The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. Author Marc Reisner was an American environmentalist and writer best known for…
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. Author Erik Larson is a former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The…
Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years, a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Author Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is…
The former French colony of Acadia—permanently renamed Nova Scotia by the British when they began an ambitious occupation of the territory in 1710—witnessed one of the bitterest struggles in the British empire. Author Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at University of East Anglia. He previously taught at the University of Cincinnati.
In 1830 the U.S. government shifted its policy from one of trying to assimilate American Indians to one of relocating them and proceeded to drive seventeen thousand Cherokee people west of the Mississippi. Authors THEDA PERDUE is a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. She is the author or editor of eight books,…
How a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals—Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison—confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. Author Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke and author of the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas…
The Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor in downtown Cairo, Egypt. Disparate lives converge, careening toward an explosive conclusion. Tragicomic, passionate, frank in its sexuality, and brimming with human compassion. Author Alaa Al-Aswany (1957) is an Egyptian writer, and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya. Aswany attended Le Lycée Français…
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,…
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…
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…
