The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, in the city of Rome mansions were besieged, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for ‘public enemies.’ Among theastonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father’s estate. Despitean acute currency shortage, she raised money to help her fiancâe in exile. And when several years later, her husband, back in Rome, was declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest. The wife’s tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral. Though no name is given on the inscriptions, starting as early as the seventeenth century, scholars saw similarities between the contents of the inscription and the story, preserved in literary sources, of one Turia, the wife of Quintus Lucretius. Although the identification remains uncertain, and in spite of the other substantial gaps in the text of the speech, the ‘Funeral Speech for Turia’ (Laudatio Turiae), as it is still conventionally called, offers an extraordinary window into the life of a high-ranking woman at a critical moment of Roman history. In this book Josiah Osgood reconstructs the wife’s life morefully than it has been before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman women who also contributed to their families’ survival while working to end civil war. He shows too how Turia’s story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. Written with a general audience in mind, Turia : A Roman Woman’s Civil War will appeal to those interested in Roman history as well as war …|Books|https://wordery.com/jackets/334eae93/turia-josiah-osgood-9780199832354.jpg|9780199832354|Turia : Paperback : Oxford University Press Inc : 9780199832354 : 28 Aug 2014 : A reconstruction of the remarkable life of a woman who became a combatant in the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic, Turia shows how her life can shed light on Roman …|new|1|1|999|32.99|0|GBP|Josiah Osgood|Oxford University Press Inc|28 Aug 2014|Ancient history: to c 500 CE 9780199832446|The Fall of the Berlin Wall|24.99|https://wordery.com/the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-jeffrey-a-engel-9780199832446|The fall of the Berlin Wall sent shock waves around the world. It was, quite literally, a world-changing event. Now, more than two decades after the Wall’s collapse, this book brings together leading authorities who offer a fresh look at how leaders in four vital centers of world politics–the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China–viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. Jeffrey Engel contributes a chronological narrative of this tumultuous period, followed by substantive essays by Melvyn Leffler on the United States, Chen Jian on China, James Sheehan on Germany and Europe, and William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya on the Soviet Union. These historians reinterpret the meaning of 1989 in the context of global history in the late 20th and early 21st century and explore such questions as why communism failed in Europe, why China took a different route following the turmoil of Tiananmen Square, and why the peace of 1989 might well prove illusory.|Books|https://wordery.com/jackets/88ae0825/the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-jeffrey-a-engel-9780199832446.jpg|9780199832446|The Fall of the Berlin Wall : Paperback : Oxford University Press Inc : 9780199832446 : 26 Jan 2012 : The fall of the Berlin Wall sent shock waves around the world. It was, quite literally, a world-changing event. Now, more than two decades after the …|new|1|1|999|20.99|0|GBP|Jeffrey A. Engel|Oxford University Press Inc|26 Jan 2012|European history 9780199832484|Goddess of the Market|17.00|https://wordery.com/goddess-of-the-market-jennifer-burns-9780199832484|Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand’s private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand’s journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand’s work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. One of the Denver Post’s Great Reads of 2009 One of Bloomberg News’s Top Nonfiction Books of 2009 Excellent." –Time magazine “A terrific book–a serious consideration of Rand’s ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century.” –The American Thinker “A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats h …
