Europe Books - Page 12

The Nicomachean Ethics (World's Classics)

Aristotle

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Translations differ 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

It would be helpful if Amazon didn't pool together reviews from different translations. Note to Amazon: the customer reviews can be very helpful and have motivated me to purchase many books. But reviews for widely translated books should be specific to the translation. Otherwise they become worthless.

For those who want a theory to excellence 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Aristotle's ethics is a theory of excellence so it definitely spoke to me as a individual. He starts with the claim that the end of all human action is happiness and he claims that happiness requires virtue. He goes on to look at several different types of virtues and he believes they can be perfected through practice. One is to practice at finding the golden mean between excess and deficiency. To use an example from Aristotle to illustrate, one is to act courageously, but it is rash to act with too much courage and it is cowardice to not act with enough courage. Therefore, he supports finding the mean in all human action and this is to lead to happiness. Books 8 and 9 give the best treatise on friendship that I have ever found so I recommend those two books above all of the rest. Overall the whole book is worth ones time though. Aristotle's ethics is a simple and a commonsensical approach to ethics so nobody should be put off from reading this book due to its difficulty.

Editorial Review:

This revised translation of Aristotle's classic treatise contains ten books based on the famous doctrine of the golden mean which advocates taking the middle course between excess and deficiency. Topics that Aristotle treats include the good for humanity, moral virtue, intellectual virtue, pleasure, friendship, and happiness.

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 279 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it."

After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson-bestsellingauthor of The Mother Tongue and Made in America-decided to returnto the United States. ("I had recently read," Bryson writes, "that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another,so it was clear that my people needed me.") But before departing, he set out ona grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.

Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, Notes from a Small Island is a delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation that has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey. The result is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile.

"Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it."

After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson-bestselling author of ,i>The Mother Tongue and Made in America-decided to return to the United States. ("I had recently read," Bryson writes, "that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.") But before departing, he set out on a grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.

Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, Notes from a Small Island is a delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation that has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey. The result is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile.

Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany

Stephen E. Ambrose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 273 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Citizen Soldier is another excellent read into history from the author. The one thing that I enjoy about this book is the authors focus on the soldiers on the ground and not necessarily the major commanders that one reads a lot about. Very educational. This book is packed with well documented information that is presented in a format foreign to many history authors and that is the ability to tell a story, keeping the the information fresh and informative.

Great book!

Editorial Review:

In this riveting account, historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war, from the high command down to the ordinary soldier, drawing on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.

Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles

Christian Duvernois

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

VERSAILLES THROUGH MARIE-ANTIONETTE 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Marie-Antoinette is something of an enigma, some feel she is the misunderstood tragic heroine of the Ancient Regime and some feel she is that Austria wh*re, who may or my not have said, let them eat cake, and spent France into Revolution, I feel she is probably all of this and more. One thing is for certain, she held herself and her family in honor as she took the guillotine, she died with grace befiting her stature, even if those around her threw things at her and called her unspeakable things. As for this book, it is very good, the images are well presented, some in black and white, others in color, and the text is informative without being too dry or scholarly. I appreciated the attention to such buildings as the glorious Belvedere and the gorgeous Pavillion, these two esquisite small buildings often get lost in the spendor that is Versailles, but they are actually two of the most beautiful stuctures on the Palace grounds. A few buildings such as the Petit Palais get sort of short shrift, but they have been covered extensively in other books and really are more thought of in the context of Louis XV and Pompadour. Overall, a good book that covers some new ground, fine images and interesting text make it a fitting homage to Antoinette and her small sanctuary at Versailles.

Editorial Review:

Marie-Antoinette has been idolized as the height of eighteenth-century French style and vilified as the spark that ignited the French Revolution. This book departs from such traditional interpretations of the infamous queen’s reign and chooses to reflect on the humanistic aspects of her private realm. To escape the formalities and royal obligations of Louis XVI’s court, Marie-Antoinette created a private realm of pleasure for herself at the Petit Trianon and Hameau, where she planted the first Anglo-Chinese garden; created a trysting grotto; a working farm; and revolutionized architecture and gardening trends for the century to come. Marie-Antoinette’s entire private domain and its story are told in beautiful photographic detail by François Halard for the first time since its recent restoration and accompanied by well-researched texts by garden expert Christian Duvernois.

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Margaret Macmillan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 132 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Usual Stuff 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There is a certain breed of American history writer who likes to fill the narrative with gossipy things like the protagonists favourite breakfast food and whether they have a mistress. Margaret McMillan is such a writer. One can see this as making a human connection filling out a dull historic narrative or simply padding.

Between the wars the discussion about the Paris peace treaty was whether it was to punitive and if it led to the rise of Nazism. Maynard Keynes in fact wrote a book on the topic. The book is an attempt to revisit that issue and to also talk about the changes which remade the map of Europe.

In 1917 the Russian Empire was overthrown and the Bolsheviks took power. The Austo-Hungarian Empire collapsed and Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland emerged as independent nations. The Ottoman Empire was occupied and the remaining imperial powers Britain and France carved up its territories.

The reality is of course that it was not Versailles that led to the Nazis taking over. The German conservatives rejected the move to a democratic state. It was only after the disaster of the second world war and the enormous loss of lives and territory that all Germans rejected war and moved to accepting that the future lay in developing as an industrial rather than a military power.

One debate that would be interesting but is not touched on in the book is how idiotic Wilson's ideas were. He believed breaking up states on the basis of the ethnic base of the people living there. Hungary for the Hungarians that sort of thing. This was meant to end conflict and lead to a peaceful world. As an ideology it is repellent. It led to the justification by Hitler to destroy Czechoslovakia and the rationalisation for countless acts of aggression and border disputes. Rather than this racial approach the modern approach to the formation of states is to create democratic institutions and the protection of individual rights so that diverse groups can live together and resolve conflict through the state institutions.

Still most writers see historical debates through the prism of previous debates so that issues such as this are seldom discussed. Not a bad historical overview of the period

Editorial Review:

National Bestseller

New York Times Editors’ Choice

Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize

Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations

Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

Alison Weir

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Isabella arrived in London in 1308, the spirited twelve-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of France. Her marriage to the heir to England’s throne was designed to heal old political wounds between the two countries, and in the years that followed, she would become an important figure, a determined and clever woman whose influence would come to last centuries. But Queen Isabella’s political machinations led generations of historians to malign her, earning her a reputation as a ruthless schemer and an odious nickname, “the She-Wolf of France.”

Now the acclaimed author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir, reexamines the life of Isabella of England, history’s other notorious and charismatic medieval queen. Praised for her fair looks, the newly wed Isabella was denied the attentions of Edward II, a weak, sexually ambiguous monarch with scant taste for his royal duties. As their marriage progressed, Isabella was neglected by her dissolute husband and slighted by his favored male courtiers. Humiliated and deprived of her income, her children, and her liberty, Isabella escaped to France, where she entered into a passionate affair with Edward II’s mortal enemy, Roger Mortimer. Together, Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of English soil since the Norman Conquest of 1066, deposing Edward and ruling in his stead as co-regents for Isabella’s young son, Edward III. Fate, however, was soon to catch up with Isabella and her lover.

Many mysteries and legends have been woven around Isabella’s story. She was long condemned as an accessory to Edward II’s brutal murder in 1327, but recent research has cast doubt on whether that murder even took place.

Isabella’s reputation, then, rests largely on the prejudices of monkish chroniclers and prudish Victorian scholars. Here Alison Weir gives a startling, groundbreaking new perspective on Isabella, in this first full biography in more than 150 years. In a work of extraordinary original research, Weir effectively strips away centuries of propaganda, legend, and romantic myth, and reveals a truly remarkable woman who had a profound influence upon the age in which she lived and the history of western Europe.

Engaging, vibrant, alive with breathtaking detail and unforgettable characters, Queen Isabella is biographical history at its finest.

Searching for Schindler: A memoir

Thomas Keneally

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This is the captivating story behind Schindler’s List, the Booker Prize–winning book and the Academy Award–winning Spielberg film. Keneally tells the tale of the unlikely encounter that propelled him to write about Oskar Schindler and of the impact of his extraordinary account on people around the world.
 
Thomas Keneally met Leopold “Poldek” Pfefferberg, the owner of a Beverly Hills luggage shop, in 1981. Poldek, a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor, had a tale he wanted the world to know. Charming, charismatic, and persistent, he convinced Keneally to relate the incredible story of “the all-drinking, all-screwing, all-black-marketeering Nazi, Oskar Schindler. But to me he was Jesus Christ.”
 
Searching for Schindler is the engrossing chronicle of Keneally’s pursuit of one of history’s most fascinating and paradoxical heroes. Traveling throughout the United States, Germany, Israel, Poland, and Austria, Keneally and Poldek interviewed people who had known Schindler and uncovered their indelible memories of the Holocaust. Keneally’s powerful narrative rose quickly to the top of bestseller lists. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent film adaptation went on to fulfill Poldek’s dream of winning “an Oscar for Oskar.” (Keneally’s anecdotes about Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and other cast members will delight film buffs.)
 
Written with candor and humor, Seaching for Schindler is an intimate look at Keneally’s growth as a writer and the enormous success of his portrait of Oskar Schindler.

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

Ross King

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Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ross King has a knack for explaining complicated processes in a manner that is not only lucid but downright intriguing. . . . Fascinating." (Los Angeles Times)

By all accounts, Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and clockmaker, was an unkempt, cantankerous, and suspicious man-even by the generous standards according to which artists were judged in fifteenth-century Florence. He also designed and erected a dome over the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore-a feat of architectural daring that we continue to marvel at today-thus securing himself a place among the most formidable geniuses of the Renaissance. At first denounced as a madman, Brunelleschi literally reinvented the field of architecture amid plagues, wars, and political feuds to raise seventy million pounds of metal, wood, and marble hundreds of feet in the air. Ross King's captivating narrative brings to life the personalities and intrigue surrounding the twenty-eight-year-long construction of the dome, opening a window onto Florentine life during one of history's most fascinating eras.

The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II

Gregory A. Freeman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Tense and Readable 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Gregory Freeman details this daring World War II rescue in the hills of German-ruled Yugoslavia. The rescuers were U.S. C-47 pilots and their fighter escorts, the rescued were downed U.S. airman hiding in the hills. Perhaps the real heroes were the Serbians, who risked their lives to help the airman, opening their homes and barns, and giving them what little food they had in the months leading up to the rescue. Also, imagine trying to clear a field for a makeshift airstrip under the noses of the Nazi occupiers. I enjoyed reading about the interactions between the Americans and their Serbian hosts, their attempts to communicate, and their joint efforts to enact rescue.

This book also details the struggle between the anti-communist Chetnik guerrillas led by Draza Mihailovich, and the communist partisans led by Josef Broz (Tito). The author doesn't hide his pro-Mihailovich sympathies, and outlines how Tito's Communists hoodwinked Allied intelligence. At least Mihailovich's daughter later saw her father's name more or less resurrected long after his 1946 show trial and execution by Tito's Communists.

This story should be of particular interest to adventure fans, persons with interest in the politics of southeast Europe, and people like me whose father flew in a B-24 during World War II. This isn't a masterpiece, but it's a readable, gripping, interesting story.

Editorial Review:

An astonishing, never-before-told story of the Second World War, based on newly declassified documents and exclusive interviews.

In 1944 the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia. Classified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time.

Sparkling Gems From The Greek: 365 Greek Word Studies For Every Day Of The Year To Sharpen Your Understanding Of God's Word

Rick Renner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 70 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Sparkling Gems 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I don't understand what you want here. I am enjoying this book because words I read in the Bible come from Greek language and it explains the meaning of them better.

Editorial Review:

Unlock a Cache of Enduring Riches In Sparkling Gems From the Greek, Rick Renner unlocks an amazing cache of rich, enduring treasures mined from deep within the Word to unveil a wealth of brilliant wisdom and sound counsel that will enrich and redefine your life. Sparkling Gems is arranged in a devotional format with more than 1,000 in-depth Greek word studies, crafted into 365 daily devotions that are sure to inspire and provoke you to plunge deeper into your own search for more hidden treasures from God s Word. Three exhaustive indices an English to Greek index, a Greek to English index, and a Scripture Index are also included, making Sparkling Gems a highly effective reference tool for your own personal study library. So let wisdom and enduring riches define your life as you delve into the depths of God s Word with Sparkling Gems From the Greek by Rick Renner. Order your copy today!