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From the bestselling, prize-winning author Linden MacIntyre comes an engrossing, page-turning exploration of the little-known life of Sir Hugh Tudor. Appointed by his friend Winston Churchill to lead the police in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, Tudor met civil strife and domestic terrorism with indiscriminate state-sanctioned murder—changing the course of Irish history. After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, Minister of War in Lloyd George’s cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict—one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor was directing a police force waging a brutal campaign against rebel “terrorists,” one he was determined to win at all costs—including utilizing police death squads and inflicting brutal reprisals against IRA members and supporters and Sinn Féin politicians. Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. And why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland? Linden MacIntyre has spent four years tracking Tudor through archives, contemporaries’ diaries and letters, and the body count of that Irish war. In An Accidental Villain, he delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause—and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion. |
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"[A] magisterial tale of how the Anishinaabe Odawa lived through and shaped the history of North America and the early modern world." —Kathleen DuVal, professor of history, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill In  Masters of Empire , the historian Michael McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg who lived along Lakes Michigan and Huron were equally influential. McDonnell charts their story, and argues that the Anishinaabeg have been relegated to the edges of history for too long. Through remarkable research into 19th-century Anishinaabeg-authored chronicles, McDonnell highlights the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great tribes of North America, and how Europeans often played only a minor role in their stories. McDonnell reminds us that it was native people who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of trade and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. And as empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial role in the making of early America. Through vivid depictions of early conflicts, the French and Indian War, and Pontiac's Rebellion, all from a native perspective,  Masters of Empire  overturns our assumptions about colonial America and the origins of the Revolutionary War. By calling attention to the Great Lakes as a crucible of culture and conflict, McDonnell reimagines the landscape of American history. "Insightful and evocative,  Masters of Empire  compels us to rethink colonial America by restoring native peoples to the center of the story." —Alan Taylor, author of American Republics |
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Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own. Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw, and relatable moments, like a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child’s teeth. In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world’s first museum, and a working mother struggling with “the juggle” in 1900 BCE. Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the world’s first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy. With breathtaking intimacy and grace, Al-Rashid brings their lives—with all their anxieties, aspirations, and intimacies—vividly close to our own. |
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The memoirs of a Jewish-American soldier who is taken as a POW by the Germans and survives against all odds. Ivan Goldstein was a nineteen-year-old green-as-grass soldier heading into his first battle: the Battle of the Bulge, World War II's fiercest engagement between the American army and Hitler's army. A bow gunner on a Sherman tank, Private Goldstein was only hours into his first battle when his tank was hit by an enemy shell, and he was almost killed. Goldstein escapes with his life . . . only to be captured by the Germans. This could be the story of many young men from what has rightly been called "the Greatest Generation," but Goldstein is not any young man. He is an American Jew. And when a German officer learns this, the officer says, "In the morning, take the Jew out and shoot him." What follows is an epic story of survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds that is sure to engage everyone interested in the war against the Third Reich. |
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THE BELOVED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[A] narrative of unfathomable courage" ― Wall Street Journal The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris. "I almost didn't finish this book. Not because it wasn't extraordinary—but because it was too extraordinary. Because somewhere around the third chapter, I realized I was holding my breath, terrified that if I exhaled too loudly, these nine women might disappear like smoke, like so many others did ...They made promises to each other's children they'd never met, memorized addresses of families they might never find, carried letters for lovers who were probably already dead. They survived not in spite of love but because of it." — The Book Nook The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments. They were arrested by French police, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. They were subjected to a series of French prisons and deported to Germany. The group formed along the way, meeting at different points, in prison, in transit, and at Ravensbrück. By the time they were enslaved at the labor camp in Leipzig, they were a close-knit group of friends. During the final days of the war, forced onto a death march, the nine chose their moment and made a daring escape. Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative from Gwen Strauss is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times. |
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans. |
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A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning “A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan, bringing a battered city roaring back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over. The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing . And a cast of outsized characters—Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer—would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies. The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened. |
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“A book that is as deeply humane and profoundly rendered as any I’ve read about Afghanistan, or any other war.” —Elliot Ackerman, New York Times Book Review From one of the great foreign correspondents of our time, author of some of the most essential reporting from Afghanistan from before 9/11 to the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, the first full accounting of that entire era, combining previously published dispatches and new reporting into a single epic tapestry Jon Lee Anderson first reported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, covering the US-backed mujahideen’s insurrection against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, he was again on the ground as an early eyewitness to the new war launched by the US against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies. His reportage from the first year of the war won a number of awards and was published in book form as The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan . At the time, the American military had prevailed on the battlefield, and the newfound peace seemed to offer a precious space for Afghan society to restore itself and to forge a democratic future. But all was not well: Osama bin Laden was still in hiding, the Taliban were stealthily reorganizing for a comeback, and the United States was about to turn its attention to Iraq. To Lose a War collects Anderson’s writing from Afghanistan over a near-quarter-century span. Containing the stories from The Lion’s Grave and all of those he published since, as well as important writing appearing here for the first time, the book offers a chronological account of a monumental tragedy as it unfolds. The colossal waste, missed signals, and wishful thinking that characterized the twenty-year arc of the US-led war in Afghanistan have consecrated it as one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the modern era, and a bellwether of a larger American imperial decline. |
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From the author of the acclaimed international bestseller Lawrence in Arabia , a stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism. On November 16th, 1977, at a state dinner in the White House, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising his “enlightened leadership” and extolling Iran as “a stabilizing influence in that part of the world.”  Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. How could the United States (and other Western allies), which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?     The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator oblivious to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The Shah emerges as a fascinating, Shakespearean character – a wannabe Richard III unaware of the depth of dissent to his rule, indecisive like Hamlet when action was called for, and at the end Lear-like as he raged against his fate. The Americans made terrible decisions at almost every juncture, from a secret pact designed by Kissinger and Nixon, to dismissing reports from the one diplomat who saw how hated the Shah was by the Iranian people (unlike almost all his colleagues, he spoke Farsi), to Jimmy Carter allowing the Shah to come to America for medical treatment, which set off the hostage crisis which forever damaged American influence in the world.     Scott Anderson tells this astonishing tale with the narrative brio, mordant wit, and keen analysis that made his bestselling Lawrence in Arabia one of the key texts in understanding the modern Middle East.  Based on voluminous research and dozens of interviews, King of Kings is driven by penetrating portraits of the people involved – the Iranian-American doctor who convinced American officials Khomeini was a moderate; the American teacher who learned of Khomeini’s influence long before the cleric was even mentioned in official reports; the Shah’s court minister who kept a detailed diary of all their interactions; the Shah’s wife Farah who still mourns her lost kingdom; the hypocritical and misguided Jimmy Carter; and the implacable Khomeini who outmaneuvered his foes at every turn.     The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions.  In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval – and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning. |
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From a New York Times media correspondent, a dishy history of the Condé Nast magazine empire, home of Vogue , Vanity Fair , The New Yorker , and more, focusing on its glitzy heyday from the 1980s through the 2000s. For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue , Vanity Fair , The New Yorker , GQ , Architectural Digest , and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over. Condé’s billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. They were the ultimate influencers—before social media changed everything. The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles. The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over. The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day. |
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A history of World War II's Operation Overlord, from the campaign's planning to its execution, as Allied forces battled to take France back from Germany. D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the seventy-six days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west—the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries. Yet as familiar as it is, as James Holland makes clear in his definitive history, many parts of the Overlord campaign, as it was known, are still shrouded in myth and assumed knowledge. Drawing freshly on widespread archives and on the testimonies of eye-witnesses, Holland relates the extraordinary planning that made Allied victory in France possible; indeed, the story of how hundreds of thousands of men, and mountains of materiel, were transported across the English Channel, is as dramatic a human achievement as any battlefield exploit. The brutal landings on the five beaches and subsequent battles across the plains and through the lanes and hedgerows of Normandy—a campaign that, in terms of daily casualties, was worse than any in World War I—come vividly to life in conferences where the strategic decisions of Eisenhower, Rommel, Montgomery, and other commanders were made, and through the memories of paratrooper Lieutenant Dick Winters of Easy Company, British corporal and tanker Reg Spittles, Thunderbolt pilot Archie Maltbie, German ordnance officer Hans Heinze, French resistance leader Robert Leblanc, and many others. For both sides, the challenges were enormous. The Allies confronted a disciplined German army stretched to its limit, which nonetheless caused tactics to be adjusted on the fly. Ultimately ingenuity, determination, and immense materiel strength—delivered with operational brilliance—made the difference. A stirring narrative by a pre-eminent historian, Normandy '44 offers important new perspective on one of history's most dramatic military engagements and is an invaluable addition to the literature of war. Praise for Normandy '44 An Amazon Best Book of the Month (History) An Amazon Best History Book of the Year "Detail and scope are the twin strengths of Normandy '44 . . . . Mr. Holland effectively balances human drama with the science of war as the Allies knew it." —Jonathan W. Jordan, Wall Street Journal "A superb account of the invasions that deserves immense praise. . . . To convey the human drama of Normandy requires great knowledge and sensitivity. Holland has both in spades." — Times (UK) |
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" The Last Days of Budapes t is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing."  -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New York Times bestseller The Daughter of Auschwitz Budapest, autumn 1943.   After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary.   All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest’s grand boulevards and historic squares. By late December the city was surrounded and under siege from the advancing Red Army. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the savage fighting as Budapest collapsed into anarchy. Hungarian death squads roamed the streets as the city’s Jews were forced into ghettos or were shot into the Danube. Russian artillery hammered the city into smoking rubble as starving residents struggled to survive the winter.   Using newly uncovered diaries, documents, archival material and interviews with the last survivors, Adam LeBor has brilliantly recreated life and death in wartime Budapest.   |
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The incredible story of the unlikeliest battle of World War II, when a small group of American soldiers joined forces with German soldiers to fight off fanatical SS troops May, 1945. Hitler is dead, the Third Reich is little more than smoking rubble, and no GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. The Last Battle tells the nearly unbelievable story of the unlikeliest battle of the war, when a small group of American tankers, led by Captain Lee, joined forces with German soldiers to fight off fanatical SS troops seeking to capture Castle Itter and execute the stronghold's VIP prisoners. It is a tale of unlikely allies, startling bravery, jittery suspense, and desperate combat between implacable enemies. |
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"Time did not exist; or if it did it did not mater. Our world then was both wide and narrow—wide in the immensity of the sea and mountain; narrow in that the boat was very small, and we lived and camped, explored and swam in a little realm of our own making…" This is the fascinating true adventure story of a woman who packed her five children onto a twenty-five-foot boat and explored the coastal waters of British Columbia summer after summer in the 1920s and 1930s. Acting single-handedly as skipper, navigator, engineer and of course, mother, Muriel Wylie Blanchet saw her crew through exciting—and sometimes perilous—encounters with fog; rough seas, cougars, bears and whales, and did so with high spirits and courage. On these pages an independent woman with a deep respect for the native cultures of a region, and a refreshing wonderment about the natural world, comes to life. In The Curve of Time, she has left us with a sensitive and lyrically written account of their journeys and a timeless travel memoir not to be missed. |
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey's seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare.  “One of the great classics of the war" ( The New Republic ) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city.   "The perspective [ Hiroshima ] offers from the bomb’s actual victims is the mandatory counterpart to any Oppenheimer viewing." — GQ Magazine “Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity.” — The New York Times   Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. John Hersey tells what these six -- a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest -- were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half-hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them -- the variety of ways in which they responded to the past and went on with their lives -- is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima. |
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One of Indigo's Top 10 History Books of 2024 A brilliant, seat-of-your-pants hostage-taking and daring SAS rescue mission of the Iran Embassy in London in 1980, this is Ben Macintyre at the very height of his story-telling powers. On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Prince’s Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There, they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued—all on television, over a Bank Holiday weekend—in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod. This mission marked a fundamental turning point in global history, when Middle Eastern terrorism arrived in the West. Britain had experienced IRA terrorism before, but never an international terrorist incident on this scale. It was a precursor to the brutal Iran-Iraq War that would follow, in which millions perished. Yet there exists to this day no full account of the week-long siege and gripping rescue. Drawing on interviews with police, hostages, terrorists and key SAS figures, and cutting through the sensationalism and misinformation, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre (author of Sunday Times #1s Colditz , The Spy and the Traitor and SAS: Rogue Heroes ) goes deep into the archives with exclusive access to tell the story of what really happened and give the first definitive account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS—and itself. |
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Destined to become a modern classic in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel , Sapiens is a lively, groundbreaking history of humankind told from a unique perspective.      100,000 years ago, at least six species of human inhabited the earth. Today there is just one.      Us. Homo Sapiens .      How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?      In Sapiens , Dr. Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical — and sometimes devastating — breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology, and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?      Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power...and our future. |
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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. “As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” — San Francisco Chronicle A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of the Last 30 Years Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction. Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both. |
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” ( The New York Times Book Review).   Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew. |
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Winner of the Jewish Book of the Year Award The first comprehensive yet accessible history of the state of Israel from its inception to present day, from Daniel Gordis, "one of the most respected Israel analysts" (The Forward) living and writing in Jerusalem. Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world’s attention, aroused its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future? We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel’s people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though Israel’s history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people’s story and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse—but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long history of Israel’s deepening isolation. With Israel, public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and rigorous, Israel sheds light on the Israel’s past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn. |
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"A tale drenched in drama and blood, heroism and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal."—Jonathan Yardley,  The Washington Post The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Third Reich in January 1945. Frenzied by their terrible experiences with Wehrmacht and SS brutality, they wreaked havoc—tanks crushing refugee columns, mass rape, pillage, and unimaginable destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred; more than seven million fled westward from the fury of the Red Army. It was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known.  Antony Beevor, renowned author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem , has reconstructed the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse. The Fall of Berlin is a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge, and savagery, yet it is also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice, and survival against all odds. |
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania “Both terrifying and enthralling.”— Entertainment Weekly “ Thrilling, dramatic and powerful. ” —NPR “ Thoroughly engrossing. ” —George R.R. Martin On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.  Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot -20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history. It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.  Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history. Finalist for the Washington State Book Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo |
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A unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single-subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope , Queeney takes readers on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. From Magellan’s world-circling ships, to the 15th-century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, to Polynesian multihulls with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and discoveries would have been possible. Time traveling, he describes the building of the pyramids, the Roman Coliseum, Hagia Sofia, Notre Dame, the Sultan Hasan Mosque, the Brooklyn Bridge, and countless other constructions that would not have been possible without rope. Not content to just look at rope’s past, Queeney looks at its present and possible future and how the re-invention of rope with synthetic fibers will likely provide the strength for cables to support elevators into space. Making the story of rope real for readers, Queeney tells remarkable nautical stories of his own reliance on rope at sea. Rope is history, adventure, and the story of one of the world’s most common tools that has made it possible for humans to advance throughout the centuries. |
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting true story of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still the deadliest natural disaster in American history—from the acclaimed author of The Devil in the White City “A gripping account ... fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true.” — The New York Times Book Review September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people—and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy. Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. |
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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘His masterpiece’ Antony Beevor, Spectator ‘A masterful performance’ Sunday Times ‘By far the best book on the Vietnam War’ Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the Year Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record. About the author Max Hastings chronicles Vietnam with the benefit of vivid personal memories: first of reporting in 1967-68 from the United States, where he encountered many of the war’s decision-makers including President Lyndon Johnson, then of successive assignments in Indochina for newspapers and BBC TV: he rode a helicopter out of the US Saigon embassy compound during the 1975 final evacuation. He is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically. |
