Biographies European History

In December 1944, Hitler launched a desperate massive counterstrike at the Allies, with thirty-eight German divisions slamming through American lines. Then the 101st Airborne was thrown into the fight. Fresh from seventy-two brutal days of combat in Holland, with little food and ammunition, the...

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining sourcebook on Provence by the writer who has made the region his own. Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. It is rather a selection of those aspects of Provence that Peter Mayle in almost...

Dramatized in a motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Seven Years in Tibet is the autobiographical account of a young Austrian adventurer and the escape from an internment camp that changed his life forever. In 1943, Heinrich Harrer, a noted mountain climber and skier, slipped out of captivity in...

A novel in The L.A. Quartet. Internationally acclaimed author James Ellroy presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an...

From the critically acclaimed bestselling author of Bee Season comes a travelogue through the magical and historic city of Prague - a city of vast beauty and wonderfully intimate detail. In Time's Magpie, Myla Goldberg uses her eye for the wonder of tiny objects and everyday things to put us in...

“One lifetime is not enough for Rome,” the famous saying goes, and anyone who’s ever been there knows these words to be true. In City of the Soul, William Murray begins to show us why. Growing up in Rome and spending much of his life in the city, William Murray is an expert guide as he...

"Ambition is like the balloonist. To some extent, the rise is nice and he does enjoy a splendid view and a vast landscape. But when he rises more, vertigo occurs, the air becomes thin and the risk of a big fall increases." With this parable, the Austrian Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg inadvertently predicted the destiny to which he would bravely ride, despite the warnings and the sweet talkers. In any case, he followed his heart's mandate. And Charlotte, the princess, was "one of the most cultured and beautiful" in Europe.