Fort Morgan Public Library

A collection of nine stories. In At the Auction of the Rubby Slippers, the author reflects on the role of auctioneers in establishing "the value of our pasts, of our future, of our lives," while an allegory on the immigrant experience is entitled Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship.

"The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor... To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiance back in Holland. But Jacob's original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter...

"Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin's means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing "unprecedented" about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before...

A romance in China featuring Miranda Grant, a 40-year-old widow from Colorado on a business trip to negotiate a knitting contract. She meets Yuan Li, 55, a half-American businessman. The food and the sights are great, but the lack of freedom takes its toll.

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game...

"Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world today. In the face of massive social changes across three continents, radical new forms of government emerged; mighty wars were fought over trade, religion, and ideology; and new faiths were ruthlessly employed to unify vast empires. The histories of Rome and China, Greece and India--the stories...

"Follow an epic story of the Viking Age that traces the historical trail of an ancient piece of jewelry found in a Viking grave in England to its origins thousands of miles east in India. An acclaimed bioarchaeologist, Catrine Jarman has used cutting-edge forensic techniques to spark her investigation into the history of the Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood...

From the front page of The New York Times to YouTube, Dr. Wafa Sultan has become a force radical Islam has to reckon with. For the first time, she tells her story and what she learned, first-hand, about radical Islam in A God Who Hates, a passionate memoir by an outspoken Arabic woman that is also a cautionary tale for the West. She grew up in Syria in a culture ruled by a god who hates women. "How can such a culture be anything but barbarous?", Sultan...

Discusses the history of encounters between East and West over the Silk and Spice Routes and how these affected cultures and civilizations for centuries.