Countess Athena & Godfather’s Twins is the first book of a four-book series. This book series illustrates eighty years of Sicilian family life - their love and devotion, traditions, commitment and loyalty, royal families merging, wealth, survival, and crime. All these factors had an influence on the world, both in America and abroad. The author began to research and document five generations of historical events in an effort to learn what happened to Duke Vito and Duchess Marie Cornino twenty years ago, along with their eight grandchildren who were four of the five sets of twins, and the great-grandchildren of Countess Athena Marie Castellammare; and Duke Don Vito Cornino, the godfather of Palermo, Sicily. Braron Tony Zibelli, his wife Countess Florence Zibelli, along with seven other family members and their security, domestic, and medical staff, as well as their two pilots, were last seen in Zurich, Switzerland in August 2001, while doing some banking business. They mysteriously disappeared and no one has seen or heard from them since. Rumors have spread that they were in a plane crash; others say they were in a shipwreck; and still others have said they are on a private island in the South Pacific . . . another theory is they were kidnapped by the Russian Mafia.

The definitive history of one of England’s greatest houses: Althorp, where for five hundred years the Spencer family have made their home.

One of the most important accounts of the Middle Ages, the history of Niketas Choniates describes the Byzantine Empire from 1118 to 1207. Niketas provides an eyewitness account of the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade.

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

The third novel in Serena Valentino's (Fairest of All, Beast Within) "VILLAINS" trilogy, featuring the story of the Little Mermaid from the perspective of the sea witch Ursula

"This publication accompanies the exhibition Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, held at the Walters Art Museum from October 14, 2012, to January 21, 2013, and at the Princeton University Art Museum from February 16 to June 9, 2013."

A remarkable history of jewelry told through the beguiling stories of the royal families of Italy, Greece, Belgium, Russia, and Yugoslavia. Renowned jewelry designer Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia recounts the enthralling exploits of his beloved family members and describes their extraordinary jewelry collections. Among the many royals whose stories are richly illustrated in this volume are his paternal grandparents Prince Regent Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia; Grand Duke Vladimir and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia; his great-grandparents Prince Nicolas and Princess Helen of Greece as well as his maternal grandparents King Umberto II and Queen Marie-José of Italy. The exquisite photography and family albums of Grand Duchess Elena of Russia (later Princess of Greece and Prince Dimitri's great-grandmother) present remarkable never-before-seen images of prerevolutionary life of the Russian imperial family, their court, and their many European royal family members and friends. This luxurious tome also includes exclusive and previously unpublished designs by Prince Dimitri, which juxtapose uncommon materials and color in imaginative yet timeless forms.

This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world. From a consistently comparative perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics.