The Worst Hard Time is a captivating tour de force of historical reportage by Timothy Egan. It rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows, focusing on the dust storms that terrorized the High Plains during the darkest years of the Depression. These storms were unprecedented and have not been seen since.

Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the loss of loved ones. He brilliantly captures the terrifying drama of catastrophe, while doing justice to the human characters who become the heroes of his story — the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives are opened up with urgency and respect.

In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time serves as a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.

It is 922 A.D. The refined Arab courtier Ibn Fadlan is accompanying a party of Viking warriors back to their home. He is appalled by their customs—the gratuitous sexuality of their women, their disregard for cleanliness, and their cold-blooded sacrifices.

As they enter the frozen, forbidden landscape of the North—where the day’s length does not equal the night’s, where after sunset the sky burns in streaks of color—Fadlan soon discovers that he has been unwillingly enlisted to combat the terrors in the night that come to slaughter the Vikings, the monsters of the mist that devour human flesh. But just how he will do it, Fadlan has no idea.

Flags of Our Fathers is an unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history. James Bradley captures the glory, triumph, heartbreak, and legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. This is the true story behind the immortal photograph that symbolizes America's courage and indomitable will.

In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire, they battled to the island's highest peak. After climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.

Now, the son of one of the flag-raisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos.

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley tells a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, becoming reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: "The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back."

Flags of Our Fathers captures the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is a story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.

Two thousand years ago, Mary Magdalene hid a set of scrolls in the rocky foothills of the French Pyrenees, a gospel that contained her own version of the events and characters of the New Testament. Protected by supernatural forces, these sacred scrolls could be uncovered only by a special seeker, one who fulfills the ancient prophecy of l'attendue -- The Expected One.

When journalist Maureen Pascal begins the research for a new book, she has no idea that she is stepping into an ancient mystery so secret, so revolutionary, that thousands of people have killed and died for it. She becomes deeply immersed in the mystical cultures of southwest France as the eerie prophecy of The Expected One casts a shadow over her life and work, and a long-buried family secret comes to light.

Maureen's extraordinary journey takes her from the dusty streets of Jerusalem to the cathedrals of Paris... and ultimately to search for the scrolls themselves. She must unravel clues that link history's great artistic masters, including Sandro Botticelli, Nicolas Poussin, and Jean Cocteau; the Medici, Bourbon, and Borgia dynasties; and great scientific minds like Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton.

Ultimately, she, and the reader, come face-to-face with Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Judas, and Salome in the pages of a deeply moving and powerful new gospel, the life of Jesus as told by Mary Magdalene.

Marco Polo was nicknamed "Marco of the millions" because his Venetian countrymen took the grandiose stories of his travels to be exaggerated, if not outright lies. As he lay dying, his priest, family, and friends offered him a last chance to confess his mendacity, and Marco, it is said, replied, "I have not told the half of what I saw and did."

Now, Gary Jennings has imagined the half that Marco left unsaid as even more elaborate and adventurous than the tall tales thought to be lies. From the palazzi and back streets of medieval Venice to the sumptuous court of Kublai Khan, from the perfumed sexuality of the Levant to the dangers and rigors of travel along the Silk Road, Marco meets all manner of people, survives all manner of danger, and, insatiably curious, becomes an almost compulsive collector of customs, languages, and women.

In more than two decades of travel, Marco was variously a merchant, a warrior, a lover, a spy, even a tax collector - but always a journeyer, unflagging in his appetite for new experiences, regretting only what he missed.

Here - recreated and reimagined with all the splendor, the love of adventure, the zest for the rare and curious that are Jennings's hallmarks - is the epic account, at once magnificent and delightful, of the greatest real-life adventurer in human history.

The Uses of Haiti tells the truth about uncomfortable matters—uncomfortable, that is, for the structures of power and the doctrinal framework that protects them from scrutiny. It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the US role in its bitter fate.

Noam Chomsky, from the introduction

In this third edition of the classic The Uses of Haiti, Paul Farmer looks at what has happened to the health of the poor in Haiti since the coup. Winner of a McArthur Genius Award, Paul Farmer is a physician and anthropologist who has worked for 25 years in Haiti, where he serves as medical director of a hospital serving the rural poor. He is the subject of the Tracy Kidder biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Foote's comprehensive history of the Civil War includes three compelling volumes: Fort Sumter to Perryville, Fredericksburg to Meridian, and Red River to Appomattox. Collected together in a handsome boxed set, this is the perfect gift for any Civil War buff.

Fort Sumter to Perryville: "Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives of our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters." -Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News

Fredericksburg to Meridian: "This, then, is narrative history-a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of the historical and literary achievements of our time." -The Washington Post Book World

Red River to Appomattox: "An unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist." -Walker Percy

It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring Xavier home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Ontario, their respective stories emerge—stories of Niska’s life among her kin and of Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.

Voices from Chernobyl is not just a book about the Chernobyl disaster, but about the world it has left us. Svetlana Alexievich, spent three years interviewing dozens of survivors, victims, and witnesses. This book is their testimony, their voices, and they are unforgettable.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a groundbreaking book by Michael Pollan, one of America's most fascinating, original, and elegant writers. Pollan turns his omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. This question has confronted humanity since the discovery of fire, but how we answer it today may determine our very survival as a species.

Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal. He develops a definitive account of the American way of eating, taking readers from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds. He emphasizes our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the plant and animal species we depend on.

Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest. He explains how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, contending that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do.

Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet.

It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

From a childhood survivor of the Cambodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.

Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.

Enhance your time reading and exploring God's Word. Experience a whole new level of visual comfort and biblical study with Thomas Nelson's NKJV Personal Size Giant Print End-of-Verse Reference Bible. This Bible is filled with references and study aids to strengthen your Bible reading. Plus, it features giant print type, making reading more enjoyable than ever. Ideal for individual study, teaching, and ministry work, this trusted edition of the Holy Bible will enhance your time exploring the beauty and meaning of God's Word.

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Among the great works of world literature, perhaps one of the least familiar to English readers is Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, the national epic of Persia. This prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between the years 980 and 1010, tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century.

Shahnameh belongs in the company of such literary masterpieces as Dante's Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, and the epics of Homer - classics whose reach and range bring whole cultures into view. In its pages are unforgettable moments of national triumph and failure, human courage and cruelty, blissful love and bitter grief.

In tracing the roots of Iran, Shahnameh initially draws on the depths of legend and then carries its story into historical times, when ancient Persia was swept into an expanding Islamic empire. Now Dick Davis, the greatest modern translator of Persian poetry, has revisited that poem, turning the finest stories of Ferdowsi's original into an elegant combination of prose and verse.

For the first time in English, in the most complete form possible, readers can experience Shahnameh in the same way that Iranian storytellers have lovingly conveyed it in Persian for the past thousand years.

Sarah Vowell embarks on a unique road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history. She exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor.

With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other—a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.

From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism.

We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and—the author's favorite—historical tourism.

Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.

Het huis van de moskee vertelt het verhaal van de familie van Aga Djan, die al eeuwenlang de belangrijkste familie is in de Iraanse stad Senedjan. Zij wonen in het huis naast de Djomè-moskee, de grootste moskee van een stad waar het vrijdaggebed wordt gehouden.

Van generatie op generatie komt de imam van de moskee uit de familie van Aga Djan; als het verhaal opent, is dit zijn neef Alsaberi. Als tapijtverkoper staat Aga Djan bovendien aan het hoofd van de bazaar en heeft economische macht.

Kader Abdolah zoomt in deze roman in op de invloed van de gebeurtenissen in Iran op deze familie. Wanneer de revolutie wordt voorbereid en uitbreekt, komt de samenleving onder druk te staan en verliest de familie langzaamaan al hun invloed en zekerheden.

Nancy Kington, daughter of a rich merchant, suddenly orphaned when her father dies, is sent to live on her family's plantation in Jamaica. Disgusted by the treatment of the slaves and her brother's willingness to marry her off, she and one of the slaves, Minerva, run away and join a band of pirates.

For both girls, the pirate life is their only chance for freedom in a society where both are treated like property, rather than individuals. Together they go in search of adventure, love, and a new life that breaks all restrictions of gender, race, and position.

Told through Nancy's writings, their adventures will appeal to readers across the spectrum and around the world.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found.

At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to this plain, strange woman. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family—a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which they were thrown together begins to shadow them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder.

Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement from one of the great artistic forces of our time.

After being forced to leave HMS Dolphin and Jaimy, her true love, Jacky Faber is making a new start at the elite Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston. But growing up on the streets of London and fighting pirates never prepared Jacky for her toughest battle yet: learning how to be a fine lady.

Everything she does is wrong. Her embroidery is deplorable, her French is atrocious, and her table manners—disgusting! Then there's the small matter of her blue anchor tattoo...

Despite her best efforts, Jacky can't seem to stay out of trouble long enough to dedicate herself to being ladylike. But what fun would that be, anyway?

Enduring Literature Illuminated by Practical Scholarship

By turns a children's fantasy and a social satire for adults, Gulliver's Travels is one of the most popular adventure tales of all time. A Modest Proposal, also an imaginative, enduring work, is political lampoonery at its finest.

Gulliver's Travels takes readers on an imaginative journey through fantastical lands, filled with strange creatures and satirical insights into human nature and society. A Modest Proposal offers a biting critique of economic and political policies of Swift's time, wrapped in dark humor.

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history.

The compilation of the OED began in 1857, and it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand.

When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

Testament of Youth is a poignant memoir by Vera Brittain that offers an intimate glimpse into the experiences of a young woman during the tumultuous years of World War I. Vera Brittain, abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915, enlisted as a nurse in the armed services. She served in London, Malta, and on the Western Front.

By the end of the war, she had lost virtually everyone she loved. This book is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Brittain's eloquent prose and candid observations make this memoir a moving exploration of love, loss, and the enduring pursuit of peace.

Testament of Youth stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit amidst the horrors of war. It speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by conflict, offering a deeply emotional insight into the personal and societal impacts of war.

In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence - when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.

At the center of the drama, with Washington, are two young American patriots, who, at first, knew no more of war than what they had read in books - Nathaniel Green, a Quaker who was made a general at thirty-three, and Henry Knox, a twenty-five-year-old bookseller who had the preposterous idea of hauling the guns of Fort Ticonderoga overland to Boston in the dead of Winter.

But it is the American commander-in-chief who stands foremost - Washington, who had never before led an army in battle. Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams, David McCullough's 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American history.

In 1517, Martin Luther nails his ninety-five theses demanding reform of the Catholic Church to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral, setting off a period of upheaval, war, civil war, and violence we now know as the Reformation.

In this age devastated by wars of religion, a young theology student adopts the cause of the heretics and the disinherited. Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German plains to the flourishing Dutch cities and down to Venice, the gateway to the East, our hero, a 'Survivor', a radical Protestant Anabaptist who goes under many names, and his enemy, a loyal papal spy and heretic hunter known mysteriously as "Q" play a game in which no moves are forbidden and the true size of the stakes remain hidden until the end.

What begins as a personal struggle to reveal each other's identity becomes a mission that can only end in death.

It seems like kids are always hearing stories about America in the "good old days." But, in fact, the 1950s and 1960s were not as carefree as they sometimes seem. Through fascinating stories, advertisements, facts, and photographs, Norman H. Finkelstein invites people of all generations to decide for themselves.

Explore the real history behind the myths and discover surprising truths about a pivotal era in American history.

A swashbuckling adventure story that unveils for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well. Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior.

At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Spain, a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule. He soon joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. Between the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins.

After many adventures — duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues — Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.

When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter Y2K to March 2004, what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalisation?

And with this 'flattening' of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in one place, has the world got too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century; what it means to countries, companies, communities and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.

Danzig Passage opens in the year 1936, amidst the rising tide of Nazi terrorism. In Zion Covenant #5, courageous stories unfold, depicting those who risk everything to stand against the deceitful guise of Hitler's Third Reich.

Jewish children must be evacuated as brutal Nazi reprisals break out. As the danger escalates, the narrative weaves through the heart-wrenching decisions and daring escapes that mark this turbulent era.

Join the journey as characters navigate through perilous times, showcasing resilience and bravery in the face of overwhelming adversity.

The Man Who Would Be King is literature’s most famous adventure story, penned by the renowned Rudyard Kipling. This stirring tale follows two happy-go-lucky British ne’er-do-wells as they attempt to carve out their own kingdom in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. Amidst its raucous humor and swashbuckling bravado, the story offers a devastatingly astute dissection of imperialism and its heroic pretensions.

Written when Kipling was only 22 years old, the novella features some of his most crystalline prose and one of the most beautifully rendered, spectacularly exotic settings he ever used. Best of all, it features two of his most unforgettable characters, the ultra-vivid Cockneys Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot, who impart to the story its ultimate, astonishing twist: it is both a tragedy and a triumph.

This novella is part of the Art of The Novella Series by Melville House, celebrating this renegade art form beloved by literature's greatest writers.

This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine Island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire.

All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur’s vulnerable invasion force were the Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American flotilla poised to charge into history.

In the tradition of naval epics, James D. Hornfischer paints an unprecedented portrait of the Battle of Samar, a naval engagement unlike any other in U.S. history—and captures with unforgettable intensity the men, the strategies, and the sacrifices that turned certain defeat into a legendary victory.

Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'Cemetery of Lost Books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out 'The Shadow of the Wind' by Julian Carax.

But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from the book, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax's work in order to burn them.

What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. An epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing explores the enduring legacy of slavery and its impact on African Americans. While African Americans managed to emerge from chattel slavery and the oppressive decades that followed with great strength and resiliency, they did not emerge unscathed.

Slavery produced centuries of physical, psychological, and spiritual injury. This book lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal.

Join the conversation on how to address historical trauma and foster healing in communities affected by this legacy.

Collapse is a brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing book by Jared Diamond, destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time. It raises the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted.

Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Shake Hands with the Devil is a profound and harrowing account by Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who served as the force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993. This book takes readers on a vivid journey into the heart of the Rwandan genocide, an event that saw the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in just 100 days.

Dallaire's mission, intended as a straightforward peacekeeping endeavor, quickly turned into a nightmare of betrayal, naiveté, and international political failure. Despite timely warnings, the international community failed to stop the genocide, leaving Dallaire and his men to witness unimaginable horrors.

Through his unsparing eyewitness account, Dallaire shares his personal journey from a confident Cold Warrior to a devastated UN commander, struggling to reconcile his experiences and find peace. His narrative challenges conventional ideas of military leadership and underscores the moral complexities faced by peacekeepers in conflict zones.

This book is not just a military account but a cri de coeur for the thousands slaughtered and a tribute to the souls lost to the violence. It highlights the critical importance of understanding the moral minefields peacekeepers must navigate when intervening in "dirty wars."

At the age of 14, Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.

The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses—or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends.

Richly textured, emotionally charged, and disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Flyboys is a gripping narrative of war, friendship, and honor set against the backdrop of the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima. Nine American flyers, Navy and Marine pilots tasked with bombing Japanese communications towers, were shot down. This is their story.

One of these men was miraculously rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine, while the others faced capture by Japanese soldiers. The fate of these eight captured men was shrouded in secrecy, buried by both American and Japanese governments.

James D. Bradley takes readers on a journey to uncover the truth, navigating through dusty attics in American towns, classified government archives, and the heart of Japan, ultimately reaching Chichi Jima itself. His findings reveal a mystery stretching back 150 years, to America's westward expansion and Japan's initial encounters with the Western world.

With vivid descriptions, Bradley brings to life the courage and sacrifice of these young men, while also exploring the complex history of two nations at war. He delves into the Japanese warrior mentality and the U.S. military strategies that justified devastating attacks on civilians.

Ultimately, Flyboys is about how we live and die, epitomized by the tale of the one Flyboy who escaped capture—a young Navy pilot named George H. W. Bush, who would later become President of the United States.

This masterpiece of historical narrative will forever change our understanding of the Pacific war and the very principles we fight for.

Storm of Steel is a memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism. It illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier.

Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict, but more importantly as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that would mark his failure.

Published shortly after the war's end, Storm of Steel was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann's brilliant new translation.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and how it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.

Henry V is Shakespeare’s most famous “war play”; it includes the storied English victory over the French at Agincourt. Some of it glorifies war, especially the choruses and Henry’s speeches urging his troops into battle. But we also hear bishops conniving for war to postpone a bill that would tax the church, and soldiers expecting to reap profits from the conflict. Even in the speeches of Henry and his nobles, there are many chilling references to the human cost of war.

The authoritative edition of Henry V from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

• Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
• Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
• Scene-by-scene plot summaries
• A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
• An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
• An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
• Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
• An annotated guide to further reading

While restoring a 15th-century painting which depicts a chess game between the Duke of Flanders and his knight, Julia, a young art expert, discovers a hidden inscription in the corner: Quis Necavit Equitem. Translation: Who killed the knight?

Breaking the silence of five centuries, Julia's hunt for a Renaissance murderer leads her into a modern-day game of sin, betrayal, and death.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford resurrects the true history of Genghis Khan, from the story of his relentless rise through Mongol tribal culture to the waging of his devastatingly successful wars and the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed.

This book offers a captivating journey into the life and legacy of one of history's most formidable figures, providing insightful perspectives on how his empire shaped the modern world.

1996, Egypt. Searching for a treasure on the Nile, Dirk Pitt thwarts the attempted assassination of a beautiful U.N. scientist investigating a disease that is driving thousands of North Africans into madness, cannibalism, and death.

The suspected cause of the raging epidemic is vast, unprecedented pollution that threatens to extinguish all life in the world's seas. Racing to save the world from environmental catastrophe, Pitt and his team, equipped with an extraordinary, state-of-the-art yacht, run a gauntlet between a billionaire industrialist and a bloodthirsty West African tyrant.

In the scorching desert, Pitt finds a gold mine manned by slaves and uncovers the truth behind two enduring mysteries: the fate of a Civil War ironclad and its secret connection with Lincoln's assassination, and the last flight of a long-lost female pilot.

Now, amidst the blazing, shifting sands of the Sahara, Dirk Pitt will make a desperate stand—in a battle the world cannot afford to lose!

102 Minutes tells the dramatic and moving account of the struggle for life inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, when every minute counted.

At 8:46 am, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers—reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it—until now.

New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken a revealing approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, 102 Minutes captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others.

Dwyer and Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews with rescuers, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women—the nearly 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished—as they made 102 minutes count as never before.

Los días del fuego es el volumen que culmina La saga de los confines, iniciada con Los días del venado y continuada por Los días de la sombra. Esta obra narra la más grande y terrible guerra contra el Odio Eterno que jamás se haya librado. Las Tierras Fértiles preparan a sus mejores hijos para enfrentar esta batalla decisiva. Paralelamente, en las Tierras Antiguas, la resistencia se organiza para evitar los ataques de Misaianes, quien observa todo desde la impiadosa quietud de su monte.

Liliana Bodoc reafirma su destreza narrativa y el alcance de su universo fantástico a través de una novela llena de magia y misterio, que captura la imaginación del lector desde la primera página.

Moving from Ireland to New York City in 1741, Cormac O'Connor witnesses the city's transformation into a thriving metropolis while he explores the mysteries of time, loss, and love. By the author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

The son of a prosperous landowner and a former slave, Paul-Edward Logan is unlike any other boy he knows. His white father has acknowledged him and raised him openly—something unusual in post-Civil War Georgia. But as he grows into a man, he learns that life for someone like him is not easy.

Black people distrust him because he looks white. White people discriminate against him when they learn of his black heritage. Even within his own family, he faces betrayal and degradation.

So at the age of fourteen, he sets out toward the only dream he has ever had: to find land every bit as good as his father's and make it his own.

Once again inspired by her own history, Ms. Taylor brings truth and power to the newest addition to the Logan family stories.