Approaching the early decades of the “Iron Curtain” with new questions and perspectives, this important book examines the political and cultural implications of the communists’ international initiatives. Building on recent scholarship and working from new archival sources, the seven contributors to this volume study various effects of international outreach—personal, technological, and cultural—on the population and politics of the Soviet bloc. Several authors analyze lesser-known complica...

The Library of Alexandria is an independent small business publishing house. We specialize in bringing back to live rare, historical and ancient Books. This includes manuscripts such as: classical fiction, philosophy, science, Religion, folklore, mythology, history, literature, politics and sacred texts, in addition to Secret and esoteric subjects, such as: occult, freemasonry, alchemy, hermetic, shamanism and ancient knowledge. Our Books are available in digital format. We have approximat...

This startling biography explores the remarkable life of an iconic figure of the twentieth century, Václav Havel, author and dissident, who became the first president of the Czech Republic.Vaclav Havel: iconoclast and philosopher king, an internationally successful playwright who became a political dissident and then, reluctantly, a president. His pivotal role in the Velvet Revolution and the modern Czech Republic makes him a key figure of the twen...

"With great erudition and profound engagement [this history] has made it possible for us to come closer to understanding Prague." ―Larry Wolff, The New York Times Book ReviewPrague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, German...

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his...

This is the history of a Lie—of a cruel and terrible Lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer, involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his identity under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian secret police department and of the unscrupulous “Black Hundreds” then utilized this fiction as the framework for the “protoc...

Srebrenica represents a dark and painful chapter in late twentieth-century European history. Here, a still unknown number of Bosnian Muslim citizens were tortured and killed in July 1995. About 8.500 deaths have so far been confirmed, but survivors say 10.701 people died as a result of the blind and racist violence of the Bosnian Serb army led by Ratko Mladic’ and mainly Serb paramilitary forces, as the Dutch UN Peacekeepers and, with them, the entire international community, stood by and ...

The Grooves of Change is the culmination of J. F. Brown’s esteemed career as an analyst of Eastern Europe. He traces events in this diverse and disruption-riddled region from the communist era to the years of transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. Brown also provides specific analyses of the development of liberal democratic culture in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe—Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, a...

This is a chronicle of one of the many ethnic groups in Canada, a group of about 80,000 people of Czech and Slovak origin who now live in this country. In the authors' own words, "the book is addressed both to Canadian-Canadians and to Czech-and-Slovak Canadians (if there is such a distinction)." The latter will learn from it who their fellow citizens of similar origin are, where they came from, what they brought to this country, and how they succeeded here. The book provides the "Canadian...

Written by the eminent German legal historian, Michael Stolleis, these two ‘Essays on Legal History’ offer an original and compelling history of the symbolism through which law is characterised as being 'above' us. In ‘The Eye of the Law’, the history of this metaphor is followed from antiquity through to the present day: from the Greek Eye of Justice, the eye of the impartial judge of the Underworld, the Eye of God watching past, present and future, the Eye of the Prince, guiding his subj...

What essential leadership lessons do we learn by distilling the actions and ideas of great military commanders such as George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Colin Powell? The Art of Command demonstrates that great leaders become great through a commitment not only to develop vital skills but also to surmount personal shortcomings.In the second edition of this classic resource, Harry S. Laver, Jeffrey J. Matthews, and the other contributing authors identify eleven co...