Secondhand History, Science & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2620

Secondhand History & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2620

Seventeen books for the reader drawn to the long view of human history — from John Gowlett's archaeology of early man to two late Toynbee masterworks, with both volumes of the Penguin Book of Lost Worlds, the mysteries of Knossos and Stonehenge, and surveys of Jerusalem, the Arab world, and ancient Greece filling the gaps. Li Cunxin's Mao's Last Dancer and Alan Moorehead's Cooper's Creek bring two of the great twentieth-century adventure stories to a box otherwise devoted to antiquity. A box that rewards the reader who finds history, in any era and any corner of the world, consistently irresistible.

1. Atlas of the Biblical World — Joseph Rhymer — A comprehensive atlas combining maps, photographs, and text to illuminate the geography, archaeology, and historical context of the biblical world, making the landscape of the scriptures visually and intellectually accessible.
2. Mao's Last Dancer — Li Cunxin — The extraordinary memoir of a peasant boy from rural China who was chosen for the Beijing Dance Academy, trained at the Houston Ballet, and defected to the West — one of the most gripping personal stories to emerge from twentieth-century China.
3. Cooper's Creek — Alan Moorehead — Moorehead's masterful account of Burke and Wills's doomed 1860 expedition across Australia, written with the pace of a thriller and the authority of a historian — one of the great books about the Australian interior and the tragedy of ambition versus landscape.
4. Stealing the Mystic Lamb — Noah Charney — The remarkable story of the Ghent Altarpiece — van Eyck's fifteenth-century masterpiece and the most stolen artwork in history — combining art history, wartime adventure, and detective work into a narrative as gripping as any thriller.
5. Knossos — One of the Great Mysteries of Archaeology series, exploring the ancient Minoan palace at the heart of Cretan civilization — the excavations of Arthur Evans, the disputed reconstructions, and the enduring enigma of a culture that left its mark on the entire ancient world.
6. The Penguin Book of Lost Worlds: Volume One — A wide-ranging Penguin anthology surveying the great vanished civilizations of human history, combining scholarship with accessibility in the tradition of Penguin's finest reference publishing.
7. The Penguin Book of Lost Worlds: Volume Two — The second volume continues the survey of lost and forgotten civilizations, taking the reader further through the ruins and mysteries of cultures that rose and fell before recorded history could preserve them.
8. The Mystery of King Arthur — Elizabeth Jenkins — Elizabeth Jenkins's beautifully written exploration of the Arthurian legend, sifting the historical evidence for a real Arthur from the accumulated centuries of medieval romance and British mythology.
9. Ascent to Civilization: The Archaeology of Early Man — John Gowlett — An authoritative and richly illustrated survey of human prehistory, tracing the development of stone tools, fire, art, and language from our earliest ancestors to the threshold of civilization.
10. Power and Greed: A Short History of the World — Philippe Gigantès — A sweeping and compulsively readable single-volume history of the world organized around the dynamics of power and greed that have driven human events from the first city-states to the modern era.
11. Mankind and Mother Earth — Arnold Toynbee — Toynbee's final and most ambitious work, a narrative history of the world that traces the relationship between human civilization and the natural environment across five thousand years — completed shortly before his death.
12. The Enigma of Stonehenge — John Fowles and Barry Brukoff — John Fowles provides the literary reflection and Barry Brukoff the photographs in this meditation on Stonehenge's enduring mystery — a beautiful and thoughtful book about one of the world's most inscrutable monuments.
13. The Reason Why — Cecil Woodham-Smith — Woodham-Smith's masterful account of the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade, examining the military culture, personal rivalries, and institutional failures that sent six hundred cavalry to their deaths at Balaklava.
14. Letters and Papers from Prison — Dietrich Bonhoeffer — The letters and meditations written by the German theologian and anti-Nazi conspirator while imprisoned by the Gestapo — published posthumously and recognized as one of the most important theological documents of the twentieth century.
15. The Arabs — Peter Mansfield — A comprehensive and accessible survey of Arab history, culture, and politics from the emergence of Islam to the modern era, written by one of the foremost Western authorities on the Arab world.
16. Jerusalem as Jesus Knew It — John Wilkinson — An archaeologist's reconstruction of first-century Jerusalem, drawing on excavation, ancient texts, and geographical evidence to illuminate the physical world of the New Testament with scholarly precision.
17. The Greeks and Their Heritages — Arnold Toynbee — Toynbee's late study of Greek civilization and its enduring legacy, examining how Greek thought, art, and political ideas have shaped the Western world from antiquity to the twentieth century.