Roy Douglas

"The total volume of taxation is certainly related largely to what the taxpayer thinks is worth paying for, and how much he or she is prepared to pay. Both of these items have changed enormously over three and a half centuries, but there is a good deal more to it than that. The growth of taxation has not been regular throughout the period. Patterns in taxation change may be discerned. In particular, wars have always resulted in taxation increases, and when the war is finished taxation never settles down to a level as low as it had been before the war began. This book seeks to understand and explain the reasons for these changing patterns, and should be of interest to the general reader, as well as the historian or economist."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1939, exhausted by a decade-long depression, Americans faced a brewing European conflict that would prove to be the most destructive war in history. At this dark juncture, a World's Fair was held in New York City that evoked such acute hope in its promise of a glorious future that a whole generation was drawn to it and transformed by its vision. People came from all over the world to see the fair, and it was not uncommon for many to attend ten, twenty, even thirty times. There, the awed spectators gazed at a utopian world of superhighways, spacious suburbs and other technological wonders. As David Gelernter brilliantly recounts in 1939, it was a future that has largely come to pass, but one that, in its realization, has drained us of the very pride and hope that were so palpable at the fair itself. In 1939, Gelernter gives us a virtual reality picture of the World's Fair and the passionate feelings it still evokes in those who were there. In entering that picture, we gain a clearer understanding of why our future stands in such dark contrast to the glittering utopian vision of 1939.

Commissario Guido Brunetti, with the help of Inspector Lorenzo Vianello and the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra Zorzi, investigates the death of a Venetian widow in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio.

"This book examines the process largely from the official British point of view. How far was Britain compelled to abandon her Empire, and how far did she do so voluntarily? The thirty-year rule governing the release of British documents means that many new papers, which heretofore were not available to researchers, have been used in this work."--BOOK JACKET.