The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. Author David Israel Kertzer (1948) is an American anthropologist, historian,…
A warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. Author Homer Hickam is the best-selling author of the “Coalwood” series of memoirs, the “Josh Thurlow” series of World War…
The Sympathizer is an epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to…
A memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America–told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Author Andrew Forsthoefel is a speaker and peace activist. After graduating from Middlebury College, he spent a year walking across the highways of America,…
A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years ( Fourth Estate, 2014) Author Christopher Nicholson is a writer,…
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. Author Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust…
Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Author Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was born in Helsinki, and was an illustrator and political cartoonist for the left-leaning, anti-Fascist magazine Garm. She created a long-running comic strip and a series of children’s books…
Haunting, harrowing, moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Author Rick Bragg (1959) is an American journalist and…
The bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war. Author Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of SAY NOTHING, THE SNAKEHEAD, and CHATTER. He lives…
Winter, January 1945. It is cold and dark, and the German army is retreating from the Russian advance. Germans are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot. But in a rural East Prussian manor house, the wealthy von Globig family tries to seal itself off from the world….
