A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell.In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splen...

A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell.In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splen...

The New York Times bestselling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s is “a Rosetta stone for reading America and its politics today” (Frank Rich, The New York Times Book Review).In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term—until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a...

'Indefatigable reporting . . . it has become newly topical, too' TelegraphIn this engrossing and deeply disturbing exposé from the bestselling author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen tells the gripping story of a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.In the chaos following the Second World War, the US government faced a critical decision: what to do with...

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened. This gripping work of literary nonf...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner of the PEN New England Award“Enchanting…A book filled with so much love…Long before Oregon, Rinker Buck has convinced us that the best way to see America is from the seat of a covered wagon.” —The Wall Street Journal“Amazing…A real nonfiction thriller.” —The New York Review of Books“Absorbing…Winning…The many layers in The Oregon Trail...

The modern image of the pirate is derived from Captain Charles Johnson's accounts of the cut-throats who sailed under the Jolly Roger. It was he who gave mythical status to the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. Using contemporary sources, Nigel Cawthorne now turns the spotlight on the reality of pirate life, revealing the truth behind the legends. It gives us an insight into the men - and women - their weapons, their ships, their unhappy victims and their hide-outs, including the capit...

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human surviva...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA gripping true story of survival, bravery, and honor in the vast Arctic wilderness during World War II, from Mitchell Zuckoff, the author of New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-LaOn November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched ...

In 1995, Stephen Kirkpatrick joined a five-man expedition into the remote jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. Kirkpatrick's assignment was to document an area of the rainforest that had never before been photographed, nor by most accounts, ever explored by white men.Within hours of their departure, an inaccurate map and a series of bad decisions leave the group hopelessly lost in the depths of the Amazon jungle. What began as a career-making photo expedition quickly turned into a despe...

This true story began in August 1929. A group of eight prospectors, led by C.D.H. MacAlpine of the Dominion Explorers, flew into the Arctic in search of mineral wealth. Grossly underequipped, the expedition ran out of fuel and was stranded above the Arctic Circle. Within days, Western Canada Airways sent a rescue team headed by Captain Andy Cruickshank, in what was to become the most extensive aviation search in Canadian history.The searchers encountered trouble: turbulent weather,...

'A brilliant book' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow‘A book that can show you how to change your behaviour' Evening StandardA child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice: Eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later. What will she choose? And what does her decision say about the person she'll become?Walter Mischel’s now iconic 'marshmallow test,' one of the most famous...