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Author: Charles Lloyd
Publisher:
Published: 2020-07
Total Pages: 394
ISBN-13: 9781590216941
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEros between men fascinates the Spartan king, whose own lover put him on the throne. But the king finds himself tempted by the youths around the throne, from a striking Persian boy to a protégé who wages war nude versus awe-struck Thebans. Perhaps the walls of Sparta are not as high as the ones surrounding the king's heart.
Author: David Frye
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-08-27
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1501172719
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.
Author: Plutarch
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2005-05-26
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0141925507
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPlutarch's vivid and engaging portraits of the Spartans and their customs are a major source of our knowledge about the rise and fall of this remarkable Greek city-state between the sixth and third centuries BC. Through his Lives of Sparta's leaders and his recording of memorable Spartan Sayings he depicts a people who lived frugally and mastered their emotions in all aspects of life, who also disposed of unhealthy babies in a deep chasm, introduced a gruelling regime of military training for boys, and treated their serfs brutally. Rich in anecdote and detail, Plutarch's writing brings to life the personalities and achievements of Sparta with unparalleled flair and humanity.
Author: Steven Pressfield
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2007-01-30
Total Pages: 402
ISBN-13: 0553904051
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .
Author: David A. Blome
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-04-15
Total Pages: 112
ISBN-13: 1501747614
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGreek Warfare beyond the Polis assesses the nature and broader significance of warfare in the mountains of classical Greece. Based on detailed reconstructions of four unconventional military encounters, David A. Blome argues that the upland Greeks of the classical mainland developed defensive strategies to guard against external aggression. These strategies enabled wide-scale, sophisticated actions in response to invasions, but they did not require the direction of a central, federal government. Blome brings these strategies to the forefront by driving ancient Greek military history and ancient Greek scholarship "beyond the polis" into dialogue with each other. As he contends, beyond-the-polis scholarship has done much to expand and refine our understanding of the ancient Greek world, but it has overemphasized the importance of political institutions in emergent federal states and has yet to treat warfare involving upland Greeks systematically or in depth. In contrast, Greek Warfare beyond the Polis scrutinizes the sociopolitical roots of warfare from beyond the polis, which are often neglected in military histories of the Greek city-state. By focusing on the significance of warfare vis-à-vis the sociopolitical development of upland polities, Blome shows that although the more powerful states of the classical Greek world were dismissive or ignorant of the military capabilities of upland Greeks, the reverse was not the case. The Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Arcadians in circa 490–362 BCE were well aware of the arrogant attitudes of their aggressive neighbors, and as highly efficient political entities, they exploited these attitudes to great effect.
Author: Dawn Davies
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2018-01-30
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 1250133718
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Davies' collection of essays soars.... It's a memoir that locates the profound within the ordinary.” —Entertainment Weekly If you’re looking for a typical parenting book, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is a book about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift twenty-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth). Alone in a new city, she summons her inner strength as she holds the hand of a dying stranger. Davies is a woman who finds humor in difficult pregnancies and post-partum depression (after reading “Pie” you might never eat Thanksgiving dessert the same way). She is a divorcee who unexpectedly finds second love. She is a happily married suburban wife who nevertheless makes a mental list of all the men she would have slept with. And she is a parent who finds herself tested in ways she could never imagine. In stories that cut to the quick, Davies explores passion, loss, illness, pain, and joy, told from her singular, gimlet-eyed, hilarious perspective. Mothers of Sparta is not a blow-by-blow of Davies’ life but rather an examination of the exquisite and often painful moments of a life, the moments we look back on and say, That one, that one mattered. Straddling the fence between humor and, well...not humor, Davies has written a book about what it’s like to try to carve a place for oneself in the world, no matter how unyielding the rock can be.
Author: Paul Anthony Rahe
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-08-04
Total Pages: 405
ISBN-13: 0300255756
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a continuation of his multivolume series on ancient Sparta, Paul Rahe narrates the second stage in the six-decades-long, epic struggle between Sparta and Athens that first erupted some seventeen years after their joint victory in the Persian Wars. Rahe explores how and why open warfare between these two erstwhile allies broke out a second time, after they had negotiated an extended truce. He traces the course of the war that then took place, he examines and assesses the strategy each community pursued and the tactics adopted, and he explains how and why mutual exhaustion forced on these two powers yet another truce doomed to fail. At stake for each of the two peoples caught up in this enduring strategic rivalry, as Rahe shows, was nothing less than the survival of its political regime and of the peculiar way of life to which that regime gave rise.
Author: Paul Cartledge
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2003-05-26
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTraces the history of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, describes its distinctive military society and the unusual freedom of Spartan women, and discusses the influence which its culture has had on later civilizations.
Author: Victor Davis Hanson
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2006-09-12
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13: 0812969707
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other. Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present. Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato. Hanson’s perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America’s own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century’s “red state—blue state” schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present. Brilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other is like no other history of this important war.
Author: Iain Thompson
Publisher:
Published: 2021-02-21
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK6th century BC, Greece has suffered generations of corruption, slavery and war. One city has adapted to this way of life, the city without walls, Sparta. King of Sparta, Anaxandridas II of the Agiad dynasty has suffered long term health. He silently struggles to battle the imminent threat of an Athenian invasion, despite a truce. The King is fully aware there is no room for error or weakness. However, he is unaware that the real threat is closer to home, in the house of Agiad. His children, Dorieus, Cleomenes and twins Leonidas and Cleombrotus all have their own ambitions and hidden agendas. When relationships and loyalties become strained, their spartan values of unity and brotherhood are tested. With royal bloodlines questioned, the reputation of Sparta is in tatters. To regain control, corruption, deceit and murder soon sweep through the dynasty. With the dynasty fractured, who can be trusted in the house of Agiad and who will be chosen to put Sparta back on top? This is a medium length novel. Specifically aimed at young adults +, it contains strong language and adult reference.
