Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...

Edens Lost and Found highlights what communities all across the country are doing to revive their ecosystems and, as a result, improve the quality of life of all its citizens. Award-winning filmmakers Harry Wiland and Dale Bell herald an exciting sea change in the reltionship between ordinary citzens, environmental groups, and local government. This PBS special series witnesses and records a new spirit of cooperation among neighbors, planners, architects...

1991. Glasnost. Perestroika. The Soviet Union opens its doors to the West. A troupe of young American actors from La Mama Theater in NY travels to Kyiv to participate in the first US/Ukrainian cultural exchange theater project in Soviet history. The play they are to perform is based on the life of Kurbas, a revolutionary Ukrainian theatre director, murdered in one of Stalin’s purges. As rehearsals progress, Gorbachev is kidnapped, a military coup...

"A lone German bomber crosses the East coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge's rail yards. The shell falls short of its mark, and lands in a maze-like neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the city's medieval centre. D I Eden Brooke is first on the scene and discovers the body of an elderly woman,...

Can a leader succeed in influencing the world? Or is he a human being like anyone else, only a grain of sand tossed to the waves of history with no ability to affect it? Tolstoy pondered this question in War and Peace. 78-year-old Ehud Barak is the controversial former prime minister, decorated and criticized commander on the battlefield, and one of the leading figures of the Zionist movement. He is also the initiator of Israel's assassination plan...

"A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett."--Amazon. Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett's answers have profoundly shaped...

"That the writings of John Milton continue to provoke study and analysis centuries after his lifetime speaks no doubt to his literary greatness but also to the many ways in which his art both engaged and transcended the political and theological tensions of his age. In Dominion Undeserved, Eric B. Song offers a brilliant reading of Milton's major writings, finding in them a fundamental impasse that explains their creative power. According to Song,...

Television series about a United States astronaut, Captain Anthony "Tony" Nelson, who finds his life vastly complicated when he stumbles on to a bottle containing a female genie, "Jeannie," who will do anything to conquer her master's heart and prove they're a match made in space.