Akron Public Library

"Joseph Conrad's enduring portrait of the ugliness of colonialism in a deluxe edition with a gripping cover by 'Hellboy' artist Mike Mignola. 'Heart of Darkness' is the thrilling tale of Marlow, a seaman and wanderer recounting his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz. Traveling upriver into the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes obsessed by this enigmatic, wraith-like figure. Marlow's discovery...

A landmark study that offers an alternative history of the Cold War from the point of view of the world's poor. "Europe" is morally, spiritually indefensible. And today the indictment is brought against it...by tens and tens of thousands of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.'--Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Here, from a brilliant young writer, is a paradigm-shifting history of both a utopian concept...

Both Florian and Evelyn have lived their lives by the rules and beliefs of others, until they fall in love, and decide to take fate into their own hands, regardless of the consequences.

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

The author of many critically acclaimed books, military historian T.R. Fehrenbach provides the reader with this exciting and timely history of the territory that is today known as Mexico. His book sweeps us from the great civilizations of the Olmecs and the Aztecs to the Spanish settlers who brutally claimed the land for their own, and from the political and economic revolutions of the nineteenth century to recent history with its government scandals....

"As a boy, Robert Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father tell evocative stories about traveling across America in his youth, travels in which he learned to understand the country literally from the ground up. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline--increasingly cosmopolitan cities...

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions but far more wide-ranging, the dynamic burst of Portuguese voyaging at the start of the sixteenth century is one of the tipping points of world history : the moment that the world went global. Within a short time span a tiny country, whose population did not exceed a million, created a maritime empire that stretched from Brazil to Nagasaki. Conquerors tells the almost forgotten story of how...

Freddy is the Prince of Wales, Fredericka his wife. Freddy commits one gaffe after another, for which he is massacred daily in the British press. Because of the epic public relations disasters caused by these heirs to the throne, they are sent, in a little-known ancient tradition, on a quest to colonize a strange and barbarous land: America.

"The Greater Middle East, the vast region between the Mediterranean and China encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Mongol, Ottoman, Russian, British. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have struggled to maintain stability in the face of power struggles between factions, leadership vaccuums, and the fact...

Within the Eastern Empire, Duke Kordas Valdemar rules a tiny, bucolic Duchy that focuses mostly on horse breeding. Anticipating the day when the Empire's exploitative and militant leaders would not be content to leave them alone, Korda's father sets out to gather magicians in the hopes of one day finding a way to escape and protect the people of the Duchy from tyranny. But then one of the Duchy's mages has a breakthrough. There is a way to place a...