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A History of the Arms, Armor, and Individual Fighting Strategies of Medieval Europe's Most Feared Warriors A source of enduring fascination, the Vikings are the most famous raiders of medieval Europe. Despite the exciting and compelling descriptions in the Icelandic sagas and other contemporary accounts that have fueled this interest, we know comparatively little about Viking age arms and armor as compared to weapons from other historical periods. We know even less about how the weapons were used. While the sagas provide few specific combat details, the stories are invaluable. They were written by authors familiar with the use of weapons for an audience that, likewise, knew how to use them. ...
The Sagas of Icelanders are enduring stories from Viking-age Iceland filled with love and romance, battles and feuds, tragedy and comedy. Yet these tales are little read today, even by lovers of literature. The culture and history of the people depicted in the Sagas are often unfamiliar to the modern reader, though the audience for whom the tales were intended would have had an intimate understanding of the material. This text introduces the modern reader to the daily lives and material culture of the Vikings. Topics covered include religion, housing, social customs, the settlement of disputes, and the early history of Iceland. Issues of dispute among scholars, such as the nature of settlement and the division of land, are addressed in the text.
Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology. A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, enginee...
Are you a good listener? How well do you really know the people around you? A capacity for empathic understanding is hard-wired in our brains, but its full expression involves particular listening skills that are seldom learned through ordinary experience. Through clear explanation, specific examples, and practical exercises, Dr. Miller offers a step-by-step process for developing your skillfulness in empathic listening. With a solid basis in sixty years of scientific research, these communication skills are not limited to professionals, and can be learned and applied in your everyday life. Instead of assuming that you know the meaning of what you think you heard, empathic listening lets you...
Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, this i Very Short Introduction/i surveys the history of medicine from classical times to the present. Focussing on the key turning points in the history of Western medicine - such as the advent of hospitals and the rise of experimental medicine - but also offering reflections on alternative traditions such as Chinese medicine, Bill Bynum offers insights into medicine's past, while at the same time engaging with contemporary issues, discoveries, and controversies.
For the first time the exercises and teaching methods of world-renowned flutist William Bennett are featured in one workbook. After more than a decade of study with Bennett and many of his students, Roderick Seed has documented the tools that have made Bennett known for his ability to give the flute the depth, dignity, and grandeur of the voice or the stringed instrument. Topics range from how to overcome basic technical difficulties, such as pitch control, to the tools for phrasing, prosody, tone, and intonation needed for playing with different dynamics and ranges of expression. Advanced musicians will find useful exercises and techniques in this book that will deepen their knowledge and enjoyment of making music and help them in their quest to master the flute.
The Franciscans by Br. Bill Short, OFMThe Franciscans: Who are they? How did they start? How have they grown? What do they do? What do they believe? Where are they today? These are some of the questions this book will try to answer. And in answering those questions it will sketch a family portrait, that of the Franciscans, a picture of a family with its own memories, its own character, its own stories. Some of these stories are familiar to many; other stories, even some of the best, remain unknown. And one good reason for writing a book like this one is to tell those stories to a new audience who may find in them a reason to give thanks, or be surprised, or even smile.
A major release in the New York Times bestselling One Second After series, set in an alternate America rebuilding after an electromagnetic pulse, this is William R. Forstchen's The Final Day. It’s been more than two years since an EMP attack wiped out all electricity in the United States and plunged the country into darkness, starvation, and death. After fighting their fair share of battles in their North Carolina mountain town, John Matherson and the people in his community are beginning to restore the technologies and social order that existed prior to the EMP. Then the national government announces that it’s ceding large portions of the country to China and Mexico; that the Constituti...
"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural good...
From William Forstchen, the New York Times bestselling author of One Second After, comes Pillar to the Sky, a towering epic to rank with Douglas Preston's Blasphemy and Michael Crichton's Prey... Pandemic drought, skyrocketing oil prices, dwindling energy supplies and wars of water scarcity threaten the planet. Only four people can prevent global chaos. Gary Morgan—a brilliant, renegade scientist is pilloried by the scientific community for his belief in a space elevator: a pillar to the sky, which he believes will make space flight fast, simple and affordable. Eva Morgan—a brilliant and beautiful scientist of Ukranian descent, she has had a lifelong obsession to build a pillar to the sk...