Bobby Northington had nothing to lose but his chains. A $5.50-an-hour production worker at Hambleton-Hill Publishing in Nashville, Tenn., Northington had been on the job three days. Early in the afternoon of July 12, 1995, he rose from his seat, walked about ten feet to a colleague to give her a piece of chewing gum and immediately returned to his workstation. His supervisor then approached him with a chain and padlocked him to his desk. Amused, she laughed and said that she should now finally be able to get some production out of him. He was kept that way for 40 minutes, a fitting image of life on the job today.

Northington worked the rest of the day, then resigned and filed suit against his company and supervisor for false imprisonment, outrageous conduct and for creating an extreme and abusive work environment. Some people just don't have a sense of humour. In response to the allegations, Hambleton-Hill Publishing denied any wrongdoing. The company said it immediately checked into the charges and found conflicting reports. Though the case is still pending, the company said as a matter of policy it does not approve the activity alleged in the suit -- at least not without the supervisor completing all of the requisite forms in triplicate.

Welcome to the wonderful world of work. From the moment God threw Adam's sorry ass out of Eden and told him to go work for a living, we have toiled to get our bread from the sweat of our brows. For many of us, the hot sun may have been replaced by the harsh glow of fluorescent bulbs, the green fields by grey cubicles and the physical strain by that unique brand of torment that could only come from working for someone stupider than ourselves, but it's work just the same.

If the existentialists are right -- that action defines being -- then we are what we do and what we do is work. It defines us and consumes us. When we are not at work, we are driving to it or escaping from it, doing it at home or preparing for it. If our struggle for the legal tender has put us a bit on edge these days so that we go home and yell at the kids or kick the dog now and then, that's too bad. But it's part of making a living and they probably deserve it anyway.

Jason Goodwin, a young English journalist, writes history as if it were today's breaking news, and with Lords of the Horizon, he delivers an anecdote-filled and breezy account of the long, troubled career of the Ottoman Empire. That empire endured for nearly 600 years and embraced not only a large territory--stretching, at one point, from the border of Iran to the gates of Vienna--but also hundreds of ethnic groups and three dozen nations. United under the banner of a tolerant form of Islam, the Ottoman Turks forged a culture that, Goodwin writes, "was such a prodigy of pep, such a miracle of human ingenuity, that contemporaries felt it was helped into being by powers not quite human--diabolical or divine, depending on their point of view."

Drawing on memoirs by European visitors as well as standard histories of the era, Goodwin traces the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the 14th-century collapse of the Byzantine state to its centuries-long decline and final collapse at the end of World War I. Along the way, he writes of the Ottomans' addiction to wealth (and to hiding their gold in fabulous hoards), the pleasure they took in holding picnics in their lush cemeteries, and the prowess of their elite military both in battle and in organised crime. ("The janissaries were magnificent extortionists," Goodwin notes. "People paid them not to burn their homes and business, then they paid them to come and put the fires out.") Full of vivid detail, Goodwin's narrative makes for an enjoyable introduction to this historically influential, but little understood, culture. © Amazon.com

What Kirkus Reviews says:
A delightfully picaresque history, brimming with memorable anecdotes and outrageous personalities. English travel writer Goodwin guides us on a highly impressionistic journey. Throughout, Goodwin relishes the exotic, the bizarre, the picturesque. In explaining the decline of Ottoman military virtue, he cites Sultan Ibrahim, who overindulged in drink and the harem, where he ``rode his girls like horses through rooms lined in fur.'' An elegantly written, thoroughly entertaining work of popular history.