Imagining the Middle Ages is an unprecedented examination of the historical content of films depicting the medieval period from the 11th to the 15th centuries. Historians increasingly feel the need to weigh in on popular depictions of the past, since so much of the public's knowledge of history comes from popular mediums. Aberth dissects how each film interpreted the period, offering estimations of the historical accuracy of the works and demonstrating how they project their own c...

The Black Death of the late Middle Ages is often described as the greatest natural disaster in the history of humankind. More than fifty million people, half of Europe’s population, died during the first outbreak alone from 1347 to 1353. Plague then returned fifteen more times through to the end of the medieval period in 1500, posing the greatest challenge to physicians ever recorded in the history of the medical profession.This engrossing book provides the only comprehensive histo...

Plagues in World History provides a concise, comparative world history of catastrophic infectious diseases, including plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, and AIDS. Geographically, these diseases have spread across the entire globe; temporally, they stretch from the sixth century to the present. John Aberth considers not only the varied impact that disease has had upon human history but also the many ways in which people have been able to influence diseases simply through th...

**“Dan Jones is an entertainer, but also a bona fide historian. Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read.” – The Times, Book of the YearA New York Times bestseller, this major new history of the knights Templar is “a fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger" – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of JerusalemA faltering war in the midd...

Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers unveils the history you were never taught at school. With a breath-taking sweep spanning Rome to the modern day, popular historian and author Dominic Selwood challenges the traditional version of some of the best-known events of the past. From ancient Christianity to the voyages of Columbus, and from the medieval Crusades to ISIS and the modern Middle East, this book debunks dozens of historical myths.You will learn that:– Magna Carta was an inf...

A New York Times bestsellerThe definitive account of the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize**–winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett**"Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesAfter decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious diseas...

From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes.The most fatal virus known to science, rabies—a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans—kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain.In this critically accl...

The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.The Birt...

The story of a microbiologist’s remarkable career, from identifying ?the Ebola virus to pioneering AIDS research and policy.When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, “There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved.” Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into ...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book."[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times...

"I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Ther...

The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures."A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New YorkerFrom the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Pl...