The 170-year history of the San Francisco Bay Area told through its crimes and how they intertwine with the city’s art, music, and politicsIn The Murders That Made Us, the story of the San Francisco Bay Area unfolds through its most violent and depraved acts. From its earliest days when vigilantes hung perps from downtown buildings to the Zodiac Killer and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, murder and mayhem have shaped the city into the political and economi...

Just in time for Comic-Con comes the investigative romp through the conventions industry! Conventions. Tradeshows. Expos. Every profession and obsession has them. We select hot tubs, handguns, the best Wonder Woman costume and even our presidential contenders at these neo-tribal gatherings where commerce and communalism collide. With a tanking economy and looming layoffs, lapsed-fanboy Bob Calhoun sets out on a quest through the temporary worlds created in concrete convention centers and h...

The 170-year history of the San Francisco Bay Area told through its crimes and how they intertwine with the city's art, music, and politics.In The Murders That Made Us, the story of the San Francisco Bay Area unfolds through its most violent and depraved acts. From the city's earliest days, where vigilantes hung perps from buildings and newspaper publishers shot it out on Market Street, to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer, crime has mad...

From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air ("Not since Devil in the White City has a book told such a harrowing tale"--Douglas Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century.Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities--beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books--sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-...

**INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!One of Amazon’s Best History Books of JanuaryAcclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true*-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.*On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small Ne...

Discover the science of forensics through Agatha Christie's novels in the ultimate true crime investigationAgatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, and nearly every story she ever wrote involves one—or, more commonly, several—dead bodies. And the cause of death, the motives behind violent crimes, the clues that inevitably are left behind, and the people who put the pieces together to solve the mystery invite the reader to analyze the evidence and ra...

“An absorbing and humane account . . . Mr. Herman is at pains to remind us that the Viking world was never just a stage for mayhem. It was, he says, ‘about daring to reach for more than the universe had gifted you, no matter the odds and the obstacles.’ In short: We might all take our own life’s cue from the Viking heart.”—The Wall Street JournalFrom a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of Vi...

A noted linguist examines extinct languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the mysteries of as-yet undeciphered writings, in this scholarly work.While certain ancient languages were passed down continuously through the ages, many others were ignored for centuries. When scholars began to decipher these extinct languages in the early nineteenth century, they uncovered previously inaccessible riches of knowledge and history. Yet much work remains to be done on undeciphe...

NPR's Best Books of 2020"Galvanizing and urgent....a slice of queer urban history and a necessary rethinking of sex work as a site of collective labor struggle." –National Public RadioA riveting true story of a young woman’s days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms.When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way t...

A "hugely enjoyable" chronicle of the Adams, Quincy and Hancock families and how they helped spark the American Revolution ( Christian Science Monitor).Awarded the 2021 New England Society in the City of New York Book Award for Best Historical Nonfiction, American Rebels explores for the first time the intimate connections between three families in the lead up to the American Revolution. Author Nina Sankovitch examines the intertwined lives of John...

" Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don't have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it's just so much fun to read." —NPREnglish is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn't speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's people in their mother tongues, you'd need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty worl...

"Deeply researched and densely atmospheric," a true crime account of a serial killer who acted under cover of London's historic environmental catastrophe. ( New York Times Book Review)London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip. Some twelve thousand people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another kille...