"From one of the foremost experts on Ukraine and the former USSR, a concise, authoritative history of Ukraine. Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense battle with Russia to preserve its economic and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's existence as a sovereign nation. As award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order...

This **Oscar**-nominated animated short film tells the story of a young boy shuffling between the homes of his recently divorced parents. Surreal, dream-like moments mix with the domestic realities of a broken up family in this hand-animated film set in 1980’s Toronto. Nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 2019 **Academy Awards**. Winner of the Golden Gate Award in the Bay Area Short Film Category at the **San Francisco International Film...

Hour four shines a light on the powerful, cosmopolitan cities that dotted Africa at a time when Europe was in its Middle Ages. From 1000 to 1600, a golden age evolves in the expansion of commerce, wealth and prosperity across Africa, and, along with this, the building of new cities and the founding of new powerful states.

Alberto, a dull and indolent engineer, is fired from his company just as he plans to buy a house with his girlfriend and become parents. To cover it up, he decides to accept an assignment from his former boss to travel to the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa and gate to Europe. Alberto must renovate, underhand, the system of fences that not only separates one piece of land from another, a city from a country, but two universes in...

Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. As the chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze...

"In the humane tradition of Katherine Boos Behind the Beautiful Forevers comes a searing account of the international refugee crisis,"--Amazon.com.

"First published anonymously in 1912, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" is James Weldon?s Johnson fictional account of a young biracial man living in America during the second half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. The so-called "Ex-Colored" man makes his living as a jazz pianist playing ragtime music at a popular New York club. It is here that he catches the attention of a wealthy white gentleman who takes a curious interest...

"Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated. Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already...

"Centered in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, one of Europe's most concentrated regions for Neandertal and early modern human occupations, writer Beebe Bahrami follows and participates in the work of archaeologists who are doing some of the most comprehensive and global work to date on the research, exploration, and recovery of our ancient ancestors. In Café Neandertal, Bahrami follows this compelling riddle along a path populated with...

"With a borrowed rucksack and the lifeline of a pound sterling a week, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off in 1933 from Amsterdam to walk to Constantinople -- a trip that was to take him a year and a half. The first part of that walk was recounted in his remarkable work of travel and autobiography A Time of Gifts. Between the Woods and the Water continues the journey.... [He] planned to live like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar -- sleeping in...