When career criminal Terry Greene is sentenced to life for a murder he didn't commit, his wife has two choices. To walk away from the criminal empire he'd built up, or to take it over. To become as big a gangster as her husband ever was. So far as Samantha "Sam" Greene was concerned, there is no choice. All the family's assets are tied up in the business, and family means more to her than anything else in the world. But being a gangboss doesn't come easily to Sam, not when other criminals are trying to take over what's left of her husband's empire and she's not even sure which of his friends and associates she can trust.
One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next he’s a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it’s the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil—so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty.
From the glassworks of Murano to the commercial hub of Timbuktu--and through fearsome peril on land and sea--entrepreneurship, religion, gold fever, friendship and revenge fuel this rich historical romance from a masterful raconteur. In 1464, adventurer and merchant banker Nicholas van der Pole (hero of three previous Dunnett novels) returns to Venice to find his financial empire in jeopardy due to the Crusades and the onslaught of powerful, unscrupulous competitors.
At its peak in the nineteenth century, the British Empire was the largest empire ever known, governing roughly a quarter of the world's population. In Empire, Niall Ferguson explains how "an archipelago of rainy islands... came to rule the world," and examines the costs and consequences, both good and bad, of British imperialism.
The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal
Like preceding chronicles of the construction of the Panama Canal (Matthew Parker’s Panama Fever, 2008), Greene’s account focuses on its feats of engineering, but in this case, social engineering. Previously an author of a history about the American Federation of Labor, Greene includes the workers’ experience within the context of the creation of a community from scratch, and that, within the wider contexts of empire building and Progressivism.
