The Price is Wrong: Understanding What Makes a Price Seem Fair and the True Cost of Unfair Pricing by Sarah Maxwell
An in-depth look at fair pricing practices and their affect on our everyday lives
Certainly consumers today are concerned about the unfairness of gasoline prices. And even if these concerns subside, the focus on fair pricing will shift to other areas such as the unfair costs of health care, mobile phones, prescription drugs, a college education, real estate, or hotel rooms. In The Price Is Wrong, pricing expert Sarah Maxwell explains the psychological and sociological basis of fair pricing and reveals how this issue affects our everyday lives. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, this book shows readers how unfair pricing causes an extreme emotional response. Throughout the book, Maxwell skillfully explains what makes a price seem wrong, the social norms of fair pricing, and the true cost of unfair pricing. (Amazon.Com)

Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power by J.A.S. Evans
Review
'A lucid, thorough and reliable introduction to the age of Justinian for students of the Byzantine World.' - Journal of Roman Studies (Amazon.Com)

Russian Identities: A Historical Survey by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky
This book investigates the question of Russian identity, looking at changes and continues over a huge territory, many centuries, and a variety of political, social, and economic structures. Its main emphases are on the struggle against the steppe peoples, Orthodox Christianity, autocratic monarchy, and Westernization. (Amazon.Com)

The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650-1831 by John P. LeDonne
At its height, the Russian empire covered eleven time zones and stretched from Scandinavia to the Pacific Ocean. Arguing against the traditional historical view that Russia, surrounded and threatened by enemies, was always on the defensive, John P. LeDonne contends that Russia developed a long-term strategy not in response to immediate threats but in line with its own expansionist urges to control the Eurasian Heartland. LeDonne narrates how the government from Moscow and Petersburg expanded the empire by deploying its army as well as by extending its patronage to frontier societies in return for their serving the interests of the empire. He considers three theaters on which the Russians expanded: the Western (Baltic, Germany, Poland); the Southern (Ottoman and Persian Empires); and the Eastern (China, Siberia, Central Asia). In his analysis of military power, he weighs the role of geography and locale, as well as economic issues, in the evolution of a larger imperial strategy. Rather than viewing Russia as peripheral to European Great Power politics, LeDonne makes a powerful case for Russia as an expansionist, militaristic, and authoritarian regime that challenged the great states and empires of its time. (Amazon.Com)

History of the Later Roman Empire: From the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian by J. B. Bury