For four years, Jessica Stern interviewed extremist members of three religions around the world: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traveling extensively—to refugee camps in Lebanon, to religious schools
First Darling of the Morning is the powerful and poignant memoir of bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, tracing the arc of her Bombay childhood and adolescence from her earliest memories to her eventua
In 1793, a canal digger named William Smith made a startling discovery. He found that by tracing the placement of fossils, which he uncovered in his excavations, one could follow layers of rocks as th
In nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media. James McG
In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father—a man con
On a moonless night just weeks after September 11, 2001, a U.S. Special Forces team of Green Berets known as ODA 574 infiltrated the mountains of southern Afghanistan with a seemingly impossible missi
How does a simple piece of wood become the king of instruments? The violin does something remarkable, magical, and evocative. It is capable of bringing to life the mathematical marvels of Bach, the
Cynthia Kaplan, acclaimed author of Why I'm Like This, once again casts her gimlet eye upon the current state of her affairs. Also of your affairs, and some other people's affairs as well. Journey w
On the evening of April 15, 1848, nearly eighty enslaved Americans attempted one of history's most audacious escapes. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the Pearl, the fugitives b
The best book I read this decade. --Sharon Van Etten in Rolling Stone"Boy Swallows Universe hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak. . . . Eli's remarkably poetic voice and his astonishingly open heart take the day. They enable him to carve out the best of what's possible from the worst of what is, which is the miracle that makes this novel marvelous." --Washington PostA thrilling (New York Times Book Review) novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy's coming of age in 1980s Australia, named one of the best literary fiction titles of 2019 by Library Journal.Eli Bell's life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli's life is Slim--a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes--who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother.Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a neglected suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese r
The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day
For the Colleys of southeastern Missouri, the War between the States is a plague that threatens devastation, despite the family?s avowed neutrality. For eighteen-year-old Adair Colley, it is a nightma
In the late 1980s, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester set out on foot to discover the Republic of Korea -- from its southern tip to the North Korean border -- in order to set the recor
?A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of
From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, and from torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human
Bestselling author Norman Cantor delivers this compact but magisterial survey of the ancient world -- from the birth of Sumerian civilization around 3500 B.C. in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (present-d
