Bøger af Robert B. Marks

Now in a new edition, this clearly written and engrossing book presents a global and environmental narrative of the origins of the modern world since 1400. Robert Marks constructs a story in which Asia, Africa, and the New World play major roles and points to the resurgence of Asia and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment.

The War BeginsThe Grand Magus is dead. Under the watchful eye of the Arbiter of Succession, seven archmagi have been granted one of the powers of the Grand Magus, which they will use to battle to the death in a ritual as ancient as it is secret.But when the Arbiter is murdered, the Successors plunge the world into a devastating war. Running for his life, Tamlin, once an apprentice mage, meets a mysterious traveller who may hold the key to ending the conflict...and who carries a secret that will shake the Order of Archmagi to its foundations.

A Reluctant ImmortalOn an endless field of ice, a solitary figure stands against the wasteland. He is Delgar Daegar's Son, the Magus Draconum, the destroyer and redeemer of worlds. This is his story.

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment, tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind.

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all of us? Ranging from the early years of China's revolutionary twentieth-century to the present, the essays collected here look at the past and present of China with a view toward better understanding the ideas, ideals, and people who have dared to imagine radical transformation of their worlds and to assess the conceptual, political, and social limitations of these visions and their implementations. The volume's chapters focus on these issues from a range of vantage points, representing a spectrum of current scholarship. The first half of the book brings new insights to understanding how early-twentieth century intellectuals interpreted ideas that allowed them to break with China's past and to envision new paths to a modern future. It treats of Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Communist party, Mao Zedong, and Mao in relation to the non-Communist Liang Shuming and with the Dalai Lama. With continuing threads of nation and nationalities, of peasants, utopias and dystopias linking the chapters, the book's second half looks broadly at the consequences of the implementations of radical ideas, at the same time critiquing our accepted frameworks of analysis. Moving up to the present, the book investigates the effects of the reforms since the 1980s on long-term environmental degradation and on the emergence of a capitalist rural economy. It gives an unsparing view into contemporary rural China through independent films. The book concludes with an analysis of the unshakable persistence of the shibboleth, 'the rise of China,' in popular and academic imagination and argues for the importance instead of taking seriously the twentieth-century history of radicalism in China and its significance for understanding China's present and its future potentials.

Ancient Greece and Rome aren't usually remembered for their sense of humour. However, in reality the ancient Greeks and Romans often refused to take themselves seriously. Strange and outlandish activities abounded - including somebody accidentally exposing himself while dancing sideways at his wedding (those wearing bed sheets didn't wear underwear) and a group of drunk young men thinking their house is sinking at sea, and tossing all their furniture out the windows. In this new edition, R. Drew Griffith and Robert B. Marks take you on a lively and funny journey through the more bizarre activities of the ancient world, venturing out as far as Egypt, Babylon, and Scandinavia, ranging everywhere from moochers to quacks to shrews to perhaps the oldest laundromat joke in history, and even revealing the most terrible thing you can do to anybody involving a radish.