What do you really know about Ancient Rome?Gladiators. Emperors. Conquest. You've heard the names — Caesar, Nero, Spartacus. But the history books only tell half the story. The real Rome was wilder, stranger, and more brutal than anything you've been taught.Did you know a Roman emperor declared war on the ocean — and won? That gladiators were the rockstars of their age, with fan clubs, sponsorship deals, and screaming crowds? That Rome's greatest military disaster was cause...

It came from the spit of a worm. It rewrote the map of the world.Five thousand years ago, in the hills of China, a woman dropped a cocoon into hot water and pulled out a single thread half a mile long. China would guard the secret of how she did it for the next three thousand years, and kill to keep it. When the thread finally escaped, it dragged armies, religions, and empires along the road it had built.Silk: Nine Stories of the Fiber That Made the World Small tells the sw...

Looking for a book that sends a positive message?Want your kids to learn about setting goals without being bored?This book tells the story of what happened before the tortoise and the hare's big race!Tommy the Tortoise always wanted to be fast like all of the other creatures in the forest.Wishing for it didn’t seem to be working.But then Tommy got the help of his Grandpa and some other forest friends.

You got dressed this morning without knowing you were putting on an empire.The jeans gone soft at the knee. The watch on your wrist. The waterproof coat by the door, the ring on your finger, the heels at the back of the closet. Every one of them began as a weapon, a conquest, or a crime — and then quietly moved into your wardrobe.The Empire Is the Tailor tells the true story of ten everyday garments and the wars, empires, and fortunes that cut them. This is history you can ...

Two titans. One room. A duel history tried to erase.Florence, 1504. The city commissions the two greatest artists alive to paint the facing walls of its grandest hall — at the same time, in full view of each other. Leonardo da Vinci: fifty-two, famous, untouchable. Michelangelo Buonarroti: twenty-nine, and hungry to dethrone him. They already despise each other. Now the Republic has handed them the perfect weapon — a wall, a rival, and an audience.What followed was the most...

Around six thousand years ago, communities between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers began building some of the world’s earliest cities. In Mesopotamia, systems of writing, law, government, trade, religion, and warfare developed in forms that would influence later civilizations.This book traces the rise and decline of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. It explores the growth of cities such as Uruk and Babylon, the development of cuneiform writing, the laws associat...

They were told the reactor could not explode. At 1:23 in the morning, it did just that.April 26, 1986. In a routine safety test pushed past every limit, the core of Reactor No. 4 tore itself apart and hurled a plume of radiation across a sleeping continent. The men in the control room did not believe their own instruments. The state would not admit what had happened. And as officials assured the public that all was well, an invisible poison drifted over villages, cities, and border...

This morning, before you were fully awake, you held a conquest in your hand. It was just the cup.The white porcelain of your mug was a secret Europe couldn't crack for a thousand years. The shine on your spoon came out of a silver mountain fed with human lives. The red of your table was a felled rainforest, the shell of your buttons was hauled up by divers who never came up right. None of it announced itself. Every object in the room had a mouth, and kept it shut.The Empire...

For three hundred years, Europe could not stop consuming the Egyptian dead. They ate them, painted with them, and sold them by the ton.In a London lecture theatre in the 1830s, a fashionable crowd in evening dress pressed in to watch a surgeon unwrap a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian body in front of them. Tickets were hard to get. It was entertainment. And it was only the most respectable use Europe had found for the mummies it had already been grinding into medicine, crushing in...

He had pardoned them all. On the Ides of March, they killed him anyway.On the morning of March 15, 44 BC, the most powerful man in the world walked into the Senate without a bodyguard. He had beaten every enemy Rome could throw at him, then spared their lives. Within minutes, a crowd of the men he had forgiven surrounded him with knives, and the Roman Republic began to die on the floor beside him.The Assassination of Julius Caesar: The Conspiracy That Killed a Dictator and ...

He was a prince who had everything. One night, he walked away from all of it.Twenty-five centuries ago, a young man slipped out of his palace, cut off his hair, and vanished into the dark to answer a single question: why do we suffer — and can it end? What he found would shape the inner lives of half a billion people, with no god, no holy book, and no promise of heaven.The Middle Way, Book Four of the Sages series, is the true life and clear-eyed philosophy of the Buddha — ...

Twenty-three centuries after his death, Aristotle’s ideas continue to influence how people think about ethics, reason, politics, science, and the meaning of a good life.Born into a medical family, Aristotle became a student of Plato and later taught Alexander the Great. His work examined subjects ranging from logic and biology to friendship, government, character, and human happiness. At the center of his philosophy was a practical question: what allows a person to live well and fl...