Concise Illustrated Book of Steam Trains by First Glance Books
First Glance Books|48 pages|1996-08|ISBN:1856272222|PDF|15 Mb.

Description: This book brings to light Russia's undeservedly-obscure military past, rectifying the tendency of American and Western military historians to neglect the Russian side of things. Russia, as both a Western and non-Western society, challenges our thinking about Western military superiority. Russia has always struggled with backwardness in comparison with more developed powers, at some times more successfully than others. The imperatives of survival in a competitive international environment have, moreover, produced in Russian society a high degree of militarization. While including operational and tactical detail that appeals to military history enthusiasts, this book simultaneously integrates military history into the broader themes of Russian history and draws comparisons to developments in Europe. The book also challenges old assumptions about the Russian military. Russian military history cannot be summed up simply in a single stock phrase, whether perennial incompetence or success only through stolid, stoic defense; it also shows numerous examples of striking offensive successes. Stone traces Russia's fascinating military history, and its long struggle to master Western military technology without Western social and political institutions. It covers the military dimensions of the emergence of Muscovy, the disastrous reign of Ivan the Terrible, and the subsequent creation of the new Romanov dynasty. It deals with Russia's emergence as a great power under Peter the Great and culminating in the defeat of Napoleon. After that triumph, the book argues, Russia's social and economic stagnation undermined its enormous military power and brought catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War. The book then covers imperial Russia's long struggle to reform its military machine, with mixed results in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I. The Russian Revolution created a new Soviet Russia, but this book shows the continuity across that divide. The Soviet Union's interwar innovations and its harrowing experience in World War II owed much to imperial Russian precedents. A superpower after the war, the Soviet Union's military might was purchased at the expense of continuing economic backwardness. Paradoxically, the very militarization intended to provide security instead destroyed the Soviet Union, leaving a new Russia behind the West economically. Just as there was a great deal of continuity after 1917, this book demonstrates how the new Russian military has inherited many of its current problems from its Soviet predecessor. The price that Russia has paid for its continued existence as a great power, therefore, is the overwhelming militarization of its society and economy, a situation it continues to struggle with.

Jeffrey A Lockwood " Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War"
Oxford University Press, USA | 2008-10-10 | 400 pages | PDF | 3,3 MB

The emir of Bukhara used assassin bugs to eat away the flesh of his prisoners. General Ishii Shiro during World War II released hundreds of millions of infected insects across China, ultimately causing more deaths than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. These are just two of many startling examples found in Six-legged Soldiers, a brilliant portrait of the many weirdly creative, truly frightening, and ultimately powerful ways in which insects have been used as weapons of war, terror, and torture.

James J. O'Donnell " The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History"
Ecco | 2008-09-01 | 448 pages | PDF | 4,4 MB

The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. It was a looking-glass world, where some Romans idealized the Persian emperor while barbarian kings in Italy and France worked tirelessly to save the pieces of the Roman dream they had inherited. At the center of the old Roman Empire, in his vast and pompous Constantinople palace, the emperor Justinian, with too little education and too much religion, set out to restore his empire to its glories. Step by step, the things he did to bring back the past sealed the doom of his entire civilization.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press | 184 pages | 2008-10-31| 0521878659 | PDF | 2,5 Mb


In The Construction of Authority in Ancient Rome and Byzantium, Sarolta Takács examines the role of the Roman emperor, who was the single most important law-giving authority in Roman society. Emperors had to embody the qualities or virtues espoused by Rome's ruling classes. Political rhetoric shaped the ancients' reality and played a part in the upkeep of their political structures. Takács isolates a reoccurring cultural pattern, a conscious appropriation of symbols and signs (verbal and visual) belonging to the Roman Empire. She shows that many contemporary concepts of "empire" have Roman precedents, which are reactivations or reuses of well-established ancient patterns. Showing the dialectical interactivity between the constructed past and present, Takács also focuses on the issue of classical legacy through these virtues, which are not simply repeated or adapted cultural patterns, but are tools for the legitimization of political power, authority, and even domination of one nation over another.

James L. Haley “Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait"
University of Oklahoma Press | 1997-09 | 453 pages | HTML | 4,51 MB

Graham Webster “The Roman Imperial Army: Of the First and Second Centuries A.D."
University of Oklahoma Press | 1998-03 | 343 pages | HTML | 4,35 MB

Review
This book is probably one of the defenitive works on the Roman legions in the English language today. This is not hyperbole. Some would find this work to be dry, but it isn't intended for popular entertainment. Through all the editions it has remained a meticulously researched piece about that most famous, or infamous, of Roman institutions-the Legion. If one is looking for a light read, the equivlant of the college survey class, then don't read this book. But if one has a genuine interest in all things Roman and reading about helmets, sandals, and other assorted minutae then this is for you. Personally I think this book is excellent and I've felt this way for the past twenty years.