Simon Prebble

James Allen's From Poverty to Power (1901) and As a Man Thinketh (1902) stand as seminal texts in the self-help genre that have served as sources of inspiration since their publication at the beginning of the twentieth century. Loosely based in its principles around the Biblical proverb "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," As a Man Thinketh asserts the powerful idea that belief is central to bringing about positive events in one's life. From...

On August 24, 1939, the world held its collective breath as Hitler and Stalin signed the now infamous nonaggression pact, signaling an imminent invasion of Poland and daring Western Europe to respond. In this dramatic account of the final days before the outbreak of World War II, award-winning historian Richard Overy vividly chronicles the unraveling of peace, hour by grim hour, as politicians and ordinary citizens brace themselves for a war that...

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century.After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. From 1939 to the war's end, scientists...

Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco is desperate to leave the notorious Lautumiae prison-though being bailed out by his mother is a slight indignity. Things go from bad to worse when a group of nouveau riche ex-slaves hire him to outwit a fortune-hunting redhead, whose husbands have a habit of dying accidentally, leaving him up against a female contortionist, her extra-friendly snake, indigestible cakes, and rent racketeers. All the while Falco tries...

"Gastner's capabilities are plausible for a septuagenarian, and Havill peoples the book with believable characters." -Publishers Weekly STARRED review What do you do when you inherit $330 million after taxes? If you're New Mexico rancher Miles Waddell, you build a dream. Waddell's dream is NightZone, an astronomy-based theme park complete with giant radio telescope, a bank of smaller scopes linked to a theater, five-star dining in a restaurant with...

The Sign Of Four is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 stories starring the fictional detective. The story is set in 1888. The SIGN OF THE FOUR has a complex plot involving service in East India Company, India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts ("the Four" of the title) and two corrupt prison guards. It presents the detective's...

Writer W. W. Jacobss haunting tale of how a mans cavalier wishes are tragically granted by an exotic but cursed talisman, wreaking havoc on what was previously a content family.

A young governess turns up at a country estate in Essex to care for Miles and Flora, two young orphans left in care of their absentee uncle. Soon after her tenure begins, the governess begins to see strangers walking the grounds, and interacting with the siblings in odd and disturbing ways. The governess begins to feel they are not wholly human-but rather are ghosts haunting Miles and Flora, and their influence upon the children has tragic consequences....

Dark offers chilling stories, both fiction and real life, about the things that scare us the most: murder, hauntings, visitations, insanity and our own vulnerability! Examined through the eyes of some of the world's most gifted writers— Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, W.W. Jacobs, Iain Banks, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Bowles, Will Self, Marjorie Bowen, A.M. Burrage, Blue Balliett —we feel the malice of serial murderers, the...