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[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|title=The Explorer Gene
|author=Tom Cheshire
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=''The Explorer Gene'' relates the remarkable story of three generations of the Piccard family, each of whom managed to push the boundaries of travel and break new frontiers. The grandfather, Auguste Piccard was the first human to enter the stratosphere, using en experimental balloon of his own invention. His later work, designing submarines, enabled his son Jacques to become the first person to descend to the bottom of the infamous Mariana trench, setting a world record for the deepest dive. Grandson Bertrand became the first person to fly around the world in a balloon and now seeks to break new records by means of a solar-powered craft that he intends to pilot all the way around the earth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780720890</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold
|summary=There are several ways of telling the history of the republic of Venice, which is generally regarded as the first great economic and naval power of the western world. Strathern has chosen to do so largely through the lives of various famous (and also infamous) people from Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century to what he calls its destruction, 'both political and symbolic', at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. On the whole, the major events such as its wars are covered fairly briefly. An exception, fittingly enough, is made in the case of a chapter on the war which began its decline in the fifteenth century, when it tried to hold Thessalonica against the Ottomans, and sent ships to help defend Constantinople against the Turkish army but found itself heavily defeated in the subsequent lengthy war, as a result of which it lost most of its possessions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951921</amazonuk>
}}
