Andrew Beattie

a cultural history

The Danube

This guidebook describes 38 walking routes in Ticino, the Swiss canton with a Mediterranean twist. Towering snowcapped mountains and lush, narrow valleys overlook stylish lakeside resorts with palm-fringed promenades and handsome Italianate architecture. It's not just the Italian language that sets Ticino apart: the food, sunny weather and stunning landscapes attract millions of visitors to this part of the southern Alps every year. As for the walks, it's the variety - as much as the fabulous scenery - that provides the draw. In this book you'll find everything from level walks along the shores of Lakes Lugano and Maggiore, to more challenging trails through craggy, forested valleys with gushing waterfalls and ancient stone-built villages, to isolated mountain huts right at the permanent snowline. If you think you already know Switzerland, but haven't walked in Ticino, a stunning experience awaits you - and all of the routes are easily accessible through a network of buses, trains, funiculars, cable cars and chairlifts.

Lugano, Locarno and the Mountains of Southern Switzerland

Walking in Ticino

Timothy Pepper

The Rough Guide to Syria is the essential guide to this compact but culturally rich Middle Eastern country. Features include: Thorough accounts of all the monuments, from the ancient remains at Palmyra and Ugarit to stately mosques and hilltop crusader castles. Practical advice on shopping in the souks of Damascus and Aleppo and exploring the desert plains. Informed guidance on how to travel independently, and where to eat and sleep, in every price range. Detailed background on the country's history, culture, architecture and politics.

The Rough Guide to Syria

IBM Redbooks

Jon Tate

Christian Burns

Libor Miklas

Torben Jensen

Data is the new currency of business, the most critical asset of the modern organization. In fact, enterprises that can gain business insights from their data are twice as likely to outperform their competitors; yet, 72 percent of them have not started or are only planning big data activities. In addition, organizations often spend too much money and time managing where their data is stored. The average firm purchases 24% more storage every year, but uses less than half of the capacity it already has. A member of the IBM® Storwize® family, IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Data Platform is a storage virtualization system that enables a single point of control for storage resources to help support improved business application availability and greater resource utilization. The objective is to manage storage resources in your IT infrastructure and to make sure they are used to the advantage of your business, and do it quickly, efficiently, and in real time, while avoiding increases in administrative costs. Virtualizing storage with SVC Data Platform helps make new and existing storage more effective. SVC Data Platform includes many functions traditionally deployed separately in disk systems. By including these in a virtualization system, SVC Data Platform standardizes functions across virtualized storage for greater flexibility and potentially lower costs. SVC Data Platform functions benefit all virtualized storage. For example, IBM Easy Tier® optimizes use of flash storage. And IBM Real-time CompressionTM enhances efficiency even further by enabling the storage of up to five times as much active primary data in the same physical disk space. Finally, high-performance thin provisioning helps automate provisioning. These benefits can help extend the useful life of existing storage assets, reducing costs. Integrating these functions into SVC Data Platform also means that they are designed to operate smoothly together, reducing management effort. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we discuss the latest features and functions of the SVC 2145-DH8 and software version 7.3, implementation, architectural improvements, and Easy Tier.

IBM SAN Volume Controller 2145-DH8 Introduction and Implementation

The story of King Arthur is one of the best known in English history: he was the boy who was schooled by Merlin and who claimed his right to lead the Britons against the Saxons by drawing a sword from a stone; later, he was the warrior who congregated with his knights around a Round Table and who was given a magical sword, Excalibur, by the Lady of the Lake. These stories have been told and re-told hundreds of times - and over the centuries the actual figure of Arthur has retreated into obscurity, with many scholars suggesting that he was a mythical figure who never actually existed. Arthur has been the subject of thousands of books; yet this one tells his story in a way that is wholly new - through the places where the events surrounding his life supposedly unfolded. From Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, Arthur's reputed place of birth, to Slaughterbridge in the same county, one of the contenders for the location of his final battle against the Saxons, and from Cadbury Castle in Somerset, one of the numerous claimants to be the site of Arthur's fort of Camelot, to Glastonbury, where in 1191 his grave was reputedly discovered by local monks, the trail through some of England's most historic places throws a whole new light on this most compelling of legends.

Following in the Footsteps of King Arthur

Rough Guides

Alice Park

Richard Woodruff

This in-depth coverage of Switzerland's local attractions and sights takes you to the most rewarding spots - from the Swiss Alps to quaint villages - and stunning color photography brings the land to life on the pages. With a beautiful new cover, amazing tips and information, and key facts, The Rough Guide to Switzerland is the perfect travel companion. Discover Switzerland's highlights, with expert advice on exploring the best sites, participating in festivals, and exploring local landmarks through extensive coverage of this fascinating area. Easy-to-use maps; reliable advice on how to get around; and insider reviews of the best hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, and shops for all budgets ensure that you won't miss a thing. Make the most of your time with The Rough Guide to Switzerland.

The Rough Guide to Switzerland

The story of the Princes in the Tower is well known: the grim but dramatic events of 1483, when the twelve-year-old Edward Plantagenet was taken into custody by his uncle, Richard of Gloucester, and imprisoned in the Tower of London along with his younger brother, have been told and retold hundreds of times. The true events of that year remain shrouded in mystery, and the end of the young princes’ lives are an infamous part of the War of the Roses and Richard III’s reign. Yet little about their lives is commonly known. Following the Footsteps of the Princes of the Tower tells the story in a way that is wholly new: through the places where the events actually unfolded. It reveals the lives of the princes through the places they lived and visited. From Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London itself, and from the remote English castles of Ludlow and Middleham to the quiet Midlands town of Stony Stratford, the trail through some of England's most historic places throws a whole new light on this most compelling of historical dramas.

Following in the Footsteps of the Princes in the Tower

Visitor's Guide Czechoslovakia

Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.

A Cutlural Guide

Prague

After Germany's reunification in 1989-90, the country faced not only the history and consequences of the nation's division during the Cold War but also the continuing burdensome legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. This book explains why concerns that the Nazi past would be marginalized by the more recent Communist past proved to be misplaced. It examines the delicate East–West dynamics and the notion that the West sought to impose "victor's justice" (or history) on the East. More specifically, it examines, for the first time, the history and significance of two parliamentary commissions of inquiry created in the 1990s to investigate the divided past after 1945 and its effects on the reunified country. Not unlike "truth commissions" elsewhere, these inquiries provided an important forum for renegotiating contemporary Germany's relationship with multiple German pasts, including the Nazi period and the Holocaust. The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War.

Andrew Beattie

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