Knowledge = Power

This classic  biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a  hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age  forty-two to become the youngest President in history. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New  Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw  open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook  8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House,  you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home  to wring the personality out of your clothes.” The rest of this  book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the  years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail,  asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he  simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and  became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New  York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North  Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester  rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he  became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant  civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police  commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he  almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After  leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan  Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the  governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he  fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator  Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months  later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had  always craved. His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so  surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated  it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of  TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief  executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man  of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one  in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”

In a sparkling, fast-paced narrative, esteemed historian John Julius  Norwich chronicles the turbulent events of fourteenth- and  fifteenth-century England that inspired Shakespeare's history plays. It  was a time of uncertainty and incessant warfare, a time during which the  crown was constantly contested, alliances were made and broken, and  peasants and townsmen alike arose in revolt. This was the raw material  of Shakespeare's dramas, and Norwich holds up his work to the light of  history to ask: Who was the real Falstaff? How accurate a historian was  the playwright? Shakespeare's Kings is a marvelous study of the Bard's method of spinning history into art, and a captivating portrait of the Middle Ages.

Winner of the National Book Award and now considered a classic, The House of Morgan is the most ambitious history ever written about an American banking dynasty. Acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as "brilliantly researched and written", the book tells the rich,  panoramic story of four generations of Morgans and the powerful,  secretive firms they spawned. It is the definitive account of the rise  of the modern financial world. A gripping history of banking and the  booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure  beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a  fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the  rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved.  Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business  archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece, a  compelling account of a remarkable institution and the men who ran it,  and an essential book for understanding the money and power behind the  major historical events of the last 150 years.

"A wonderful, splendid book - a book that should be ready by every  American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country,  its true history, and its hope for the future." (Howard Fast) For  much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history  from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools -  with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street,  the home, and the workplace.

Everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Long before our own day of  self-help books offering twelve-step programs and other guides to attain  happiness, the philosophers of ancient Greece explored the riddle of  what makes a life worth living, producing a wide variety of ideas and  examples to follow. This rich tradition was recast by Diogenes Laertius  into an anthology, a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes, that  generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as  entertainment ever since the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,  first compiled in the third century AD, came to prominence in  Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of  what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient  Greece, covering a longer period of time and a larger number of  figures-from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus-than any  other ancient source.

One of The Economist's Best Books of the Year A  gripping, meticulously researched account of Lenin’s fateful 1917 rail  journey from Zurich to Petrograd, where he ignited the Russian  Revolution and forever changed the world In April 1917, as the  Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn  Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution Vladimir Lenin was  far away, exiled in Zurich. When the news reached him, Lenin  immediately resolved to return to Petrograd and lead the revolt. But to  get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help  from the deadliest of Russia’s adversaries. Millions of Russians at home  were suffering as a result of German aggression, and to accept German  aid―or even safe passage―would be to betray his homeland. Germany, for  its part, saw an opportunity to further destabilize Russia by allowing  Lenin and his small group of revolutionaries to return. Now, in Lenin on the Train,  drawing on a dazzling array of sources and never-before-seen archival  material, renowned historian Catherine Merridale provides a riveting,  nuanced account of this enormously consequential journey―the train ride  that changed the world―as well as the underground conspiracy and  subterfuge that went into making it happen. Writing with the same  insight and formidable intelligence that distinguished her earlier  works, she brings to life a world of counter-espionage and intrigue,  wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism.  When Lenin arrived in Petrograd’s now-famous Finland Station, he  delivered an explosive address to the impassioned crowds. Simple and  extreme, the text of this speech has been compared to such momentous  documents as Constantine’s edict of Milan and Martin Luther’s  ninety-five theses. It was the moment when the Russian revolution became  Soviet, the genesis of a system of tyranny and faith that changed the  course of Russia’s history forever and transformed the international  political climate.

The Moralia (Ancient Greek: Ἠθικά Ethika;  loosely translated as "Morals" or "Matters relating to customs and  mores") is a group of manuscripts dating from the 10th-13th centuries,  traditionally ascribed to the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea.[1] The eclectic collection contains 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They provide insights into Roman and Greek life, but often are also timeless observations in their own right. Many  generations of Europeans have read or imitated them, including Michel de Montaigne and the Renaissance Humanists and Enlightenment philosophers.

“Lives” is a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans by the  ancient Greek historian Plutarch who lived during the first and second  century AD. The work consists of twenty-three paired biographies, one  Greek and one Roman, and four unpaired, which explore the influence of  character on the lives and destinies of important persons of Ancient  Greece and Rome. Rather than providing strictly historical accounts,  Plutarch was most concerned with capturing his subjects common moral  virtues and failings. This volume includes the complete “Lives” in which  you will find the biographies of the following persons: Theseus,  Romulus, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Solon, Poplicola, Themistocles,  Camillus, Pericles, Fabius, Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Timoleon, Æmilius  Paulus, Pelopidas, Marcellus, Aristides, Marcus Cato, Philopœmen,  Flamininus, Pyrrhus, Caius Marius, Lysander, Sylla, Cimon, Lucullus,  Nicias, Crassus, Sertorius, Eumenes, Agesilaus, Pompey, Alexander,  Cæsar, Phocion, Cato the younger, Agis, Cleomenes, Tiberius Gracchus,  Caius Gracchus, Demosthenes, Cicero, Demetrius, Antony, Dion, Marcus  Brutus, Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho. Plutarch’s “Lives” remains  today as one of the most important historical accounts of the classical  period. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s  landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty,  probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t  understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension,  and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many  things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.  What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of  things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and  flourish.  In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even  necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner.  The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists  shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and  protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the  nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call  “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social  policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write  your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the  sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by  trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal  finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to  the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of  ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are  loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.

Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The  House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize  as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D.  Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book  Critics Circle Award finalist.