Profiles in power

The phenomenal national bestseller that is "the Lincoln biography for this generation" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)-now in paperback. Drawing on resources not available until recently, including Lincoln's personal papers, archives, and newspaper reports, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald presents a masterful account of Lincoln's rise to the presidency and the political and personal challenges he faced while in office. David Herbert Donald's Lincoln is a stunningly original portrait of Lincoln's life and presidency. Donald brilliantly depicts Lincoln's gradual ascent from humble beginnings in rural Kentucky to the ever-expanding political circles in Illinois, and finally to the presidency of a country divided by civil war. Donald goes beyond biography, illuminating the gradual development of Lincoln's character, chronicling his tremendous capacity for evolution and growth, thus illustrating what made it possible for a man so inexperienced and so unprepared for the presidency to become a great moral leader. In the most troubled of times, here was a man who led the country out of slavery and preserved a shattered Union-in short, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.

The reign of Charles I witnessed some of the most dramatic and controversial developments in the course of English history including a full-scale civil war and the trial and public execution of a monarch by his subjects. Since then Charles has been variously regarded as a tragic martyr and as an evil tyrant who attempted to destroy the liberties of the English people. This book reconsiders the personality of Charles and the effects of his decisions as ruler. It questions the responsibility Charles should bear for the disasters of his reign and examines contemporary and modern portrayals of Charles's reign, the king's military leadership, the context and prelude to his execution, and his status as a martyr king in the 1650s and beyond.

His successes as a political reformer have been exaggerated, and his diplomatic views have been largely misunderstood. In religion, government and diplomacy he was only more or less successful, and his greatness lies in the personal influence he wielded in all these spheres, rather than in the actual changes he brought about. His defects of character are those of his generation; his virtues are those of Counter-Reformation Europe; and his life is worthy of study by all who would understand the problem of regulating human affairs. - Preface.

"As America moves toward normalizing relations with Cuba, this gripping, vivid graphic novel reveals the life and times of Fidel Castro, one of the 20th century's most intriguing, charismatic, and divisive figures. The book is narrated by a German journalist named Karl Mertens, who is plunged into the searing heat of pre-revolutionary Cuba in the mid-1950s. He first meets with Castro while the latter is hiding in the mountains, then follows him through the dramatic revolution and his ascent to the presidency that, despite the Bay of Pigs confrontation and decades of international trade blockades, lasts for nearly 50 years. We also witness Castro's involvement in bloody skirmishes, failed missions, and brutal crackdowns, as well as his interactions with and on behalf of the Cuban people, which reveal as much about his fallible human qualities as they do his legend. Castro is the work of acclaimed German graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist, who visited Cuba in 2008; it was first published in English by SelfmadeHero for the British market, and is now being made available in North America for the first time. Bristling with energy and alive with the spirit of Cuba, Castro has much to offer about the complex politics of one of the most enduring and controversial figures in modern history."--

Gustavus Adolphus (1594-l632, king of Sweden 1611-1632) was one of the dominant figures of the early seventeenth century. He made Sweden the leading power of Northern Europe; was the champion of the northern Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War; and was a great administrator as well as a brilliant soldier, whose reforms helped define the development of the modern state. His dazzling career, brought to a premature end on the battlefield of Lutzen when he was still well short of forty, is an obvious subject for treatment in the Profiles in Power series. Michael Roberts's magisterial two-volume study of Gustavus Adolphus was published by Longman in the 1950s. It is still the standard biography; but from the very outset its monumental scale put it beyond all but the most serious student of the age. In 1973, to meet the need for a concise account of the subject designed for students and general readers, Professor Roberts published Gustavus Adolphus and the Rise of Sweden.^ It has itself been unavailable for some years, and the need for a short authoritative book in English on Gustavus Adolphus is again pressing. That earlier book now forms the basis of the present volume, and is issued under the Longman imprint for the first time. Professor Roberts has revised and expanded the text to take account of work that has appeared on the period since 1973, and to fit it to its new series context. The bibliography has been updated, enlarged and modified. Intended for those who don't read Swedish, it indicates the increasing number of Swedish-language works that are published with an English summary. The entire work has been redesigned and reset. Its essential purpose, however, remains as before: to make accessible to a non-specialist readership the large and complex fields of action in which Gustavus and his chancellor Oxenstierna played so conspicuous a part; and to bring them alive as human beings. In both these aims it triumphantly succeeds.^ Its appearance, reuniting Professor Roberts and Gustavus Adolphus (and, incidentally, Longman) for the first time in a generation, will be widely welcomed.

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a symbol, like Stalin and Mao, of the unparalleled barbarism of the 20th century. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I. With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the settings that made Hitler's rise possible: the virulent anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense casualties, the toxic nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the 1920s, the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right and the Left, the hysteria that accompanied Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and then mounted in brutal attacks by his storm troopers on Jews and others condemned as enemies of the Aryan race. In an account drawing on many previously untapped sources, Hitler metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a "drummer" sounding an insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of an infamous failed putsch and, ultimately, to the leadership of a ragtag alliance of right-wing parties fused into a movement that enthralled the German people. This volume, the first of two, ends with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer fringes of society, and with the march of the German army into the Rhineland, Hitler's initial move toward the abyss of war. - Publisher.