History Science Life

Making War at Fort Hood offers an illuminating look at war through the daily lives of the people whose job it is to produce it. Kenneth MacLeish conducted a year of intensive fieldwork among soldiers and their families at and around the US Army's Fort Hood in central Texas. He shows how war's reach extends far beyond the battlefield into military communities where violence is as routine, boring, and normal as it is shocking and traumatic.

Somalia was Tom Pecora's first deployment as a CIA Protective Operations Cadre (POC) officer, responsible for providing protective operations support in hostile areas of the world. He later headed up a series of the Agency's undisclosed protective operations teams. From 1989 until his retirement in 2013, he was assigned to multiple war zones across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, doing the kind of work few are even aware exists.

New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter has twice won the Global Health Council’s Excellence in Media Award, as well as the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In Denialism, he fervently argues that people are turning away from new technologies and engaging in a kind of magical thinking that is hindering scientific progress.

Complicated Lives upends the pervasive belief that all Africans landing on the shores of Virginia, beginning in late August 1619, became slaves. In reality, many of these kidnapped victims received the status of indentured servants. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of free African Americans in the South and North owned property, created businesses, and engaged in public service.

When British-born Elizabeth Blackwell earned her medical degree in America in 1849, there was an international outcry. Few at the time would have disagreed with the actress Fanny Kemble's remark - "What, trust a woman doctor - never!"

Ben Judah is an acclaimed foreign correspondent, but here he turns his reporter's gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London's immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From the backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah has supped with oligarchs and spent nights sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he's heard stories of heartbreaking failure, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion.

Through painstaking research, Geoffrey Perret located thousands of revealing documents on national security issues and foreign affairs, subjects to which John F. Kennedy devoted most of his time and energy. Perret has mined the Kennedy Library in a way few others have, finding letters and diaries that have never before seen the light of day. With style and substance, Perret brings to life again the man who left such an indelible impression on our century.

The two reigns - both unusually long - could scarcely have been more different. Queen Elizabeth I brought a much needed (and appreciated) stability to England at a key moment in the history of the nation. Queen Elizabeth II has, by contrast, been the constitutional monarch par excellence.

You are among the last in a long line of animals that were the likeliest to survive half a billion years of evolution. But you wouldn't be here today without all other wildlife. Over the past fifty years, we've killed three quarters of the creatures we need to keep ecosystems healthy. Now we have a choice to make: re-find our place among them, or succumb to the power of nature.

Lakes might be the most misunderstood bodies of water on earth. And while they may seem commonplace, without lakes our world would never be the same. In this revealing look at these lifegiving treasures, John Richard Saylor shows us just how deep our connection to still waters run.

For a generation of Democrats, Terry McAuliffe has been the ultimate political insider: strategist and spokesperson for the party, confidant for the candidates, mediator among party leaders, and, without question, the most successful fundraiser in political history. Now, McAuliffe's energetic memoir provides readers with a fly-on-the-wall view, from the front lines to the back rooms where deals are made, strategies conceived, initiatives launched, and elections won. Or, sometimes, lost.

The author of the "dazzling epic" (Lev Grossman, Time) Brilliant delivers an indelible view of the ways silence affects those who seek it and those who have it imposed upon them. Through her original, intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, Jane Brox illuminates the many ways silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society.

What will our world be like in the year 2010? Where will we work? How will we travel? What kind of advances can we expect in medicine and technology? Probable Tomorrows offers a look into the near-future advances, inventions, products, services, and everyday conveniences that will change how people live and work.

Que outra história do Ocidente poderia ser construída se a rainha Njinga de Angola, a poeta escravizada Phillis Wheatley e o intelectual palestino Edward Said fossem vistos como figuras relevantes na história da civilização ocidental? Ao descentralizar o papel da Europa, a autora desafia essa versão já conhecida e desconstrói a história hegemônica do Ocidente, jogando luz em importantes personagens históricos que foram escanteados por todo este tempo.

Eggs are the origins of ninety percent of the Earth's organisms. They can be found as far apart as deep-sea volcanoes and in space. Yet despite their fundamental importance, eggs often find themselves an afterthought in the discussion of evolution of life on Earth as the interests of scientists congregate around the things that emerge from eggs rather than the eggs themselves.

George Stephenson is one of the world’s most famous engineers. His pioneering work on steam-powered locomotion would supercharge the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and help bring about the heyday of the British Empire.

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. The Third Man is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government. Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book is certain to ruffle many feathers.

William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), although still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized Black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. For more than 30 years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation.

David Falkner, noted author of five previous books about baseball, deftly portrays the rise to stardom of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play on a major-league team in baseball’s modern era. As Falkner traces the development of Robinson’s natural skill and tireless dedication, he focuses on the strengths that earned Robinson a unique place on the diamond and in the struggle for civil rights. This compelling biography illuminates a critical intersection of sports and cultural history.