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What is going on behind closed doors when the President of the United States meets privately with another world leader whose language he does not speak. The only other American in the room is his interpreter who may also have to write the historical record of that meeting for posterity. In his introduction, the author leads us into this mysterious world through the meetings between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and their highly skilled interpreters. The author intimately knows this world, having interpreted for seven presidents from Lyndon Johnson through Bill Clinton. Five chapters are dedicated to the presidents he worked for most often: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. We get to know these presidents as seen with the eyes of the interpreter in a lively and entertaining book, full of inside stories and anecdotes. The second purpose of the book is to introduce the reader to the profession of interpretation, a profession most Americans know precious little about. This is done with a minimum of theory and a wealth of practical examples, many of which are highly entertaining episodes, keeping the reader wanting to read on with a minimum of interruptions.

When Western explorers first encountered dolmens in the Levant, they thought they had discovered the origins of a megalithic phenomenon that spread as far as the Atlantic coast. Although European dolmens are now considered an unrelated tradition, many researchers continue to approach dolmens in the Levant as part of a trans-regional phenomenon that spanned the Taurus mountains to the Arabian peninsula. By tightly defining the term 'dolmen' itself, this book brings these mysterious monuments into sharper focus. Drawing on historical, archaeological and geological sources, it is shown that dolmens in the Levant mostly concentrate in the eastern escarpment of the Jordan Rift Valley, and in the Galilean hills. They cluster near proto-urban settlements of the Early Bronze I period (3700–3000 BCE) in particular geological zones suitable for the extraction of megalithic slabs. Rather than approaching dolmens as a regional phenomenon, this book considers dolmens as part of a local burial tradition whose tomb forms varied depending on geological constraints. Dolmens in the Levant is essential for anyone interested in the rise of civilisations in the ancient Middle East, and particularly those who have wondered at the origins of these enigmatic burial monuments that dominate the landscape.

“Lobster is served three ways in this fascinating book: by fisherman, scientist and the crustaceans themselves. . . . Corson, who worked aboard commercial lobster boats for two years, weaves together these three worlds. The human worlds are surely interesting; but they can’t top the lobster life on the ocean floor.” — Washington Post In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

This book takes readers back and forth through time and makes the past accessible to all families, students and the general reader and is an unprecedented collection of a list of events in chronological order and a wealth of informative knowledge about the rise and fall of empires, major scientific breakthroughs, groundbreaking inventions, and monumental moments about everything that has ever happened.