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Hannibal and Scipio: Pocket Giants

Greg Fisher

In 218, Hannibal Barca, desperate to avenge the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War, launched an ambitious ground invasion of Italy. With just a small force, he crossed the Alps – a feat reckoned to be impossible – and pitted his polyglot army against Rome’s elite citizen infantry. At Cannae, in 216, Hannibal destroyed an 80,000-strong Roman force in one afternoon, delivering a blow unequalled in Roman history for half a millennium to come.The Romans had no answer to Hannibal until the young Scipio volunteered to take over Rome’s armies in Spain, which were close to defeat, and left leaderless by the death of Scipio’s own father and uncle. In the decade which followed, Scipio turned Rome’s desperate fortunes into a stunning victory over Carthage. The portrait of Hannibal and Scipio takes the reader through one of the greatest military campaigns in history, driven by two remarkable and fascinating men.

Albert Einstein: Pocket Giants

Andrew May

Everyone has heard of Albert Einstein and everyone knows that he was a genius. Yet only a few people understand his work. In fact, he was just one of many brilliant scientists grappling with the deepest problems of theoretical physics during the first half of the twentieth century. He may not have been the most important or influential of them – the point is arguable – but there is no doubt he was the most revolutionary. Almost single-handed, he transformed the way the world thinks about light, matter, space and time.

In the sixty years since his death Einstein has become a legend. The profound obscurity of his theories has contributed to this, as has his archetypal "mad scientist" appearance. His philosophical and political utterances – both real and imagined – are regularly used to clinch arguments online or in the pub. So how can a modern reader separate myth from reality? This short book attempts to do just that!

ANDREW MAY has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and a PhD in astrophysics from Manchester University. He went on to work in the shadowy world of defence science and now earns his living as a freelance writer and defence consultant. He is author of Isaac Newton pocket giant (2015).

Abraham Lincoln: Pocket Giants

Adam I. P. Smith

The President who 'freed' the slaves and held the Union together in the face of the slaveholding South's bid to create a separate Confederacy. The teller of ribald stories, and the author of the most sublime speeches in the English language. A clever, complex, secretive man who rose from frontier obscurity to become the central figure at the moment when the United States of America came close to disintegration.

Was Lincoln the 'Great Emancipator', whose wartime leadership helped free four million enslaved people? Or was he a nationalist who jumped late on the antislavery bandwagon? Was his intransigence the cause of much bloodshed? Or was he a pragmatist whose leadership minimised the destruction of the war?

This concise biography situates Lincoln in his time and place. A very human figure who, after his assassination by a leading Shakespearean actor, was turned into an icon.

Greek Heroes

Charles Kingsley

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli

The Posy Ring

Catherine Czerkawska

When antiques seller Daisy Graham inherits an ancient house on the Hebridean island of Garve, she’s daunted by its size and isolation. But the building, its jumble of contents, its wilderness of a garden and the island itself prove themselves so fascinating that she’s soon captivated. She’s also attracted to Cal Galbraith, who is showing an evident interest in the house and its new owner, yet she’s suspicious of his motives – with good reason, it seems.

In parallel with their story runs that of sixteenth-century cousins Mateo and Francisco, survivors from the ill-fated Spanish Armada who find safe passage to the island.There, one of them falls in love with the laird’s daughter. The precious gold posy (poesy) ring he gives her is found centuries later. Are its haunting engraved mottoes, un temps viendra and vous et nul autre, somehow significant now for Daisy and Cal?

The Curiosity Cabinet

Catherine Czerkawska

A novel sure to appeal to fans of Outlander. When Alys revisits the beautiful Scottish island of Garve after an absence of 25 years, she is captivated by the embroidered casket on display in her hotel. She discovers that it belongs to Donal, her childhood playmate, and soon they resume their old friendship.

Interwoven with the story of their growing love is the darker 18th-century tale of Henrietta Dalrymple, kidnapped by the formidable Manus McNeill and held on Garve against her will. Despite the 300 years separating them, the women are strongly connected: their parallel lives are linked by the cabinet and its contents, by the tug of motherhood and by the magic of the Hebridean island itself.

But Garve has its secrets, past and present. Donal must learn to trust Alys enough to confide in her and, like Henrietta before her, Alys must earn the right to belong.

Remove the Thorns From Your Life

John Wayfarer

All life contains elements conducive to suffering, the Buddha discovered on attaining Illumination. In one of history’s most successful records of service to humankind, he then dedicated his life to helping people alleviate the misery blighting their existence. The requisite effort, however, had to come from the individual him or herself, he stressed—“Buddhas (illumined people) can only point the way.”

A practical, commonsense guide to relief from suffering, based on 2500-year-old precepts of Buddhist wisdom but written in modern, non-esoteric style, has been released by Sunbury Press under the title Remove the Thorns From Your Life. The author uses the pen-name John Wayfarer on the grounds that “we are all wayfarers through life.” He thereby guides the reader, not as an ivory tower academic but as a fellow-traveler who, over many incarnations, has made and thus understands all the mistakes that the reader himself has made along the thorny path of life and faces the karma resulting from them.

The purpose of this work, in a nutshell, is to assist people suffering emotional distress (frequently manifesting in mental and even physical distress) by highlighting the main cause of suffering identified by Gautama Buddha (desire for things that cannot be attained or permanently retained), followed chapter by chapter by the Buddha’s eightfold strategy for dealing with the problem.

The work kicks off by setting out the reasons why it is safe for people of any or no religion to follow the Buddha’s guidelines and provides a brief account of his life. It then examines the cause of suffering and describes the Illumined One’s eightfold strategy for rising above it.

The practical exercises commence with the discipline of Right Meditation to get the reader started on gaining mind control, without which no progress is possible. Once this basis has been established, the work then proceeds to Right Effort—dealing with our daily chores and habits, purely as an exercise in applying willpower.

With these two tools, mind control and willpower, in hand, the work looks at Right Understanding—freedom from delusion—to establish in the reader a realistic understanding of the world as it is and ourselves as we are. An important part of this chapter relates to karma—that what we send around comes around, and thus that while we are the cause of our own problems, we also have the ability to create a future without problems.

The work then proceeds to Right Purpose—pointing out that we cannot build our lives without having established our purpose. Succeeding chapters deal with the practicalities of Right Speech and Right Conduct. Since our livelihoods play a great role in determining our happiness or lack thereof, the importance of Right Livelihood is then illustrated.

The work concludes with Right Mindfulness (attention, vigilance) as the early warning system enabling us to avoid putting a foot wrong and correct the mistakes already committed before they come back to bite us. 

Where the Tree Frogs Took Me

Maia Williamson

How encounters with strangers shaped a life of travel and beyond ~

We are all looking for ways to make our lives meaningful and often turn to those in our inner circles and communities for the direction. But what if that sense of meaning and perspective comes from complete strangers? And what if those random encounters were not so random after all? This book shows us how to embrace the messages and subsequent lessons we receive from the different people – often complete strangers – that we meet while out there in the world.

This collection of stories from over twenty years of travel shows what we can learn about the world we live in through greater empathy and understanding of the people we share it with. Each encounter we have, however, sad, humorous, strange or seemingly insignificant is part of the journey we are all on.

Where the Tree Frogs Took Me is for anyone who appreciates the diversity of the human experience and our reaction to it in all of its different forms. This book will resonate with people who are open to the notion of synchronicity and the significance of each encounter as meant to happen in order to create a change or shift in our lives.

BRAVO! The Case for Italian Musical Mastery

Guy Graybill

The Italians were so busy creating and performing superb music that they neglected to tell the great epic story of their wondrous achievement. With BRAVO! We hope to tell that story. The 1,000-year-old story begins, basically, with the work of a humble monk from the city of Arezzo. And this story has no end. If on one hand, we will never know the music of the Egyptians, of the Greeks, and of the Romans, we have come to know the music of every composer from the 12th Century to the present day, thanks to Guido s invention of the musical scale. As the story unfolds, we are rewarded with the many convincing superlatives forever tied to Italian musical endeavors. The first ten chapters deal with the Italian musical geniuses who theorized, made superb instruments, composed, performed, orchestrated, conducted, and sang for the enjoyment of listeners worldwide. The closing chapter gives a comprehensive look at the beautiful things that have happened in the Italian and American world of music. Each page of BRAVO! is full of surprising and fascinating details, and the title reminds us that the term, BRAVO!, is reserved only for topnotch performances.

Behind Barbed Wire and High Fences

Unknown

For three years, a Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines was home for Church of the Brethren missionaries Edward and Helen Angeny during WW II. Their tale of replacing murdered missionaries in China in 1940 and their subsequent imprisonment was aptly written into this memoir by Helen Angeny when she was 80 years old. Their internment included hunger as well as humor, frustration as well as joy, and threats as well as miracles. It also included the birth of their first child soon after imprisonment. The story ended well for the 500 civilian internees but only after MacArthur's troops accidentally came upon this POW group which had been previously unknown to the US government. Helen Angeny's reflections, as well as her soul, are revealed in this thought-provoking historical narrative.