In this highly provocative text, now considered by many a classic, Ian Buruma examines and compares how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their violent pasts, investigating the painful realities of living with guilt—and with its denial. The Wages of Guilt follows Buruma’s encounters, as he travels through both countries, with people whose honesty in confronting their past is strikingly brave, and with others who astonish by their ingenuous evasions of responsibility. In Auschwitz, Berlin, Hiroshima, and Tokyo, Buruma explores the contradictory attitudes of scholars, politicians, and survivors toward World War II and visits the contrasting monuments that commemorate the atrocities of this conflict. These opposing voices reveal how an obsession with the past, especially distorted versions of it, continually raises questions about who should indeed pay the wages of guilt.

Available for the first time in paperback, The Lessons of History is Will and Ariel Durant's celebrated collection on the themes that define history.

"From one of the most respected historians in America, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a new collection of essays that reflect a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history. The past has always been elusive: how can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover the uncertainties of the past, before the outcomes were known? Whatkind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history we now write? How unique was North America among the far-flung peripheries of the early British empire? As Bernard Bailyn argues in this elegant, deeply informed collection of essays, history always combines approximations based on incomplete data, with empathic imagination and the interweaving of strands of knowledge into a narrative which also explains. This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades--a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history"--From publisher's website.

The noted historian's essays, written over thirty-five years, include comments on the writing of history, shorter historical and journalistic pieces, and essays on the importance of history and historical awareness

A history of book lore, book culture, and book lovers begins in Alexandria more than 2,500 years ago and passes through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present, offering special emphasis on collecting in Great Britain and North America.

A collective history of feral children who were brought up in the wilderness, raised by animals, or locked up in solitary confinement examines the stories of Peter the Wild Boy, Victor of Aveyron, and a boy raised by monkeys in Uganda.

Seventeen essays by scholars of literature, history, geography, and cultural studies interrogate the geography of the 19th century both as field of inquiry and as political-economic reality. The essays consider the interplay between discourses describing space and those describing time, that is, between geography and history. They examine the geography embedded in particular objects, especially commodities, as well as in the social identities of persons; and they analyze the construction of the "domestic" sphere, as distinct from the "foreign." Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"A young survivor of the Bosnian War returns to his homeland to confront the people who betrayed his family. At age eleven, Kenan Trebincevic was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brcko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero - Kenan's beloved karate coach - showed up at his door with an AK-47, screaming: "You have one hour to leave or be killed!" Kenan's only crime: he was Muslim. This poignant, searing memoir chronicles Kenan's miraculous escape from the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that swept the former Yugoslavia. After two decades in the United States, Kenan honors his father's wish to visit their homeland, making a list ofwhat he wants to do there. Kenan decides to confront the former next door neighbor who stole from his mother, see the concentration camp where his Dad and brother were imprisoned and stand on the grave of his first betrayer to make sure he's really dead.Back in the land of his birth, Kenan finds something more powerful-and shocking-than revenge"--

The noted military historian evaluates works ranging from accounts of individual campaigns to general histories, biographies, and studies of espionage

A chronicle of the author's five-year legal battle with writer David Irving, a prolific supporter of holocaust denial, describes how the author, along with a team of solicitors, historians, and experts, defended against Irving's libel suit while exposing his distortions of history. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.