Books about Commoners from Amazon.com

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman—a rising star in the foreign ministry—to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic.

Told in the voice of Haruko, meticulously researched and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarified and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other. With the unerring skill of a master storyteller, John Burnham Schwartz has written his finest novel yet.

.
Price: $12.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A feast for history lovers--the whole colorful parade of English history brilliantly captured in a single volume.

From ancient times to the present day, the story of England has been laced with drama, intrigue, courage, and passion. In GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY, Robert Lacey recounts the remarkable episodes that shaped a nation as only a great storyteller can: by combining impeccable accuracy with the timeless drama that has made these tales live for centuries.

This new paperback edition is encyclopedic in scope, gathering together all of Robert Lacey's great tales previously published in three separate hardcover volumes.

The book comprises 154 delectable stories, each brimming with insight, humor, and fascinating detail. Bite-sized history at its best, GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY belongs on every Anglophile's bookshelf.

"An informative, trustworthy distillation, less a debunking than an entertaining, wryly lucid reconstruction of the facts. . . . The tales weave a narrative as finely thatched as an English cottage." -Tennessean

"Eminently readable, highly enjoyable. . . GREAT TALES should appeal to the reader who appreciates individuals and their personalities more than mere mass movements." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Beautifully written, full of things you didn't know, and well worth a read if you want a new view on stories you thought you'd already understood." -Living History


.
Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The greatest civilization of the ancient world revealed through the tales of the men and women, both rulers and commoners, who lived in those times.

The one hundred biographies included here give voice not only to ancient Egypt's rulers but also to the people who built the great monuments, staffed government offices, farmed, served in the temples, and fought to defend the country's borders. Spanning thousands of years of ancient Egyptian history, the book offers a fresh perspective on an always fascinating civilization through the lives of:
•the god-kings, from great rulers like Khufu and Ramesses II to less famous monarchs such as Amenemhat I and Osorkon;
•Egypt's queens: the powerful Tiye, the beautiful Nefertiti, Tutankhamun's tragic child-bride Ankhesenamun, and the infamous Cleopatra;
•the officials who served the pharaoh: the architect Imhotep who designed the first pyramid; the court dwarf Perniankhu; and the royal sculptor Bak;
•ordinary women who are often overlooked in official accounts: Hemira, a humble priestess from a provincial Delta town, and Naunakht, whose will reveals the trials and tribulations of family life;
•commoners and foreigners such as the irascible farmer Hekanakht, the serial criminal Paneb, and Urhiya, the mercenary who rose to the rank of general in the Egyptian army.

Profusely illustrated with works of art and scenes of daily life, Lives of the Ancient Egyptians offers remarkable insights into the history and culture of the Nile Valley and very personal glimpses of a vanished world. 200 illustrations, 80 in color..
Price: $9.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For over half a century, the biologist Barry Commoner has been one of the most prominent and charismatic defenders of the American environment, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 as the standard-bearer of "the emerging science of survival." In Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, Michael Egan examines Commoner's social and scientific activism and charts an important shift in American environmental values since World War II.

Throughout his career, Commoner believed that scientists had a social responsibility, and that one of their most important obligations was to provide citizens with accessible scientific information so they could be included in public debates that concerned them. Egan shows how Commoner moved naturally from calling attention to the hazards of nuclear fallout to raising public awareness of the environmental dangers posed by the petrochemical industry. He argues that Commoner's belief in the importance of dissent, the dissemination of scientific information, and the need for citizen empowerment were critical planks in the remaking of American environmentalism.

Commoner's activist career can be defined as an attempt to weave together a larger vision of social justice. Since the 1960s, he has called attention to parallels between the environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements, and connected environmental decline with poverty, injustice, exploitation, and war, arguing that the root cause of environmental problems was the American economic system and its manifestations. He was instrumental in pointing out that there was a direct association between socioeconomic standing and exposure to environmental pollutants and that economics, not social responsibility, was guiding technological decision making. Egan argues that careful study of Commoner's career could help reinvigorate the contemporary environmental movement at a point when the environmental stakes have never been so high..
Price: $20.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The life story of Dwight Lyman Moody, commoner of Northfield and a man "mightily used of God," as the introduction says. The author, Richard Ellsworth Day, led churches in California and Arizona and went on to be a general evangelist and widely-read author of the column, "Beside the Golden Gate," in The Baptist. He is also the author of The Shadow of Broad Brim, a biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, acclaimed as one of the greatest preachers of all time..
Price: $12.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is a paperback edition of one of the most important and original contributions to English rural history published in the past generation. Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1994, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common right and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss..
Price: $39.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The King and Mrs. Simpson recounts the extraordinary love story between the popular King and the enigmatic woman that began at a party in England and culminated with the downfall of his reign nearly six years later.
The King and Mrs. Simpson reads like a story and is sized like a novella, but still captues the historical detail that makes their story one of legend. The King and Mrs. Simpson offers a reader the chance to learn their story in just a few hours. A reader does not have to love or even like history to enjoy this short book about the greatest romance of the twentieth century. The King & Mrs. Simpson is a concept the author terms "beach history": creative nonfiction that reads like a story, but retains the accuracy found in traditional texts. Finally, a new way of reading and learning about history has been launched!
.
Price: $7.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the first full-length study of the political economy of one of the African states which were formed in the course of the nineteenth-century Zulu revolution. The early chapters examine the evolution of the Swazi state and the dynamics of its stratified systems, paying particular attention to the 'layering' of inequality through marriage and inheritance patterns, and the simultaneous integration of age regiments and the elaboration of a national ideology based on the Swazi royalty. Dr Bonner then sets the Swazi state in the wider context of south-eastern Africa and discusses its relations with the surrounding Boer societies. The later chapters analyse the role played by the great mining companies and their white concessionaires in the partition of southern Africa and in bringing about the dissolution of the Swazi state..
Price: $29.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]