The gripping story of the years that ended the Great War and launched Europe and America onto the roller coaster of the twentieth century, Crucible is filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, and the absurdities of chance In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style. Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal--these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Revolutions and civil wars erupt across Europe. A red scare hits America. Women win the vote. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. The real becomes surreal. Encompassing both tragedy and humor, the celebrated author of 1913 brings immediacy and intimacy to this moment of deep historical transformation that molded the world we would come to inherit.

Geology coalesced as a discipline in the early part of the nineteenth century, with the coming together of many strands of investigation and thought. The theme of experimentation and/or instrument-aided observation is absent from most recent accounts of that time, which rely on an admixture of theory and field observations, informed by close examination of minerals. James Hutton emerged as the person who had it right with suggestion of a central heat source for Earth, while Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Neptunist supporters were derided as being blinded by overarching belief, as opposed to sober application of observed facts. However, despite several claims that Hutton had won the day, primary literature from both England and the Continent reveals that the question was by no means settled for decades after Hutton derided information derived from "looking into a little crucible." This Special Paper makes the case that it was just those parameters of heat, pressure, solution, and composition discovered in the laboratory that prevented resolution of the overriding questions about rock origin.

The Field is John B. Keane's fierce and tender study of the love a man can have for land and the ruthless lengths he will go to in order to obtain the object of his desire. It is dominated by Bull McCabe, one of the most famous characters in Irish writing today. An Oscar-nominated adaptation of The Field proved highly successful and popular worldwide, and starred Richard Harris, John Hurt, Brenda Fricker and Tom Berenger.

Little is known about Arabia in the sixth century, yet from this distant time and place emerged a faith and an empire that stretched from the Iberian peninsula to India. Today, Muslims account for nearly a quarter of the global population. A renowned classicist, G. W. Bowersock seeks to illuminate this obscure and dynamic period in the history of Islam—exploring why arid Arabia proved to be such fertile ground for Muhammad’s prophetic message, and why that message spread so quickly to the wider world. The Crucible of Islam offers a compelling explanation of how one of the world’s great religions took shape. “A remarkable work of scholarship.” —Wall Street Journal “A little book of explosive originality and penetrating judgment... The joy of reading this account of the background and emergence of early Islam is the knowledge that Bowersock has built it from solid stones... A masterpiece of the historian’s craft.” —Peter Brown, New York Review of Books

Annotation At the pivotal battles of Twin Tunnels and Chipyong-ni in February 1951, U.N. forces met and contained large-scale attacks by Chinese forces. Col. Paul Freeman and the larger-than-life Col. Ralph Monclar led the American 23rd Infantry Regiment and the French Bataillon de Coree, respectively. In this careful consideration of combat leadership at all levels, Kenneth E. Hamburger details the actions of these units, offering stories of men sustaining themselves and one another to the limits of human endurance. He analyzes the roles that training, cohesion, morale, logistics, and leadership play in success or failure on the front lines, providing a well-organized discussion that is sure to become a classic in the field of leadership studies. Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander, and Lt. Col. Ralph Monclar, the French Battalion commander, March 1951.

Arriving home, Commander Gray Pierce discovers his house ransacked, his pregnant lover missing, and his best friend's wife, Kat, unconscious on the kitchen floor. His one hope to find the woman he loves and his unborn child is Kat, the only witness to what happened. But the injured woman is in a semi-comatose state and cannot speak.

Take a whirlwind tour to the incredible planet of a million fantasy races, the Crucible, in this wild science fantasy anthology from the hit new game, KeyForge. Welcome to the Crucible – an artificial planet larger than our sun – an ever-growing patchwork of countless other worlds, filled with creatures, sentient beings and societies stolen from across the universe by the mythical Architects. Across this dizzying juxtaposition of alien biospheres, the enigmatic and godlike Archons seek to unlock the secrets at the heart of the Crucible. Everyone else is just trying to survive... Explore ten tales of adventure in a realm where science and magic team up, of discovery and culture clash, featuring mad Martian scientists, cybernetic surgeons, battle reenactors, elven thieves, private investigators, goblins, saurian monsters, and the newly arrived human Star Alliance.

Life had become too interesting on one world crawling across the rubble-strewn arm of a spiral galaxy. For as the system moved it swept up cosmic dust and debris. Ice ages and periods of tropical warmth followed one another very quickly. Meteors large and small fell constantly. Yesterday's fabled culture might be tomorrow's interesting hole in the ground. But society had always endured. Many thought it always would. Only the brightest scientists admitted that to survive, the race would have to abandon the planet. And to do that they'd have to invent spacecraft . . . This engrossing epic describes the development, over millennia, of a species from a culture of planet-bound medieval city-states to a sophisticated, technological civilization. With The Crucible of Time, John Brunner returns to the large-canvas science fiction he pioneered in his Hugo Award-winning, novel Stand on Zanzibar. First published in 1982.