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,…
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…
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….
Frances Perkins was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. As the first female cabinet secretary, she spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of America’s working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities. Perkins’s ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare and legislation in the nation’s history, including…
The final book in his trilogy about landscape and the human heart. Robert Macfarlane reveals to us a forgotten world: routes, roads, trade routes and routes that pilgrims once followed. Author Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic. Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is…
In Walter Isaacson’s vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin seems to turn to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. By bringing Franklin to life, Isaacson shows how he helped to define both his own time and ours. Author Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen…
The exhilarating, untold story of an extraordinary World War II rescue mission, where a plane crash in the South Pacific plunged a trio of U.S.military personnel into a land that time forgot. Author Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of…
Benjamin Weaver, a Jew and an ex-boxer, is an outsider in eighteenth-century London, tracking down debtors and felons for aristocratic clients. An enthralling historical thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper will leave readers wondering just how much has changed in the stock market in the last three hundred years. Author David Liss is the author of…
The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age. Author An American journalist who wrote for Collier’s, among other magazines and was later an editor for Time, Inc. Books. Alfred Lansing served in the US Navy from 1940-46. He…
