Historical Nonfiction

A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and...

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the...

From the winner of the Edgar Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize, a cultural history of “everyday madness” The Book of Phobias and Manias is a thrilling compendium of 99 obsessions that have shaped us all, the rare and the familiar, from ablutophobia (a horror of washing) to syllogomania (a...

Inge Auerbacher is a happy German girl when the nightmare begins. Six-year-old Inge is made to wear a yellow star to identify her as a Jew. As the Nazis gain power, her family is subjected to greater and greater horrors. Their home and citizenship are taken away. Inge’s relatives are sent away, and she and her parents are forced into the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Learn to harness the ancient wisdom of astrology and the runes, cast your birth chart and uncover your destiny with this essential guide to runic astrology.Rich Lister explores the powerful combination of the runes and traditional astrology to show you how to tune into your past, present and...

A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what...

“Fascinating . . . a serious, wide-ranging study of all the magical, mystical, and spiritual movements that have arisen and influenced American history in often-surprising ways.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World “A treasure trove.”—HuffPost From its inception...

In February 1942, a reconnaissance party of US Army Air Force officers arrived in England. Firmly wedded to the doctrine of daylight precision bombing, they believed they could help turn the tide of the war in Europe. In the months that followed, they formed the Eighth Air Force—an organization that grew at an astonishing rate. To accommodate it, almost seventy airfields were built across the eastern counties of England. At the heart of the Eighth Air Force was its bombardment groups, each equipped with scores of heavily armed, four-engine bombers. This is the story of just one "Bomb Group".

“Daniel Barbarisi plunges into an adventure from another era when he goes in search of buried treasure, guided only by a cryptic poem, a mischievous art collector, and the footsteps another pursuer who died on the quest… Every page draws you deeper into this no-man’s-land where...

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and...

In three straight years he was a paratropper, and army seaman, and a LRRP—and he lived to tell about it. As an FNG paratrooper in the 173d Airborne, John Leppelman made that unit's only combat jump in Vietnam. Then he spent months in fruitless search of the enemy, watching as his buddies...

The twelve entries in The Golden Age of Piracy discuss why pirates thrived in the seas of the New World, how pirates operated their plundering ventures, how governments battled piracy, and when and why piracy declined. Separating Hollywood myth from historical fact, these essays bring the real pirates of the Caribbean to life with a level of rigor and insight rarely applied to the subject.

A timeless classic that recounts the origins of the Jonestown Massacre as well as the U.S. culture wars of the late 60s and 70s In this harrowing and unflinching work of reportage, acclaimed writer Shiva Naipaul travels deep into the ideological wreckage of the Jonestown massacre—seeking not...

The story of the pivotal struggle between the Creek Indians and an insatiable, young United States for control over the Deep South—from the acclaimed historian and prize-winning author of The Earth is Weeping The Creek War is one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the...

When Green Beret Lieutenant James N. Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive. In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beri-beri, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

This book is the product of The Earhart Project, a thirty-four-year investigation of the Earhart tragedy by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR investigators had no agenda. They were not out to advocate, excuse, honor, or impugn. They saw the Earhart disappearance as an aviation accident and reasoned the answer to its cause and outcome should be discoverable if they could find, assemble, and analyze the relevant data.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the church with the state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing an agreement in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope's arrest. Ambrogio Caiani provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent.

Explore the lives and achievements of the Wright Brothers.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of the first great works of English literature; William Shakespeare, writer of the greatest plays in history; Charles Dickens, who wanted to make England a better place; Victor Hugo, the French writer who cared about the poor; Leo Tolstoy, the man who wrote War and Peace; and Rudyard Kipling, who wrote The Jungle Book and won a Nobel Prize.