A Confederacy of Dumptys: Portraits of American Scoundrels in Verse (Dumpty, 3) by John Lithgow
Regular price $22.95Celtic Tales by Kate Forrester
Regular price $22.95This book is currently available at The Islander bookshop in Kodiak Alaska. Stop into the shop or purchase online. Pick up, delivery and mailing services are available. Thank you for supporting indie bookstores.
It's an absorbing introduction to the lore of Albion, but readers will also enjoy teasing out similarities between these tales and more familiar ones." — Publishers Weekly
Perilous quests, true love, and animals that talk: The traditional stories of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales transport us to the fantastical world of Celtic folklore.
• This Celtic mythology book features 16 stores that were translated and transcribed by folklorists in the late 19th and 20th centuries that focus on themes such as Tricksters, The Sea, Quests, and Romance and mythological creatures.
• These timeless tales brim with wit and magic, and each one is brought to life with elegant silhouette art in this special illustrated edition
• Celtic Tales is an extraordinary collection that conjures forgotten realms and rare magical creatures in vivid prose
Discover the impactful and stunning illustrations by Kate Forrester in this special edition that is sure to impress any true fan of cultural and mythological literature.
Discover delightfully entertaining tales such as Master and Man, The Soul Cages, The Red-Etin, and The Witch of Lok Island.
Celtic Tales makes an impressive gift for any fan of greek mythology, roman mythology, Chinese mythology, and folklore and cultural studies from around the globe.
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse
Regular price $15.00Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun by Charles Hudson
Regular price $33.95Between 1539 and 1542 Hernando de Soto led a small army on a desperate journey of exploration of almost four thousand miles across the U. S. Southeast. Until the 1998 publication of Charles M. Hudson’s foundational Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, De Soto’s path had been one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. With this book, anthropologist Charles Hudson offers a solution to the question, “Where did de Soto go?” Using a new route reconstruction, for the first time the story of the de Soto expedition can be laid on a map, and in many instances it can be tied to specific archaeological sites.
Arguably the most important event in the history of the Southeast in the sixteenth century, De Soto’s journey cut a bloody and indelible swath across both the landscape and native cultures in a quest for gold and personal glory. The desperate Spanish army followed the sunset from Florida to Texas before abandoning its mission. De Soto’s one triumph was that he was the first European to explore the vast region that would be the American South, but he died on the banks of the Mississippi River a broken man in 1542.
With a new foreword by Robbie Ethridge reflecting on the continuing influence of this now classic text, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Knights is a clearly written narrative that unfolds against the exotic backdrop of a now extinct social and geographic landscape. Hudson masterfully chronicles both De Soto’s expedition and the native societies he visited. A blending of archaeology, history, and historical geography, this is a monumental study of the sixteenth-century Southeast.
Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience Hardcover by Shaun Usher
Regular price $40.00Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky
Regular price $16.95From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.
24 illustrationsPoland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II by Roger Moorhouse
Regular price $32.00Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2: The Pillars of Civilization (Sapiens: A Graphic History, 2) by Yuval Noah Harari
Regular price $25.99NATIONAL BESTSELLER
This second volume of Sapiens: A Graphic History, the full-color graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari’s #1 New York Times bestseller, focuses on the Agricultural Revolution—when humans fell into a trap we’ve yet to escape: working harder and harder with diminishing returns.
What if humanity’s major woes—war, plague, famine and inequality—originated 12,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens converted from nomads to settlers, in pursuit of the fantasy of productivity and efficiency? What if by seeking to control plants and animals, humans ended up being controlled by kings, priests, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy? Volume 2 of Sapiens: A Graphic History–The Pillars of Civilization explores a crucial chapter in human development: the Agricultural Revolution. This is the story of how wheat took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, plague, famine, and inequality became an intractable feature of the human condition.
But it’s not all doom and gloom with this book’s cast of entertaining characters and colorful humorous scenes. Yuval, Zoe, Prof. Saraswati, Cindy and Bill (now farmers), Detective Lopez, and Dr. Fiction, all introduced in Volume 1, once again travel the length and breadth of human history, this time investigating the impact the Agricultural Revolution has had on our species. The cunning Mephisto shows them how to ensnare humans, King Hammurabi lays down the law, and Confucius explains harmonious society. The origins of modern farming are introduced through Elizabethan tragedy; the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News; the story of urbanization is portrayed as a travel brochure, offering discount journeys to ancient Babylon and China; and the history of inequality unfolds in a superhero detective story; with guest appearances by historical and cultural personalities throughout such as Thomas Jefferson, Scarlett O'Hara, Margaret Thatcher, and John Lennon.
Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 is a radical, witty and colorful retelling of the story of humankind for adults and young adults, and can be read on its own or in sequence with Volume I.
Son of Charlemagne by Barbara Willard
Regular price $5.99The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson
Regular price $20.99The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge
Regular price $24.00The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
Regular price $35.00A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own.
This is the first volume in a bold series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history.
Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage of years and cultural interconnection. This old-fashioned narrative history employs the methods of “history from beneath”―literature, epic traditions, private letters and accounts―to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled. The result is an engrossing tapestry of human behavior from which we may draw conclusions about the direction of world events and the causes behind them.
13 illustrations, 80 mapsThe Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (Hardcover) by Brian C. Muraresku
Regular price $32.50The Port Chicago 50 by Steve Sheinkin
Regular price $14.99The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Regular price $35.00The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic by Jillian Peterson
Regular price $28.00There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World by Carlo Rovelli
Regular price $26.00