Сто портретов выдающихся представителей украинского народа — это сто судеб великих людей, посвятивших себя борьбе и созиданию, ратным подвигам и политической деятельности, созданию художественных шедевров, уникальных литературных произведений и чудес техники. Но чем бы они ни занимались, всех их объединяет одно — украинская земля, на которой они родились и процветанию которой посвятили свою жизнь, талант и призвание. Прочитав эту книгу, читатель сможет еще раз убедиться в том, какой богатой на славных героев была и остается древняя и вечно молодая Украина.

Из классических 7 чудес света до наших дней дошли только Египетские пирамиды. "Все боится времени, но само время боится пирамид", - говорили древние. А какие чудеса нашего времени увидят потомки? О ста наиболее значительных архитектурных сооружениях последних десятилетий расскажет эта книга.

The history, achievements, and enduring legacies of Greek and Roman antiquity come to life in the pages of this comprehensive and beautifully illustrated volume. Following a format similar to that of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, the book brings together the work of thirty outstanding authorities and organizes their contributions into three main sections. The first section covers Greece from the eighth to the fourth centuries B.C., a period unparalleled in history for its brilliance in literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. The second section deals with the Hellinization of the Middle East by the monarchies established in the areas conquered by Alexander the Great, the growth of Rome, and the impact of the two cultures on one another. The third section covers the foundation of the Roman Empire by Augustus and its consolidation in the first two centuries A.D. A short concluding essay discusses certain aspects of the later Empire and its influence on Western civilization, notably through the adoption of Christianity. Within each section, chapters dealing with political and social history alternate with chapters on literature, philosophy, and the arts. Maps and chronological charts--not to mention more than 250 illustrations, including sixteen in color--enrich the basic text, along with bibliographies and a full index.

Vol. 1 : Africa. - 649 p.

Covering nearly 200 countries, this yearbook is filled with background notes reports from the U.S. Department of State. Entries typically cover geography, history, government and political conditions, economy, and state of relations with the United States. Also highlights detailed travel notes, including passport applications, visa requirements, regulations and duties, medical information, and national holidays, as well as international adoption regulations and annually updated comprehensive terrorism reports.

Islam vs. Islamism/i introduces the Islamic world's diversity, conflicts, and dilemmas—its origins, extraordinary creativity, and current crisis, the result of its unhappy encounter with Western modernity. Particular attention is given to Islamism, IslaM&Apos;s radically antimodern and often violent revision that is causing turmoil in the Middle East and beyond. Islam vs. Islamism/i introduces the reader to the Islamic world, to its diversity and conflicts, and to possible solutions to those conflicts. Steering clear of either Islamophilia or Muslim-bashing, yet avoiding blandness, Demant explains the origins of Islam, its history, and its position in today's world. After a period of extraordinary expansion and creativity, and a long sequel of decline, the Islamic world is now in deep crisis, caused by IslaM&Apos;s unhappy encounter with the West and its modernity. Islamic societies have tried a variety of approaches to escape from their predicament, but the result has only been to deepen Muslim powerlessness and Muslims' feelings of frustration. Then came Islamism (Islamic fundamentalism) with its revolutionary but antimodern proposal to refashion Muslim society after the Prophet's original model. Islamism has had unsettling results, first in IslaM&Apos;s heartlands, then along its multiple frontiers, and finally in confrontation with the West itself. Among the outcomes has been an ascending wave of terrorism. But violence is not the whole story. Extremism represents no more than a minority within Islam. Although co-existence with violent fundamentalists is a hopeless task, the questions Islamists raise are serious and evoke echoes in the hearts of many more Muslims. To prevent a war of civilizations, dialogue with the moderate majority of Muslims is more urgent than ever. This book is one step on that long road.

Hotel architecture tends to look like office building architecture in some cases, and not that interesting office architecture, but the dull type. Fortunately, there are also cases of unique and well thought architectural plans for hotels, showcased in this article through a few examples. A small number of these are just projects or in construction, but the rest are just architectural marvels.

Too many laws, too many lawyers--that's the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principles. In this book, Epstein demonstrates how. The first four rules, which regulate human interactions in ordinary social life, concern the autonomy of the individual, property, contract, and tort. Taken together these rules establish and protect consistent entitlements over all resources, both human and natural. These rules are backstopped by two more rules that permit forced exchanges on payment of just compensation when private or public necessity so dictates. Epstein then uses these six building blocks to clarify many intractable problems in the modern legal landscape. His discussion of employment contracts explains the hidden virtues of contracts at will and exposes the crippling weaknesses of laws regarding collective bargaining, unjust dismissal, employer discrimination, and comparable worth. And his analysis shows how laws governing liability for products and professional services, corporate transactions, and environmental protection have generated unnecessary social strife and economic dislocation by violating these basic principles. Simple Rules for a Complex World offers a sophisticated agenda for comprehensive social reform that undoes much of the mischief of the modern regulatory state. At a time when most Americans have come to distrust and fear government at all levels, Epstein shows how a consistent application of economic and political theory allows us to steer a middle path between too much and too little

Vol. 1 : Absolutism - Coligny. - 736 p.

This unique book explores a very broad range of ideas and institutions and provides thorough and detailed case studies in the context of broader theoretical analysis. Key topics such as poverty, global governance, sustainable development and the environment are closely examined, with detailed case studies of the World Bank, the WTO, the IMF, Asian Development Bank, UN Development Programme and the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. The impact multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF have on development is hotly debated, but few doubt their power and influence. This book examines the concepts that have powerfully influenced development policy and, more broadly, looks at the role of ideas in international development institutions and how they have affected current development discourse. The authors analyze why some ideas are taken up by these institutions, how the ideas travel within the systems and how they are translated into policy, modified, distorted or resisted.

Vol. 2 : Dominica to Italy. - 348 p.

In this book I propose the thesis that a collective learning process took place after Hitler, bringing the Germans back from perpetrating unspeakable crimes to a sincere commitment to human rights. Unlike the intellectual preoccupation with German efforts to deal with the Nazi past (explored by Charles Maier and Jeffrey Herf), this investigation focuses primarily on the practical lessons that a disoriented people drew from their past misdeeds. My analysis pays particular attention to the relationship between the outside interventions of the United States and the Soviet Union and the inside insights of the minority of anti-Fascist Germans who were ready to make a new start. In an attempt to integrate both postwar histories, I contrast the Western consequences drawn from the catastrophe with the Eastern efforts to learn from disaster. Since the transformation was a drawn-out process, I concentrate here on three different stages of its development, starting with the postwar period, then focusing on the 1960s, and concluding with the 1990s. After exploring the alternative of Westernization, I settled on the concept of “civilization” as a standard for evaluating the metamorphosis of the Germans. While postcolonial critics have correctly condemned its misuse as justification for sexist and racist repression, several reasons support this terminological choice. First, prominent contemporaries, from Hannah Arendt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the notion of a German deviation from the values of Western civilization as a key argument. Second, in modifying the Sonderweg thesis, the Israeli-German historian Dan Diner suggested that the Holocaust constituted a rupture of common ethical norms, a veritable Zivilisationsbruch. Third, the surprising resurgence of the concept of “civil society” as a rejection of Communist dictatorship and as a characterization of voluntary social activism links the two dictatorships with each other. Therefore, “civilization” may serve as shorthand for the struggle for human rights.

Written for those in the telecom, datacom and infocom industries, this provocative text deals with the development of the wireless communications industry and technology during the coming ten to fifteen years