Classic Biography

A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer. When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth...

Richard Brookhiser has won a wide and loyal following for his stylish, pointed, and elegant biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In America's First Dynasty, Brookhiser tells the story of America's longest and still greatest dynasty -- the Adamses, the only family in our...

"Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets...

A masterful dual narrative of Napoleon Bonaparte and a tiny microbe that pits the height of human ambition and achievement against the supremacy of nature, from the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Blue Water “Gripping . . . Talty brings international politics and science...

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem...

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To...

As author of the bestselling Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe, and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer has emerged as the nation's number one scourge of superstition and bad science. Now, in The Borderlands of Science, he takes us to the place where real...

From Attorney Ryan, the most well-known labor lawyer in America, the complete guide to workers’ rights that your boss doesn’t want you to read Life for working people is getting harder and more expensive. While employers clamp down with return-to-office mandates, productivity trackers, and...

The boys at Linbury Court Preparatory School are eager to speed up the progress of space travel, and none more so than Jennings, whose first task is to find a suitable helmet. But is it really a good idea to take a dome-shaped glass-case, which previously housed a stuffed woodpecker, and place it over his head? Petrified paintpots! Jennings and Darbishire's luck is in when they hitch a ride with an international cricketer, and could it be that they've done something right for once when they attempt to apprehend a suspected burglar? Bat-witted clodpoll!

Four works in one collection: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Also The Life of Lovecraft: An Original Biography by CSA Publishing. Howard Lovecraft, well-known for his style of weird fiction and horror stories, is attributed as the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos and one of the most significant authors of supernatural horror fiction of the 20th-century.

Originally published in 1856, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed is the personal memoir of Peter Still, who was born a slave. He was yoked to servitude for more than four decades in Alabama and Kentucky. Still was finally freed with the help of two Jewish brothers.

Walden is a work by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and to some degree a manual for self-reliance. First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amid woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

In Volume Four, Dumas relates the 1819 murder of German dramatist August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, the campaign to destroy Father Urbain Grandier in 1634, who was successfully convicted of witchcraft and put to a brutal death, and the consequences of the amorous relationship between the prince of Brancaleone and Nisida.

"La folie et le désespoir ! Qu'on me donne cela comme levier, et je ferai bouger le monde". Verloc, espion infiltrant le milieu anarchiste, se voit sommé de commettre un attentat retentissant, sous peine de se voir retirer ses rétributions. Mais personne dans son entourage, à commencer par sa femme, ne sait rien de ses activités parallèles. Tout se gâte réellement lorsque Stevie, le frère attardé mental de la femme de M. Verloc, s'intéresse aux agissements de son beau-frère.

In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern listeners have come to see Thoreau's story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

The Bard was so incredibly prolific that even most Shakespeare scholars would welcome the occasional refresher course, and most of the rest of us haven't even got a clue as to what a petard actually is. Fear not, the best-selling authors of Homework for Grown-Ups are here to help.

In 1902, newly-married Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) left the security and comfort of her Melbourne home to travel to the depths of the Northern Territory, Australia, where her husband had been appointed manager of 'The Elsey', a large cattle station. One of the very few white women in the area, she was at first resented by people on and around the station, till her warmth and spirit won their affection and respect. This is her moving and simple account of her life amidst the beauty and cruelty of the land.

William Shakespeare had nothing to do with the actor and moneylender William Shaksper from Stratford-upon-Avon. The man behind the nom de plume "William Shakespeare" was, in fact, a very well-educated aristocrat who often frequented the court of Elizabeth and whose real name was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The dramas of Shakespeare were not written for the Globe Theatre but for the Queen's court.

THE TRUE STORY OF A CROSSDRESSING, TRANSATLANTIC ADVENTURER WHO ESCAPED FROM A SPANISH CONVENT IN 1599 AND LIVED AS A MAN—GAMBLING,FIGHTING DUELS, AND LEADING SOLDIERS INTO BATTLE Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the...

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times A literary discovery: an extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood This astonishing memoir was hailed as an instant classic when first...