Showing results by narrator "Chris Newman" in All Categories

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it's like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S...

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time comes an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own--featuring characters...

The Netherlands had a great century in the 1600s, until it all ended about three-fourths of the way along. Trading was all around; business was good. Their vast empire that reached across the world made money from spices, raw materials, metals, and so much more, with an extensive network of ships and merchants, and an entire army fleet. The Dutch Golden Era was a time in Dutch history varying from about 1588 (the start of the Dutch Republic) to 1672 (the "Catastrophe Year"), throughout which Dutch trade, science, and art, and the Dutch armed force, were amongst the world's best.

This is a great package of several titles in one book. The topics are all related to the history of the Netherlands.

Picasso’s work is famous. His art is intricate, yet bizarre. His personal life was filled with struggles, and his children weren’t any better off, creating substance abuse and suicidal headlines. Despite the dysfunctionality in his personal and family life, his artwork reflected something new and fresh. And in a variety of paintings, an underlying rebel message against totalitarian regimes. Having lived through many horrors of the Spanish war, as well as other 20th-century conflicts, the painter showed both style and morale in his works, and left a legacy studied by the masses.

Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, typically referred to as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in the Catholic Church, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje (today the capital of North Macedonia), which was then part of the Ottoman Empire's Kosovo Vilayet. After 18 years in Skopje, she went to Ireland and ultimately to India, where she spent the remainder of her life. Teresa formed the Missionaries of Charity in the year 1950, a Roman Catholic spiritual order with about 4,500 nuns active in about 133 nations in the year 2012.

One of the big lords of the drug cartels in Colombia is Pablo Escobar, a criminal who became a leader and expanded his influence on organized crime throughout the North and South American continents. With billions in his bank account, in cash, and in other assents, it’s not easy to ignore his name and the power he gained.

We’ve all had our humble beginnings, and we seemed so innocent as children. However, for some people, given their childhood and circumstances, and then the political or war-driven environment they face, it goes completely wrong. Such was the case for Rudolf Hoess, a cruel, murderous Nazi commander who had been brainwashed by the system that justified his aid in exterminating millions of Jews. Hoess was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp for the longest time. Learn more about what Rudolf Hoess did and why he has become so infamous.

Claude Monet has been the icon for the impressionist movement. His family life wasn’t perfect, but despite all obstacles, the French genius painter has left us a legacy and a new perspective on realism and technique in their purest forms. In this guide, we’ll go over his youth, his style, his methods, his most famous paintings, and many of the reasons why he made the decisions he made.

Meet Dr. Josef Mengele, a man with a twisted mind who had no compassion for the subjects he experimented on. His methods were cruel. His conclusions were inconclusive, and his sadism hardly knew any boundaries. At the time of WWII, Josef Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and cosmetic surgeon. He is known for his exploits at the Auschwitz prisoner-of-war camp, where he carried out deadly experiments on slaves, belonged to the team of medical professionals that chose victims for the gas chambers, and was just one of the medical professionals who administered the gas.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE of the TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR by THE NEW YORK TIMES * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * SLATE* THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER * Also named one of the BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by Vanity Fair, Time, NPR, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, Self, Vogue, The New Yorker, BBC, Vulture, and many...

Here we have it: We may be looking at the years 2020-2021 and think a certain virus has been bad for the world population. However, what happened in these two years is nothing, proportionally, to the hundreds of millions of people who got wiped out by rat infestations spreading insanitary bacteria, resulting in the disease and death of huge parts of the European population in the mid-centuries.

The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie; VOC), was a megacorporation created in the early 17th century by a government-directed merger of many competing Dutch trade services. You might think that Amazon or Google is big, but the VOC is still thought to be the world's biggest corporation in documented history.

There are doers and there are preachers. The people who were executing orders or abusing people in World War Two wouldn’t have been able to commit any atrocities if the country hadn’t warmed up to an inhumane narrative. That’s where propaganda came in. Propaganda has long been part of various countries and societies to make the population believe something, and to find culprits, create feelings of animosity, and glorify local leaders or military campaigns.

Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts, Surrey, on September 22, 1791 (which is now part of the London District of Southwark). He grew up in a bad home. His dad, James, was a Christian who came from the Glasite sect.

Pol Pot was a Cambodian political leader and revolutionary who worked as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 till 1979. He was a key member of Cambodia's communist party, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997, and acted as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. He was a Marxist-Leninist and a Khmer nationalist. Cambodia was changed into a one-party communist state under his management, and the Cambodian genocide happened.

The infamous double murder that inspired elementary school rhymes is a controversial one: partially because of the insidious nature and grossness of the crime and on the other hand because some people still believe the defendant is innocent. There are many reasons to believe why Lizzie killed both her parents with an axe, and there are some that could be used to argue that she didn’t.

There is no doubt that Michelangelo is one of the most influential artists of all time, together with some other Renaissance geniuses, such as Leonardo and Rafael. Michelangelo had a vision, a dream, and the talent to carry out those imaginations. His life, in our perspective, is a compilation of great works of art, architecture, sculptures, paintings, and intricate movements, contrast, colors, and anatomy of the human body. Religious and thematic symbolism are intertwined in his frescos and structures. Let us learn more about this great artist.

The war between the Protestant Netherlands, mostly led by William of Orange, and Catholic Spain was one of the marks in Dutch history. This war had determined the beliefs of many people who now lived along the three rivers that went through the country. Most of the people north of the rivers were Protestant, and most of the believers below them (even throughout Belgium as well) were Catholic. This was no coincidence. The war in the 1600s had become a symbol of Dutch resistance, independence, and the royal family (of Orange).

It doesn’t seem like Enver Pasha was a good man. His war crimes caused the deaths of millions of innocent citizens. Sure, during a war and a collapsing empire, you try to do what you can to stop losing, but I doubt anyone in their right mind can justify his actions, which included the slaughter of minorities in the Ottoman Empire during World War One, and even the Armenian Genocide. And to this day, the Turkish government is still somewhat reluctant to acknowledge the severity of that historical atrocity.