Yale University Press

The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the gulags to become Russia's much-feared crime class: the vory v zakoneMark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that...

"Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies,...

"Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these writings from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust in the words of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, this anthology comprises reportage, diaries, prose, poems, jokes, and...

"After Germany's humiliating World War II defeat, numerous German generals published memoirs claiming that their country's brilliant military leadership had been undermined by the Fuhrer's erratic decision making. The author of three highly acclaimed books on the era, Stephen Fritz upends this characterization of Hitler as an ill-informed fantasist...

"Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley's ""The Doors of Perception"", after which the word ""psychedelic"" was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples. Mescaline was isolated in 1897...

"This richly illustrated publication explores the full career of the hugely influential and endlessly fascinating French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). A pioneer whose creative output was predicated on a fundamental questioning of what art is, Duchamp is well known despite remaining mysterious as an artist, owing to his elusive persona...