It is 1979. The author travels (and takes the reader) by rail, boat, bus, rental car, bicycle, and Shanks's pony up the East Coast from Washington to Maine, "going from here to there, to see" what in thirty years has changed in the land, the landscape, the society. He reflects on history, he dreams, he digresses untethered and, "perhaps to delay" his own painful progress, he interpolates passages from the high-satirical Caldoon Wars, chronicle of Operation Mollycoddle, a U.S. military action to rein in a secessionist Maine and, as though in passing, to destroy Caldoon himself. The passing of another thirty years has not dulled the author's critical vision. After all, we still confront " ... a future without freedom ... where the repressed seek more repression ... a direct route to torture chambers and random terror, the return of religion, barbarity..."

In this book, the author combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into a story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries.

Essays discuss Greek and Chineese art, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dutch genre painting, Rubens, Rembrandt, art collecting, museums, and Freud's aesthetics

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

A superb history of the world's people during the last four million years, beginning before the human race moved out of Africa to explore and settle the other continents. Mr. Blainey explores the development of technology and skills, the rise of major religions, and the role of geography, considering both the larger patterns and the individual nature of history. A delightful read, gracefully written, and full of odd and interesting pieces of information as well as thoughtful comparisons that span both time and space. —William L. O'Neill

A Short History of Relations Between Peoples traces how the cultural attitudes that different peoples and nations had toward each other have undergone a profound and positive change during the last 500 years. For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension—when not outright fear and loathing. Tribal or racial attitudes were virtually universal, no one group being much better or worse in this respect than any other—and for good reason given the conditions of life before the modern era. But in the last 500 years, relations between different peoples have undergone a slow but profound change. In this book, John Ellis explains how a confluence of discoveries, inventions, explorations, as well as social and political changes gave birth to a new attitude, one expressed succinctly in the Latin phrase: gens una sumus—we are all one people. This sentiment has by now become a modern orthodoxy, however inconsistently or even hypocritically it may sometimes be espoused. Ellis tells the story of how the transition happened, setting out the crucial stages in its progress as well as the key events that moved it forward, and identifying the individuals and groups that brought about the eventual dominance of this new outlook. This is a compelling story in its own right, but it is also a useful inoculation against the destructive ideas of today’s race hustlers. An accurate grasp of how this crucial change happened contradicts everything that they want us to believe. Ideologies such as Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have everything touching on race and racism completely backwards. The villains of their ignorant version of history are really the heroes. In explaining how the historical record makes nonsense of CRT, Ellis’s book amounts to the most fundamental and complete refutation of that pernicious ideology.