A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting.New parents are faced with innumerable decisions to make regarding the best way to care for their baby, and, naturally, they often turn for guidance to friends and family members who have already raised children. B...

An epic cultural journey that reveals how Venetian ingenuity and inventions—from sunglasses and forks to bonds and currency—shaped modernity.How did a small, isolated city—with a population that never exceeded 100,000, even in its heyday—come to transform western civilization? Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, the author of the groundbreaking Our Babies, Ourselves examines the the unique Venetian social structure that was key to their explosion of c...

A once beautiful woman in a little black dress, designer stiletto heels, and a long string of expensive pearls floats face down in a turbulent pool at the base of a local waterfall, her long auburn hair streaming in the current and her skull bashed in. Homicide Detective First Grade Grace McLeod, a Big City exile now living and working a small college town, knows one thing immediately: this is no suicide...not with those pearls. She recognizes Renata Durand, head of the University Developm...

The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnessesWINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZECommitted in utmost secrecy in April–May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western govern...

Harvard’s acclaimed geologist “charts Earth’s history in accessible style” (AP)“A sublime chronicle of our planet." –Booklist, STARRED reviewHow well do you know the ground beneath your feet?Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roame...

This expert guide to plant formation and the origins of life "makes the solar system an even weirder and more wonderful place than it seemed before" ( Wall Street Journal).In 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 revealed an astonishing truth: the far side of the moon is an enormous mountainous expanse, completely different from the vast lava-plains on the side facing Earth. But why would the two side of the moon be so different? And what might this tell us about o...

"With extraordinarily gut-wrenching descriptions of . . . battle" this #1 international bestseller "makes real a tragedy that shaped Spain and Europe" ( Kirkus Reviews ).Why do the weak fight against the strong? At ninety-eight, Martí Zuviría ponders this question as he begins to tell the extraordinary tale of Catalonia and its annexation in 1714. No one knows the truth of the story better, for Martí was the very villain w...

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic ob...

The remarkable, moving story of Prince Philip's mother by eminent biographer Hugo Vickers, updated in this new edition - for fans of Kingmaker and The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse'Gripping. Hugo Vickers has pulled off an extraordinary feat in describing the life - in many ways tragic - of Princess Andrew of Greece. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a masterpiece.' - A. N. WilsonPrincess Alice, mo...

Exit Wounds: A Vietnam Elegy is an intimate, boots-on-the-ground memoir that chronicles one captain’s brutal experience in the Vietnam War.On October 19, 1965, American Special Forces in Vietnam came under attack at their camp at Plei Me. This marked the first major confrontation between the North Vietnamese and US armies during the war. Throughout six days of constant hostile fire, Captain Lanny Hunter sorted the seriously wounded from the dead and saved ...

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award FinalistOne of Smithsonian Magazine**'s Best History Books of 2021**"An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal"A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPRIn the summer of 1942, the Rab...

The Sunday Times BestsellerA new assessment of the West’s colonial recordIn the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.These t...