A gripping narrative history of Napoleon Bonaparte's ten-month exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than a hundred square miles of territory. This would have been the end of him, if Europe's rulers had had their way. But soon enough Napoleon imposed his preternatural charisma and historic ambition on both his captors and the very island itself, plotting his return to France and to power. After ten months of exile, he escaped Elba with just of over a thousand supporters in tow, marched to Paris, and retook the Tuileries Palace--all without firing a shot. Not long after, tens of thousands of people would die fighting for and against him at Waterloo. Braude dramatizes this strange exile and improbable escape in granular detail and with novelistic relish, offering sharp new insights into a largely overlooked moment. He details a terrific cast of secondary characters, including Napoleon's tragically-noble official British minder on Elba, Neil Campbell, forever disgraced for having let "Boney" slip away; and his young second wife, Marie Louise who was twenty-two to Napoleon's forty-four, at the time of his abdication. What emerges is a surprising new perspective on one of history's most consequential figures, which both subverts and celebrates his legendary persona.

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Viruses are the world's most abundant life form, and now, when humanity is in the midst of a close encounter with their immense power, perhaps the most feared. But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all. Everything about them is extreme, including the reactions they evoke. However, for every truism about viruses, the opposite is also often true. So complex and diverse is the world of viruses that it merits being labelled an empire unto itself. And whether we see them as alive or dead, as life-threatening or life-affirming, there is an ineluctable beauty, even a certain elegance, in the way viruses go about their lives-or so Pranay Lal tells us in Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses. This is a book that defies categorisation. It brings together science, history and great storytelling to paint a fascinating picture of viruses as a major actor, not just in human civilisation but also in the human body. With rare photographs, paintings, illustrations and anecdotes, it is a magnificent and an extremely relevant book for our times, when we are attempting to understand viruses and examining their role in the lives of humans.

“A very fun, largely chronological journey through invisibility, beginning with myth and early magicians, ending with quantum physics.” —The New Yorker In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries. In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are. “Full of insights drawn from a broad survey of history, literature and philosophy; wherever the invisible is being contemplated, Ball is there to select the juiciest anecdotes . . . [He] is a lucid, witty and highly entertaining guide.” —The Globe and Mail “A tour-de-force history capped off with an animated discussion of H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

How Romans used the world of the house to interpret and interrogate the role of the emperor. The Julio-Claudian dynasty, beginning with the rise of Augustus in the late first century BCE and ending with the death of Nero in 68 CE, was the first ruling family of the Roman Empire. Elite Romans had always used domestic space to assert and promote their authority, but what was different about the emperor's house? In The Ruler's House, Harriet Fertik considers how the emperor's household and the space he called home shaped Roman conceptions of power and one-man rule. While previous studies of power and privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome have emphasized the emperor's intrusions into the private lives of his fellow elites, this book focuses on Roman ideas of the ruler's lack of privacy. Fertik argues that houses were spaces that Romans used to contest power and to confront the contingency of their own and others' claims to rule. Describing how the Julio-Claudian period provoked anxieties not only about the ruler's power but also about his vulnerability, she reveals that the ruler's house offered a point of entry for reflecting on the interdependence and intimacy of ruler and ruled. Fertik explores the world of the Roman house, from family bonds and elite self-display to bodily functions and relations between masters and slaves. She draws on a wide range of sources, including epic and tragedy, historiography and philosophy, and art and architecture, and she investigates shared conceptions of power in elite literature and everyday life in Roman Pompeii. Examining political culture and thought in early imperial Rome, The Ruler's House confronts the fragility of one-man rule.

Two novelettes about madmen who want to conquer the world. The Beetle Horde was the cover story for the initial issue of Astounding Stories in January 1930. The Invisible Death was the cover story for Astounding Stories in the October 1930 issue. Both stories were about the revenge that spurned egotistical men will wreak upon the world when they don’t get their ways. Both stories reveal weak men in positions of advantage as the aspiring autocrats of their fantasies. The Beetle Horde (1930) Only two young explorers stand in the way of the mad Bram’s horrible revenge— the releasing of his trillions of man-sized beetles upon an utterly defenseless world. Chapter I – Dodd’s Discovery Chapter II – Beetles and Humans Chapter III – Ten Miles Underground Chapter IV – Bram’s Story Chapter V – Doomed! Chapter VI – Escape! Conclusion Bullets, shrapnel, shell—nothing can stop the trillions of famished, man-sized beetles which, led by a madman, sweep down over the human race. Chapter VII – Through the Inferno Chapter VIII – Recaptured Chapter IX – The Trail of Death Chapter X – At Bay Chapter XI – The World Set Free The Invisible Death (1930) With night-rays and darkness-antidote America strikes back at the terrific and destructive Invisible Empire. Chapter I – Out of the Hangman’s Hands Chapter II – Conference Chapter III – In the White House Chapter IV – The Invisible Ambassador Chapter V – The Enemy Strikes Chapter VI – The Gas Chapter VII – On the Trail Chapter VIII – The Magnetic Trap Chapter IX – The Invisible Emperor Chapter X – The Tricks of the Trade Chapter XI – In the Laboratory Chapter XII – Von Kettler’s End Chapter XIII – You Can’t Down the Marines Invisible Death has 3 illustrations.