Though the Czech Republic is a young nation, the areas within and just outside its modern borders boast an ancient and intricate past. A History of the Czech Lands provides one of the most complete historical accounts of this region to date. This history begins in the Neolithic era and follows the development of the state as it transformed into the Kingdom of Bohemia during the ninth century, into Czechoslovakia after World War I, and finally into the Czech Republic. Such a tumultuous political past arises in part from a fascinating native people, and A History of the Czech Lands profiles the Czechs in great detail, delving into past and present traditions and explaining how generation after generation adapted to a perpetually changing government and economy. In addition, the authors examine the many minorities that now call these lands home—Jews, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others—and how each group’s migration to the region contributed to life in the Czech Republic today.
 
The second edition includes sixty new photographs and a new chapter detailing the transformation of this post-communist country into a member of the European Union. The only study in English of this scope and ambition, A History of the Czech Lands is essential for scholars of Slavic, Central, and East European studies and a must-read for those who trace their ancestry to these lands.

The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. For young people, however, life on the street may be merely a temporary stage in their lives. This book tells of homelessness among young people—the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face.
           
Young homeless people describe a life in which they lose their privacy, the possibility to satisfy their basic needs, and, often, their self-respect in order to survive. The latter half of the book considers what happens when these young people return to society and how they navigate difficulties as they attempt to leave their past behind. Often, the struggle is not solely one of coping with the stigma of their experience; rather, they must face the legacies that linger long after their lives have turned a corner: drug addiction, criminal records, and accumulated debt.
           
Based on interviews with homeless people in Prague, Homelessness as an Alternative Existence of Young People paints an authentic picture of this social group and documents the often unseen social consequences of the transformation to capitalism from communism.

Peter Ackroyd’s writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London—its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called “London writers,” this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal.

This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd’s novels, in which his ideas about the city’s nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London’s past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants’ psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.