After being cast out of the Clan that had adopted her as a child by the new leader, Ayla shares a lonely valley with a herd of steppe ponies, harnesses their power, and discovers speech and love with Jondalar, a member of her own race.

This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love. Through Jean M. Auel's magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear. A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous...

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
“Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.”...

The Renaissance was a time of cultural rebirth. Allow students to learn all about life and education during the Renaissance in this engaging title. Readers will explore how artists created masterpieces and explored subjects like music, architecture, Renaissance religion, and new artistic movements like naturalism. The intriguing facts and beautiful images allow readers to see examples of Renaissance art from great artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo...

Ayla, the heroine first introduced in The Clan of the Cave Bear, is known and loved by millions of readers. Now, in The Plains of Passage, Ayla’s story continues.
Ayla and Jondalar set out on horseback across the windswept grasslands of Ice Age Europe. To the hunter-gatherers of their world—who have never seen tame animals—Ayla and Jondalar appear enigmatic and frightening. The mystery surrounding the woman, who...

How did the universe work? How did the human mind learn? What kind of government was best? These are some of the questions that people asked during the Age of Ideas, or the Enlightenment. Readers will learn about some of the most important aspects, ideas, and people of this time, including John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Copernicus, and Romanticism. Through intriguing facts and engaging sidebars, readers will discover the incredible outcomes of...

Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female "hysterics" and...

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human...

"From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: from the breakdown of diplomacy to the dramatic battles that occurred before the war bogged down in the trenches. World War I immediately evokes images of the trenches: grinding, halting battles that sacrificed millions of lives for no territory or visible gain. Yet the first months of the war, from the German invasion of Belgium to the Marne to Ypres, were utterly...