Bøger af Gideon Defoe

An Atlas of Extinct Countries meets David Nicholl's Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: a funny, fascinating, beautifully illustrated - and timely - history of countries that, for myriad and often ludicrous reasons, no longer exist

Countries die. Sometimes it's murder, sometimes it's by accident, and sometimes it's because they were so ludicrous they didn't deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either 'got too greedy' or 'Napoleon turned up'. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence. This is an atlas of 48 nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book refuses to do so, because these dead nations are so full of schemers, racists, and con men that it's impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff. Because of this ¿ and because treating nation-states with too much reverence is the entire problem with pretty much everything ¿ these accounts are not concerned with adding to the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags might be.

After adventures with Charles Darwin, Captain Ahab, and Karl Marx, The Pirate Captain faces off against his toughest-though not his biggest-challenge yet: Napoleon Bonaparte. Bruised from a crushing disappointment at the Pirate of the Year Awards, the Pirate Captain decides that it's time for a career change. Before long, his loyal crew, much to their dismay, find themselves en route to St. Helena, a bleak speck of an island a thousand miles from anywhere. But the Captain's plan for a quiet life rearing bees is interrupted by the arrival of another visitor to the island-the recently deposed Napoleon Bonaparte. Is the island's twenty-eight mile circumference big enough to contain two of history's greatest egos? Has the Pirate Captain finally met his match? And who has the best hat? Once again, Gideon Defoe has given us an exciting, swashbuckling tale of lavish tea parties, planning regulations, and raw political ambition.