Лучшие книги Саймона Майкла Шамы

«У великого искусства ужасные манеры!» С первых строк этого драматичного повествования становится очевидно: знаменитый историк и популяризатор науки Саймон Шама не намерен примерять на себя роль авторитетного музейного гида, неспешно ведущего от шедевра к шедевру доверчивую группу жаждущих прикоснуться к прекрасному. А потому не надейтесь на легкую прогулку по музейным залам — вместо нее эксцентричный провожатый, ни секунды не помешкав на пороге, просто втолкнет вас в двери мастерской, где в этот самый момент является на свет одно из самых значимых произведений искусства. Возможно, перспектива стать свидетелем этого и лицом к лицу…

Непревзойденный мастер популярного исторического повествования Саймон Шама с блеском профессионального романиста и скрупулезностью профессионального историка создает динамичный и объемный образ Нидерландов XVII века, – тех времен, когда уроженец Лейдена Рембрандт ван Рейн, триумфально продемонстрировав, каких высот способна достичь голландская живопись, на многие века завоевал звание величайшего из живописцев. Немногие дошедшие до наших дней документально подтвержденные сведения о жизни и профессиональной деятельности художника виртуозно вплетены в пеструю ткань обширного и разнообразного исторического контекста. Коммерческая суматоха и…

Inside these pages lies the bloody epic of liberty, the British Iliad.
The second volume of Simon Schama's A History of Britain brings the histories of Britain's civil wars - full of blighted idealism, shocking carnage, and unexpected outcomes - startlingly to life. These conflicts were fought unsparingly between the nations of the islands - Ireland, England, and Scotland - and between parliament and the crown. Shattering the illusion of a "united kingdom," they cost hundreds of thousands of lives: a greater proportion of the population than died in the First World War.
When religious passion gave way to the equally consuming passion for profits, it became possible for the pieces of Britain to come together as the spectacularly successful business enterprise of "Britannia Incorporated." And in a few generations that business state expanded in a dizzying process that transformed what had been an obscure, off-shore footnote to Europe's great powers into the main event - the most powerful empire in the world.
Yet somehow, it was the "wrong empire." The British considered it a bastion of liberty, yet it was based on military force and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Africans. In America, the emptiness of British claims to protect "freedom" was thrown back into the teeth of colonial governors and redcoat soldiers, while the likes of Sam Adams and George Washington inherited the mantle of Cromwell.
Simon Schama grippingly evokes the horror of the battle, famine, and plague; the flames of burning cities; the pathos of broken families, with fathers and sons forced to choose opposing sides. But he also captures the intimacies of palace and parliament and the seductions of profit and pleasure. Geniuses like John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and Benjamin Franklin stalk vividly through his pages, but so do Scottish clansmen, women pamphleteers, and literate, eloquent African slaves like Olaudah Equiano.

Simon Schama, one the most celebrated historians of our day, brings the history of Britain to dramatic life in this landmark work. Schama reanimates historical figures and events, and draws them skillfully into a powerful and profound narrative that combines passion and scholarship with a superb sense of storytelling. At the Edge of the World, the first volume of Schama’s monumental work, moves from the birth of civilization to the Norman Conquest. It spans the religious wars and turbulence of the Middle Ages, the outbreak of the Black Plague, the reign of Edward I, the intrigues of the Tudors, and the clash between Elizabeth I and Mary,…

Simon Schama's magisterial new book encompasses over 1,500 years of Britain's history, from the first Roman invasions of the early seventeenth century, and the extraordinary reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Schama, the author of the highly acclaimed Citizens and The Embarrassment of Riches, is one of the most popular and celebrated historians of our day, and in this magnificent work he brings history to dramatic life with a wealth of stories and vivid, colorful detail, reanimating familiar figures and events and drawing them skillfully into a powerful and compelling narrative. Schama's perspective moves from the birth of civilization to the…

"История евреев: Обретение слов" - первая книга, открывающая многотомное издание, посвященное еврейской истории. Широта научных интересов автора, британского историка Саймона Шамы, его эрудированность, ироничный стиль и великолепный живой язык позволяют воспринимать созданный им фундаментальный труд как роман-эпос о вечном сопротивлении разрушению, об изобретательности в условиях подавления, о жизнеутверждении в самых безысходных обстоятельствах. Сюжет первого тома, охватывающего период от X века до н. э. и до 1492 года н. э., открывает перед читателем историю зарождения еврейского народа, рассказывает о формировании его национального самосознания, повествует о развитии самобытного еврейского мира, становящегося неотъемлемой частью других мировых культур.

Издание адресовано широкому кругу читателей, интересующихся мировой историей и культурой.

Вторая книга многотомного издания "История евреев" - "Осознание дома" - охватывает период с 1492 года до конца XIX века. Саймон Шама продолжает свой великолепный роман-эпос о бесконечном выживании народа в обществах, не допускавших полной интеграции евреев, об обмане и ненависти, о разрушительных погромах и изгнаниях, о вечно разбитых надеждах и о том, что где бы евреи ни оказывались и как бы много ни работали, все легко могло быть потеряно в одночасье. Именно начиная с Альгамбрского эдикта вектор еврейской истории был направлен на поиск места, где бы еврейский народ, осознающий себя единой нацией, мог свободно жить и исповедовать свою религию, не подвергаясь притеснениям. Оставаясь верным себе, автор показывает коллективную историю через судьбы отдельных людей, как знаменитых (будь то философ Спиноза, или композитор Мейербер, или Великий Магид, или узник Чертова острова Дрейфус), так и мало известных большой истории. Проходя сквозь революции Нового времени, сквозь изменения политической карты мира, сквозь экономическую и социальную модернизацию, подводя свое повествование вплотную к обострению антисемитизма и к формированию сионистского движения, Саймон Шама останавливается на пороге XX века, насыщенного сколь ужасными, столь и значительными событиями в жизни еврейского народа.
Издание адресовано широкому кругу читателей, интересующихся мировой историей и культурой.

Simon Schama’s great project continues and the Jewish story is woven into the fabric of humanity. Their search for a home where a distinctive religion and culture could be nourished without being marginalized suddenly takes on startling resonance in our own epoch of homelessness, wanderings, persecutions, and anxious arrivals. Volume 2 of The Story of the Jews epic tells the stories of many who seldom figure in Jewish histories: not just the rabbis and the philosophers but a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a general in Ming China; a boxer in Georgian England, a Bible showman in Amsterdam; a teacher of the deaf in eighteenth-century France,…

It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain.
Within these pages, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with spice and gems founder at sea.
And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians.
Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

Timothy West reads the second volume of Simon Schama’s compelling chronicle of the British Isles. The British wars began on the morning of 23 July 1637, heralding two hundred years of battles waged within and away from our isles. Most would be driven by religious or political conviction, as Republicans and Royalists, Catholics and Protestants, Tories and Whigs, and colonialists and natives vied for supremacy. Of those battles not fought on home territory, a great number took place across Europe, America, India and also at sea. Schama’s examination of this turbulent period reveals how the British people eventually united in imperial enterprise, forming what he calls ‘Britannia Incorporated’. The story of that change evokes the memory of such enduringly influential people as Oliver Cromwell, as well as lesser known but equally extraordinary individuals. A story of revolution and reaction, progress and catastrophe, this is a vivid account of two centuries which changed Britain.

The second volume of Simon Schama's acclaimed history of Britain, a magnificent companion to the History Channel's successful series

Simon Schama, one of the world's most distinguished historians, covers the most tumultuous eras of Britain's past in this second installment of his epic history of Britain. Schama's powerful, dramatic narrative focuses on political and social change from England's first ventures into the New World through periods of colonial expansion, radical scientific advancement, industrial revolution, and two World Wars.

'History clings tight but it also kicks loose,' writes Simon Schama at the outset of At the Edge of the World?, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain's past. And change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history. At its heart lie questions of compelling importance for Britain's future as well as its past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it?

Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives, depicted in Schama's brilliant portrait of the life of the British people.

In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art.

"A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times

"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times - or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease have lived side by side for millennia. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines.

The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science - it is political, cultural, and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, acclaimed historian Simon Schama unpacks the stories of the often-unknown individuals whose pioneering work changed the face of modern healthcare. Questioning why the occurrence of pandemics appears to be accelerating at an alarming rate, Schama looks into our impact on the natural world, and how that in turn is affecting us, all while interrogating how geopolitics has had a devastating effect on global health.

Inspirational and tragic by turns, these are stories of success and failure, of collaboration and of persecution, as humanity struggles to work together in the face of one of our most deadly shared enemies: the pandemic.

'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...'
With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever.
The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain.
Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript... "OK, OK, but what's art really for?"'

Вторая книга многотомного издания "История евреев" - "Осознание дома" - охватывает период с 1492 года до конца XIX века. Саймон Шама продолжает свой великолепный роман-эпос о бесконечном выживании народа в обществах, не допускавших полной интеграции евреев, об обмане и ненависти, о разрушительных погромах и изгнаниях, о вечно разбитых надеждах и о том, что где бы евреи ни оказывались и как бы много ни работали, все легко могло быть потеряно в одночасье. Именно начиная с Альгамбрского эдикта вектор еврейской истории был направлен на поиск места, где бы еврейский народ, осознающий себя единой нацией, мог свободно жить и исповедовать свою религию, не подвергаясь притеснениям. Оставаясь верным себе, автор показывает коллективную историю через судьбы отдельных людей, как знаменитых (будь то философ Спиноза, или композитор Мейербер, или Великий Магид, или узник Чертова острова Дрейфус), так и мало известных большой истории. Проходя сквозь революции Нового времени, сквозь изменения политической карты мира, сквозь экономическую и социальную модернизацию, подводя свое повествование вплотную к обострению антисемитизма и к формированию сионистского движения, Саймон Шама останавливается на пороге XX века, насыщенного сколь ужасными, столь и значительными событиями в жизни еврейского народа. Издание адресовано широкому кругу читателей, интересующихся мировой историей и культурой.

‘Great art has dreadful manners…
…The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock and proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.’ In inimitable style, our greatest historian and master storyteller Simon Schama makes an irresistible case for the power of art and its necessary place in our lives, exa

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

Simon Schama is famous both as a great scholar and as one of the UK's greatest popularizers of history, whose books and TV series have enthralled huge audiences through their gripping storytelling. "Citizens", his award-winning account of the French Revolution, has continued to be one of Penguin's most popular history titles since it was first published in 1989. This extract takes us into the heart of the revolution's ferment as the angry crowd storms the Bastille prison.

One of the great landmarks of modern history publishing, Simon Schama's "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution" is the most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution ever produced. "Monumental ...provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist". (Eugen Weber, "The New York Times Book Review"). "The most marvellous book I have read about the French Revolution". (Richard Cobb, "The Times"). "Dazzling - beyond praise - He has chronicled the vicissitudes of that world with matchless understanding, wisdom, pity and truth, in the pages of this marvellous book". (Bernard Levin, "Sunday Times"). "Provides an unrivalled impression of the currents and contradictions which made up this terrible sequence of events". (Antony Beevor, "Express"). Simon Schama is University Professor in Art History and History at Columbia University in New York, and one of the best-known scholars in Britain in any field. He is the prize-winning author of numerous books, including "Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)", "Landscape and Memory", "Rembrandt's Eyes" and three volumes of "A History of Britain". He is also the writer-presenter of historical and art-historical documentaries for BBC Television. He lives outside New York City with his wife and children.