Лучшие книги Дэвида Уиллиса Маккалоу

Люди с древнейших времен создавали лабиринты. Они обладали необычными, загадочными свойствами и нередко наделялись магическим смыслом, символизируя спуск в огненную бездну ада, восхождение в небесный Град Божий или вполне земную дорогу в Иерусалим. В разные эпохи и на разных континентах лабиринты выцарапывали на стенах пещер, выкладывали из огромных валунов на берегах северных морей, набирали из мозаики в храмах и умело устраивали из кустарника в королевских садах. В хх веке они пережили настоящее возрождение - из непонятной старинной диковины превратились в любимое развлечение для публики, естественную часть парка, усадьбы или детской площадки. Что главное в лабиринте: красота или путаница ходов? В чем его загадка? Десять глав этой книги - как десять витков лабиринта; американец Дэвид Маккалоу проходит их, не разу не сбившись с пути, уверенно и со знанием дела.

For the first thousand years of its history, Ireland was shaped by its wars. Beginning with the legends of ancient battles and warriors, Wars of the Irish Kings moves through a time when history and storytelling were equally prized, into the age when history was as much propaganda as fact. This remarkable book tells of tribal battles, foreign invasions, Viking raids, family feuds, wars between rival Irish kingdoms, and wars of rebellion against the English. While the battles formed the legends of the land, it was the people fighting the battles—Cuchulain, Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Robert the Bruce, Elizabeth I, and Hugh O’Donnell—who shaped the destiny and identity of the Irish nation.

This is the real story of how Ireland came to be, told through eyewitness accounts from a thousand years of struggle, brought together for the first time in one volume. It’s a surprisingly immediate and stunning portrait of an all-but-forgotten time that forged the Ireland of today.

'Brooklyn...and How It Got That Way' is the first major celebration in text and photos of this remarkable city. The book begins with a brief history, tracing the gradual settlement of the western end of Long Island, from treaties with the local Indians to the less than enthusiastic 1898 union of the Independent City of Brooklyn - then the third largest in the nation - with the City of New York. The following chapters offer a cultural history of four Brooklyn's most estimable features: its waterfront, site of a once thriving shipping industry; its parks and open spaces, including Frederick Law Olmsted's masterpiece of urban design, Prospect Park; its recreations, ranging from the beloved underdog Dodgers to the fabulous array of amusement parks that have sprung up on Coney Island; and finally, its neighborhoods, diverse, fiercely partisan, and beautiful, from Flatbush ('where' as P.G. Wodehouse wrote in a lyric to a Jerome King song, 'there's room to swing a cat') to Brooklyn Heights, whose magnificent brownstones have been homes to so many great writers and artists.

David W. McCullough, a longtime resident of Brooklyn, has written a graceful and witty text that, complemented by a selection of rare historical pictures and Jim Kalett's luminous, evocative photographs, reveals the glories, idiosyncracies, and byways of Brooklyn, past and present. How many people know that one of Coney Island's most popular attractions at the beginning of the century was The Infant Incubators, a display of live, premature babies tended in equipment far more sophisticated than that found in most hospitals? Or that Emma Goldman once operated an ice cream parlor in Brownsville? And what other city can boast of a Catholic girls' academy housed in a mansion built by Diamond Jim Brady for Lillian Russell. This book tells all.