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Worlds at War by Anthony Pagden
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Worlds at War

The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

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Narrator John Lee

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Length 20 hours 36 minutes
Language English
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In the tradition of Jared Diamond and Jacques Barzun, prize-winning historian Anthony Pagden presents a sweeping history of the long struggle between East and West, from the Greeks to the present day.



The relationship between East and West has always been one of turmoil. In this historical tour de force, a renowned historian leads us from the world of classical antiquity, through the Dark Ages, to the Crusades, Europe's resurgence, and the dominance of the Ottoman Empire, which almost shattered Europe entirely. Pagden travels from Napoleon in Egypt to Europe's carving up of the finally moribund Ottomans—creating the modern Middle East along the way—and on to the present struggles in Iraq.



Throughout we learn a tremendous amount about what "East" and "West" were and are, and how it has always been competing worldviews and psychologies, more than religion or power grabs, that have fed the mistrust and violence between East and West. In Pagden's dark but provocative view, this struggle cannot help but go on.

Anthony Pagden has been a fellow of Merton College, Oxford; University Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge University; a fellow of King's College; and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a professor in the history and political science departments at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books on European imperialism and the European understanding of non-European cultures. Among his recent publications are Peoples and Empires and Europeans and the Rest of the World. He also contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. He lives in Los Angeles.

British narrator John Lee has read audiobooks in almost every conceivable genre, from Charles Dickens to Patrick O'Brian, and from the very real life of Napoleon to the entirely imagined lives of sorcerers and swashbucklers. He has won numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile in 2009. Lee is also an accomplished stage actor and wrote and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit.

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Reviews

"[Narrator John Lee's] linguistic skill exemplifies how the comfort of a reader on an international sea of words can render an equivalent pleasure to the listener.... [A] happy marriage of information and presentation." ---AudioFile Expand reviews
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale