“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished...

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German...

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics—the politics of ethnocide—played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of Indigenous people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream.” It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day.

The Gulag - a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners - was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

From the award-winning author of Sandworm comes the propulsive story of a new breed of investigators who have cracked the Bitcoin blockchain, exposing once-anonymous realms of money, drugs, and violence. “I love the book… It reads like a thriller… These stories are amazing.” (Michael...

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages.

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing...

A contrarian scientist wrestles with the big questions that modern physics raises, and what physics says about the human condition Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes...

A compelling and accessible new perspective on the modern science of psychology, based on one of Yale’s most popular courses of all time How does the brain—a three-pound wrinkly mass—give rise to intelligence and conscious experience? Was Freud right that we are all plagued by forbidden...

Author of the New York Times best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections. Taken together, these four strands reveal a deeply integrated, rational, and optimistic worldview. It describes a unified fabric of reality that is objective and comprehensible, in which human action and thought are central.