Pete Newell is considered one of the finest basketball minds in the sport’s history. His death in 2008 spawned tributes from around the country, including legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and B
“Robert Vivian’s prose is lyrical and harrowing—harrowing in the Biblical sense,” Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian’s Tall Grass Trilogy
“Annie Ernaux’s work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy qu
Covering more than two centuries, The Beaver Men recounts the beginning of the beaver trade along the St. Lawrence to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers on Ham’s Fork, in what is
Written in the aftermath of World War II, Love Goes to Press opened in London in 1946 and on Broadway in 1947. At the time a relief for the survivors of Blitzkrieg and ration cards, today it is a devi
Gen. Leonard Wood’s meteoric career was no fluke. The ambitious Wood (1860–1927), serving as an army physician, strategically took on tasks and assignments that led him from the pursuit o
In 1968 Nguyen Qui Duc was nine years old, his father was a high-ranking civil servant in the South Vietnamese government, and his mother was a school principal. Then the Viet Cong launched their Tet
For four years during the Civil War, Generals Grant and Lee clashed as bitter enemies in a war that bloodied and scorched the American landscape. Yet in an earlier time, they had worn the same unifor
This book may change your life. It may save it. It is one of the most important—and most shocking—books ever written.Tomorrow! is a story of average, nice Americans living in the ne
Though George Norris was born and grew up in Ohio, he headed west after earning his law degree and set up practice in Nebraska, eventually settling in McCook. Elected to the House of Representatives i
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1794–1876) is one of the most famous, and infamous, figures in Mexican history. Six times the country’s president, he is consistently depicted as a traitor, a turncoat, an
First published in 1934, this collection of tales was recorded and edited by Thelma Adamson (1901–83), a student of Franz Boas and one of the first women to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the Pacif
Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark cocaptained the most famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three years after the expedition, Clark, as t
They were called aliens and enemies. But the World War II internees John Christgau writes about were in fact ordinary people victimized by the politics of a global war. The Alien Enemy Control Program
Civil unrest at home, war abroad, and political uncertainty gripped the nation as the 1970s approached. In the summer of 1969, as a tumultuous decade of American history neared its end, Major League B
Many Jewish foods are beloved in American culture. Everyone eats bagels, and the delicatessen is a ubiquitous institution from Manhattan to Los Angeles. Jewish American Food Culture offers readers an
This meditative novel, grounded in the thinking of Spain's great modern philosopher Ortega y Gasset, unfolds as the journal of a bourgeois chemist who makes his way in Buenos Aires just before and du
Across between kiss-and-tell and curse-and-tell, Malika Mokeddem’s memoir of the men in her life presents a mosaic of relationships defining what it is to be a woman, an immigrant, a doct
Beset by enemies on every side and torn by internal divisions, the crusader kingdoms were a hotbed of intrigue, where your greatest ally might be your natural enemy. Because lives and kingdoms often
Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, “two female icons of disability.” Or the story of “Moby Dick, or, The Leg,” told from Ahab’s perspect
It was a time of bold new technology, historic moments, and international jousting on the final frontier. But it was also a time of human drama, of moments less public but no less dramatic in the live
Like the yellow, pink, and blue irises that had been transplanted from house to house over the years, the stories of poet Ted Kooser’s family had been handed down until, as his mother lay ill a
Pioneer Girl is the true story of Grace McCance Snyder. In 1885, when Grace was three, she and her family became homesteaders on the windswept prairie of central Nebraska. They settled into a small s
Although many books about the Civil War have been written by veterans, few provide an accurate and entertaining portrayal of the daily life of a soldier, as does Corporal Si Klegg and His “Pard.” The
Epic Wanderer, the first full-length biography of mapmaker David Thompson (1770–1857), is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries against the broad canvas of dramatic rivalries betwe
John Charles Frémont was the illegitimate child of a Virginia aristocrat and a working-class French immigrant; Jessie Benton was the daughter of the most powerful pre-Civil War U.S. senator, Tho
Before Lewis and Clark relates the extraordinary saga of the Chouteaus, the dynastic family that guarded the gates to the West for three generations. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus, patricia
Although finding a way to feel at home in the world is ultimately the life's work of us all, rarely has the search ranged as far or found as precise and moving an expression as it does in An Inside P
Winner of the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award, Gentleman and Soldier is the first biography in more than fifty years of Wade Hampton III (1818–1902), a Confederate general whose life pro
The Sound of Music endeared Georg von Trapp (1880–1947) and his singing family to the world, and it also showed how desperately the Nazis wanted Captain von Trapp for their navy. In To the Last Salute
From Our House is the luminous and uniquely American memoir of Lee Martin, born into a farming family the same year his father unexpectedly lost both hands. Lee’s father, once known for “doing a good
When Blue Bird and her grandmother leave their family's camp to gather beans for the long, threatening winter, they inadvertently avoid the horrible fate that befalls the rest of the family. Luckily,
Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive, subversive, and entertaining American authors of the last half of the twentieth century. The cinematic adaptations of Dick’s fiction have generated so much
Writers have long been attracted to boxing. Hemingway, Mailer, Algren, Plimpton, Oates, and many others have stepped into the ring—at least in spirit—to give voice to an otherwise wordles
Why does she play basketball? Since the enactment of Title IX in 1972, that question has come to be asked of more girls and women—and answered in more ways—than ever before. Christine A.
In September 1862 the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac conducted one of the truly great campaigns of the Civil War. At South Mountain, Harpers Ferry, and Antiet
“Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live,” begins the title essay by Phillip Lopate. This rejoinder to the cult of hedonism and
Every now and then violence erupts in the banlieues of France allowing the world a glimpse into the grimmest corners of these multiethnic suburban ghettos. From such a corner comes the story of Samir
The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these sto
On October 8, 1908, Mordecai Brown clutched a half-dozen notes inside his coat pocket. The message of each was clear: we’ll kill you if you pitch and beat the Giants. A black handprint marked e
