For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil...

"Step back in time to an ancient world of mythical beasts, bow down to gods and goddesses, and take a trip to the first Olympics in this illustrated guide. Become an eyewitness to the glory of ancient Greece in this picture-led reference guide that will take you on a visual tour of what classical Greece was like. Children will be mesmerized by striking photography, maps, paintings, and lots of artefacts to help understand what life was like at this...

An interpretation of the paradoxes of Italian life, past and present.

"From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee...

"The citizens of Plainfield, Texas have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of our former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn't happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker's brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection WHY VISIT AMERICA"--

Presents revisionist insights into the influences of classical cultures, revealing the lesser-known roles played by ancient civilizations on shaping the modern West, in an account that also cites the contributions of Greek and Roman figures.

"In 1948, Israel's founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a "national home for the Jewish people," where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering. Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis...