页数： 304 到书日期： 1900-1-1 上传日期： 2025-6-9

中文概要:

英文简介: The Mamluks were, at one distinct point in history, the greatest body of fighting men in the world and the quintessence of the mounted warrior. They were slave soldiers, imported as boys into the Islamic Empire from the pagan Steppes, but they became its savior, bringing defeat to the Mongols and forming the machine of jihad that ultimately destroyed the Crusader Kingdoms of Palestine and Syria. They entered the Islamic world as unlettered automatons and through a total application to the craft of the warrior they became more than soldiers. After a bloody seizure of power from their masters, the descendants of Saladin, they developed a martial code and an honor system based on barracks brotherhood, a sophisticated military society that harnessed the state’s energies for total war and produced a series of treatises on warfare that more than compare to SunZi’s Art of War in their complexity, beauty of language and comprehensive coverage of the bloody business of war. Their story embraces many of the great themes of medieval military endeavor. The Crusaders and the deadly contest between Islam and Christendom, the Mongols and their vision of World Dominion, Tamerlane the Scourge of God and the rise of the Ottoman Empire whose new slave soldiers, the Janissaries, would be the Mamluks’ final nemesis.

页数： 528 到书日期： 2025-4-3 上传日期： 2025-4-3

中文概要:

英文简介: Professor Vecce has brought sensitivity and respect to Caterina’s life in a story that gallops across the page on the energy of his immense historical research and results in a compelling novel that reads like a story from the Arabian Nights or the Travels of Marco Polo, all the while granting us detailed insight into the mother of one of the greatest minds of all time, Leonardo da Vinci.

Professor Vecce is a historian who has been researching Leonardo da Vinci for many years. When he recently found evidence in the archives that suggested Caterina to be Leonardo’s mother, Professor Vecce felt compelled to tell her story first in a novel because the findings are immense: Caterina was from Circassia, and was brought to Italy by way of the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, and Constantinople, to Venice, where women from Circassia were brought work on the production of brocade. She was a slave, a woman whose life, possessions, voice, and liberty were taken from her. The author saw so many parallels to our modern-day plight of slaves and international refugees that his desire to allow this woman to be known and to become immediately human in our eyes overcame even his instincts as a historian (nb, his scientific article was published on 30/10/23; his non-fiction title, The Life of Leonardo will be published by Giunti in April 2024.)

页数： 660 到书日期： 2025-4-3 上传日期： 2025-4-3

中文概要:

英文简介: Carlo Vecce’s definitive biography on Leonardo: the boy from Vinci, the universal man, the wanderer. The life of one of the greatest minds in history is told to us by the only Leonardo scholar who knows his true story.

For many years Professor Carlo Vecce has been researching and recording the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Recently he made a very important discovery regarding the identity of the mother of Leonardo, and in March of 2023 Giunti published his groundbreaking novel, Il sorriso di Caterina, la madre di Leonardo. Now the companion volume -the life of Leonardo told in a non-fiction, biographical format- is available and will be published in early 2024: The Life of Leonardo, Son of Caterina.

Complete with footnotes and bibliography, Professor Vecce’s biography of Leonardo is written in a warm and elegant style, intertwining history and detail, events and artistry, to paint once and for all a complete portrait of a man whom we know so well but whose life nonetheless held many great mysteries.

页数： 216 到书日期： 1900-1-1 上传日期： 2024-11-21

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页数： 262 到书日期： 2024-10-11 上传日期： 2024-10-11

中文概要:

英文简介: The many political lives of Pakistan’s most populous city, as seen through the eyes of scholars, writers and activists

Karachi is a city framed in the popular imagination by violence, be it criminality and gangsterism or political factionalism. That perception also dominates literary, cinematic and scholarly representations and discussions of this great metropolis.

By commenting in different ways on the trials and tribulations of Karachi and Pakistan, the contributors to this innovative book on the city build on past writings to say something new or different – to make their reader re-think how they understand the processes at work in this vast urban space.

They scrutinise Karachi’s diverse neighbourhoods to show how violence is manifested locally and citywide in protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, and how it affects the fractured lives of militants and journalists, among others. Oral history and memoir feature strongly, as do insights gleaned from anthropology and political science.

The contributors include academics, ethnographers, journalists, writers and activists: Nadeem F. Paracha, Laurent Gayer, Zia Ur Rehman, Nida Kirmani, Nichola Khan, Oskar Verkaaik, Arif Hasan, Razeshta Sethna, Asif Farrukhi, Kausar S. Khan, Farzana Shaikh, and Kamran Asdar Ali.

页数： 384 到书日期： 1900-1-1 上传日期： 2024-10-11

中文概要:

英文简介: Globalised manufacturing, multinational hegemony, street violence and urban securitisation come together in this eye-opening study of Karachi’s economic ‘order’.

On 11 September 2012, over 250 workers of Ali Enterprises, which produced jeans for the German discount retailer KiK, perished in a fire in their Karachi factory. Was this an accident or an arson attack? Straight away, the tragedy gave rise to contradictory interpretations. While some blamed the exploitative logics of fast fashion, others suspected foul play by the political parties preying on the city and its business class.

Taking as a starting point the controversy caused by this disaster, Gunpoint Capitalism plunges us into the murky waters of globalisation. Exploring the back alleys of Pakistan’s industrial capital city, it shows how the manufacturing economy makes order out of disorder, and profit out of conflict–to the detriment of workers. In Karachi, as elsewhere, petty criminals and ex-servicemen prove to be formidable enforcers of economic order. A comparison with Europe, the United States and Latin America confirms the central place of such henchmen in the dynamics of capitalism. These shock troops of anti-unionism are now participating in the dismantling of the social state.

This probing, sometimes shocking, book sheds new light on the power structures, organised violence and daily labour struggles underpinning the production of our consumer goods.

页数： 256 到书日期： 2024-10-11 上传日期： 2024-10-11

中文概要:

英文简介: With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta—‘protection’ money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicised. Karachi, often referred to as a ‘Pakistan in miniature,’ has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.

Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer’s book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence ‘manageable’ for its populations. Whether such ‘ordered disorder’ is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite—and sometimes through—violence.

页数： 374 到书日期： 2024-10-10 上传日期： 2024-10-10

中文概要: 近三千年来，科林斯的西西弗斯国王一直是世界神话中最引人入胜的角色之一。西西弗斯将肩膀顶住巨石，将其推向冥界山顶的经典形象在全世界广为人知。

对许多诗人和哲学家而言，从荷马和埃斯库罗斯到露西尔·克利夫顿和阿尔贝·加缪，叛逆的英雄一直是艰辛智慧和超越痛苦斗争的有力象征，而更具怀疑态度的评论者则将西西弗斯对众神的反抗解读为徒劳和注定失败的行为。

在这部神话诗意的小说中，菲尔·库西诺重新构想了西西弗斯，描绘他通过自己在忍受臭名昭著的惩罚时所写的笔记讲述自己的故事。这些笔记中包含了他为同胞科林斯人所做的自我牺牲、他对众神不公的大胆反抗，以及对妻子和儿子无限的爱，这些都为他赢得了第二次生命的机会。

英文简介: For nearly three thousand years, King Sisyphus of Corinth has been one of the most compelling characters in world mythology. The iconic image of Sisyphus putting his shoulder to the boulder and pushing it to the summit of a mountain in the Underworld is recognizable the world over.

To many poets and philosophers, from Homer and Aeschylus to Lucille Clifton and Albert Camus, the rebel hero has been a powerful symbol for hard-earned wisdom and the struggle to transcend suffering, while more skeptical commentators have interpreted Sisyphus’ defiance of the gods as futile and doomed.

In this mythopoetic novel, Phil Cousineau reimagines Sisyphus as telling his own tale through notebooks he kept while enduring his notorious punishment, which include surprising revelations about the self-sacrifice he made for his fellow Corinthians, his bold fight against the injustice of the gods, and the unbounded love for his wife and sons that earned him a second chance at life.

The Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus is a timeless allegory that helps us come to terms with our own daily struggles and shines new light on Camus’ existential conclusion that, "We must imagine Sisyphus as happy."

I am Sisyphus, King of Corinth, great-great-grandson of Prometheus, great-grandson of Deucalion and Pyrrha, grandson of Hellen and Orseis, son of Aeolus and Enarate, husband of Merope, father of Glaucus, Ornytion, Almus, and Thersander, and grandfather of Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera.

I am a champion of navigators, sailors, athletes, merchants, poets, and playwrights, and an enemy of tyrants, despots, bullies, ruffians, and demagogues. I honor the gods and goddesses by building splendid temples, holy shrines, and sacrificial altars worthy of their glory.

Many men deep am I, as my mentor, the deep-browed, long- bearded, wise-counseling Alexandros of Milos described me.

What I am not is a scoundrel, as scandalmongers have impugned across the centuries while exonerating the cruel gods who condemned me.

页数： 480 到书日期： 1900-1-1 上传日期： 2024-9-26

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页数： 128 到书日期： 2024-6-7 上传日期： 2024-6-7

中文概要:

英文简介: Life Beyond the Big Top is a photo book that captures the history of the Tai Thean Kew Circus, a once-great Chinese circus established in Singapore in 1929. Adele Wong’s ancestors founded the circus, and through her eyes we get a glimpse of an almost five-decade-long performing career

Life Beyond the Big Top is a photo book that captures the history of the Tai Thean Kew Circus, a once-great Chinese circus established in Singapore in 1929. The collection of old photographs and suriving props and costumes that makes up this visual documentation belongs to Sze Ling Fen and Wong Fu Qi, lead performers of the circus. Sze Ling Fen’s progenitors founded the circus, and through her eyes we get a glimpse of an almost five-decade-long performing career. Authored by their granddaughter, Adele Wong, be invited to visit her grandparents, listening and looking as the story about the humble beginnings of a pioneering, family-run Chinese circus unfolds.

Be transported to a front-row seat, viewing the dazzling circus acts and astounding animals at the peak of the circus success, before running offstage to join the circus folks in their nomadic lives and private adventures as they travel around the region. Discover the evolution of live performance shows after the end of the circus as these performers adapt their skills to changing demands. Finally, reminisce as we return to their present-day retirement and rummage through their collection of old performing items and costumes.