritual in Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and David Jones. While all three ritual forms were frequently associated with the most conservative tendencies of the age, Query shows that each had a remarkable political flexibility in the hands of interwar writers concerned with the idea of Europe.
Author: Peter Sahlins
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ari ge department in the French Pyrenees, describing male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women's clothes, gathering in the forests at night to chase away state guards and charcoal-makers. This was the raucous War of the Demoiselles, a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827, which restricted peasants' rights to use state and private forests. Peter Sahlins unravels the fascinating story of this celebrated popular uprising, and in his telling captures the cultural, historical, and political currents that swept the countryside during France's July 1830 Revolution. Sahlins explains how and why the Ari ge peasants drew on the practices and rituals of folk culture, as well as on a revolutionary tradition, to defend their inherited rights to the forest. To explore these rights and their expression, he delves into the history of forest management, of peasant conflicts with the state, and of popular culture--particularly the disputed history of Carnival and of local rituals of justice. Sahlins also sheds new light on the French revolutionary tradition and the "Three Glorious Days" of July 1830. The drama and symbolism of the War of the Demoiselles have inspired nearly a dozen plays, novels, films, and even a comic book. Using the concepts of anthropology and cultural studies as transport, Sahlins moves from this rich event to the wider worlds of peasant society in France. Focusing on the years from 1829 to 1832 but drawing on sources since the sixteenth century, his book should captivate social, cultural, and political historians of both early modern and modern Europe.
