Historical heroes

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Albert Marrin

Traces the life of the revolutionary who led the struggle to make China a Communist nation in 1949 and unleashed the horror of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960's.

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Lesley and Roy Adkins

The Roman Empire died out nearly 1500 years ago, but unlike other civilizations in the world which are long forgotten and have passed into obscurity, a legacy of the Romans is still with us today. Their language, law, literature, customs, technology, and architectural styles have passed into our own everyday lives. As well as the "invisible" legacy, the Romans left us many buildings and monuments, some ephemeral ruins, others whole cities, which still survive right across the Empire, from Scotland to Syria. We can still wonder at Roman feats of engineering, art, and architecture, from the soaring aqueducts to the exquisitely worked jewelry. This book looks at many fascinating aspects of everyday life for the Romans two centuries ago, in towns, the countryside, and the army -- the clothes people wore, their jewelry, food, religious beliefs, the entertainment they enjoyed, and how they traveled across their vast Empire, to expand and control it. The text is beautifully illustrated with a wealth of evocative and informative pictures, which bring the exciting past alive and put it into its context. - Jacket flap.

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Patricia Sullivan

"Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, D.C., she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. In her struggle to understand the South and battle isolation, she wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp, and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black, and C. Vann Woodward." "Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a window onto a society in turmoil, chronicling the events that transformed the South and the nation. Her writing adds a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history."--Jacket.

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Rae Yang

Earlier this century the Chinese writer Lu Xun said that some of our ancestors must have bravely attempted to eat crabs so that we would learn they were edible. Trials with spiders were not so enjoyable. Our ancestors suffered their bitter taste and spared us their poison. Rae Yang, a daughter of privilege, became a spider eater at age fifteen, when she enthusiastically joined the Red Guards in Beijing. By seventeen, she volunteered to work on a pig farm and thus began to live at the bottom of Chinese society. With stunning honesty and a lively, sly humor, the complex and likable Yang incorporates the legends, folklore, and local customs of China to evoke the political and moral crises that the revolution brought upon her over three decades, from 1950 to 1980. Unique to memoirists of this genre, Yang expresses often-overlooked psychological nuances and, with admirable candor, charts her own path as both victim and victimizer. Through this gifted author's compelling meditation, readers will, with Yang, grapple with the human scale of national conflicts - and the painful lessons learned by spider eaters.