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Porcelain

Porcelain was invented in medieval China--but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony's revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain's ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain's uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of "white gold" from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany's cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home.

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Price: 29.99 EUR excl. shipping

City of Big Shoulders: Second Edition: A History of Chicago , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 816min

City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600's to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city - from the tycoons and the politicians, to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world.In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the 21st century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called "the wild-garlic place" burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city?A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. Spinney brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places - from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls - that make this incredible city one of the best places in the world.The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Doug McDonald. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/192195/bk_acx0_192195_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

A Tangled Mercy: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 884min

Told in alternating tales at once haunting and redemptive, A Tangled Mercy is a quintessentially American epic rooted in heartbreaking true events examining the harrowing depths of human brutality and betrayal, and our enduring hope for freedom and forgiveness. After the sudden death of her troubled mother, struggling Harvard grad student Kate Drayton walks out on her lecture - and her entire New England life. Haunted by unanswered questions and her own uncertain future, she flees to Charleston, South Carolina, the place where her parents met, convinced it holds the key to understanding her fractured family and saving her career in academics. Kate is determined to unearth groundbreaking information on a failed 1822 slave revolt - the subject of her mother's own research. Nearly two centuries earlier, Tom Russell, a gifted blacksmith and slave, grappled with a terrible choice: arm the uprising spearheaded by members of the fiercely independent African Methodist Episcopal Church or keep his own neck out of the noose and protect the woman he loves. Kate's attempts to discover what drove her mother's dangerous obsession with Charleston's tumultuous history are derailed by a horrific massacre in the very same landmark church. In the unimaginable aftermath, Kate discovers a family she never knew existed as the city unites with a powerful message of hope and forgiveness for the world. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: JD Jackson, Angela Dawe. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/brll/009511/bk_brll_009511_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

Cricket on the Beach: Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia, Book 1 , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 458min

Cricket on the Beach is book one of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia. Timeline 10/27/62 is set in a world in which the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong and the swinging '60s never happened. The thermonuclear madness might not have reached as far south as Australasia, but in the weeks and months after the Cuban Missiles War, many more people might have succumbed to the "On the Beach" syndrome had it not been for the distraction of a unique sporting odyssey. It happened that on the day the world went mad, the English cricket team was in Perth, Western Australia, on the opening leg of its campaign to win back The Ashes.Touring under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club - the MCC - and playing international, or test, matches as England, the tourists under the captaincy of that most quintessentially dashing of batsmen, Edward Ralph "Ted" Dexter, the eyes of the British and Australian sporting publics were not, on the day of World War III, fixed on an island in the Caribbean of which few knew anything, and most cared less, but upon the forthcoming titanic struggle down under. Cricket on the Beach is a cricket book; a history of the last MCC tour to Australia.The tour that began in one world and ended in another. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Duncan Galloway. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/212408/bk_acx0_212408_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 812min

In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's story has been told and re-told over generations to become a foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted into one of Hollywood's most legendary films, The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant story that has emerged departs dramatically from documented history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white civilization, underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of white women by "savages." What makes John Ford's film so powerful, and so important, Frankel argues, is that it both upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: John McLain. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/015902/bk_adbl_015902_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

Myths about Ayn Rand: Popular Errors and the Insights They Conceal , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 46min

Since the 2008 recession began, sales of Atlas Shrugged have surged and the novel (and author Ayn Rand) have landed at the center of American politics, including presidential campaigns. Thousands of articles have been written about Ayn Rand's ideas. A firestorm of criticism has followed. How is one to make sense of all the competing claims about Rand's ideas? What did Ayn Rand believe? Was she a prophetic visionary who sounded a warning bell about creeping socialism and the financial disaster that would follow in its wake? Did she define what is quintessentially American - individualism, self-authorship, achievement, and freedom? Or was she the lowest of the low, a fawning and vapid worshipper of wealthy persons and unbridled power? If someone asked you to explain Rand's basic ideas, could you? This illuminating book reveals the "clockwork" behind many critics' misunderstandings and distortions of her ideas and provides simple and straightforward explanations of prominent "myths" about Ayn Rand. Whether you decide to embrace Ayn Rand's ideas, reject them, or simply want to be able to participate in an informed way in conversations about Rand's ideas, this slim volume will help you understand her revolutionary philosophy and identify the myths circulating about her ideas. In these essays, four authors identify some prominent myths, show why they are false, and state the plain facts that the myths conceal. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Scott R. Smith. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/063651/bk_acx0_063651_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 494min

From one of our most acclaimed novelists, a David-and-Goliath biography for the digital age. One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked. The whole world changed. Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented the device, and because the developers of the far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas from him. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of the child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Kathe Mazur. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/002424/bk_rand_002424_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

The Metamorphosis , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 123min

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young traveling salesman who, transformed overnight into a giant, beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. Rather than being surprised at the transformation, the members of his family despise it as an impending burden upon themselves. A harrowing - though absurdly comic - meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of 20th-century fiction. As W. H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.” FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924), one of the major fiction writers of the twentieth century, was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. His unique body of writing, much of which is incomplete and was mainly published posthumously, is considered by some people to be among the most influential in Western literature, inspiring such writers as Albert Camus, Rex Warner, and Samuel Beckett. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Ralph Cosham. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/blak/004319/bk_blak_004319_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

Prosperity Far Distant: The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933-1934 , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 511min

Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1933, but unable to find work, Charles M. Wiltse joined his parents on the small farm they had recently purchased in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact. In wry and often affecting prose, Wiltse recorded a year in the life of this quintessentially American place during the Great Depression. He describes the family's daily routine, occasional light moments, and their ongoing frustrations, small and large - from a neighbor's hog that continually broke into the cornfields to the ongoing struggle with their finances. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had little to offer small farmers, and despite repeated requests, the family could not secure loans from local banks to help them through the hard economic times. Wiltse spoke the bitter truth when he told his diary, "We are not a lucky family." In this he represented millions of others caught in the maw of a national disaster. The diary is introduced and edited by Michael J. Birkner, Wiltse's former colleague at the Papers of Daniel Webster Project at Dartmouth College, and coeditor, with Wiltse, of the final volume of Webster's correspondence. The book is published by Ohio University Press. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Wayne Hughes. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/031929/bk_acx0_031929_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

Latin American Revolutionaries: The Life and Legacy of Hugo Chavez , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 97min

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. (Hugo Chávez, address to the United Nations, September 20, 2006) The above quote is quintessentially Chávez - controversial, shocking, and designed to cause a stir. He shared his words with the entire United Nations General Assembly at a time when the United States was embroiled in two failing war efforts and its banks were inching ever closer towards the economic crisis of 2008. Yet Chávez shared his beliefs fearlessly, confident enough with his presidency and his role on the world's stage to criticize the US president in a way that had never been done before at the UN. Understandably, Chávez is one of the most divisive and controversial political figures in Latin American history. He has been in power since 1999 and is South America's longest serving head of state. The leader of the movement towards 21st century socialism, Chávez has sought to bring socialist reform to Venezuela through what he calls the Bolivarian Revolution. His goal has been to shift power from the nation's traditional oligarchy to the neglected poor. Chávez's past is a complicated one, rife with military coups, troubled relationships, and political betrayal. During his presidency, he has written and implemented a new constitution, instituted democratic councils, and nationalized important industries. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Mark Norman. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/094769/bk_acx0_094769_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Shop: Audible
Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping

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