In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against human rights, religious freedom, and the secular state. According to the Catholic view, modern concepts like these, unleashed by the French Revolution, had been a disaster. Yet by the 1960s, those positions were reversed. How did this happen? Why, and when, did the world’s largest religious organization become modern?James Chappel finds an answer in the shattering experiences of the 1930s. Faced with the rise of Nazism and Communi...

An “essential” (The New Republic) account of the history of old age in modern America, showing how we created unprecedented security for some and painful uncertainty for othersOn farms and in factories, Americans once had little choice but to work until death. As the nation prospered, a new idea was born: the right to a dignified and secure old age. That project has benefited millions, but it remains incomplete—and today it’s under siege.In Gol...

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it – as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book – more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and p...

Isaiah Berlin was born a century ago. One of the most celebrated British thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a tireless champion of freedom and diversity against control and conformity. His generous, open vision of life is displayed with special immediacy in his brilliant pen-portraits of contemporaries, Personal Impressions, in which he sees the point of radically differing personalities, enters into their distinctive outlooks, and describes his encounters with them, in arrestingly ...

Before Browning’s 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. He in stead investigates the men who carried out acts of extreme violence. Who were they? How could they end up committing such unspeakable acts? Focusing on one unexceptional regiment of German reservists, Police Battalion 101, Browning shows that, while their orders to kill appalled them at first, a combination of reluctance to c...

“Riveting . . . Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time [is] a book that none of us can afford to miss.”—The Washington PostA gripping investigation of the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis.SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN...

**A “gripping” (The Washington Post) work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society.“Reads like a thriller . . . masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)**A BEST BOOK OF T...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality . . . a must-read for every American parent and educator.”—Esquire“Though the argument of this book is bleak, it illuminates a path for a more just future that is nothing short of dazzling.”—Oprah Daily“This book will transform the way you see this country.”—Michelle Alexander, author of

In this definitive book on revenge, psychiatry researcher James Kimmel, Jr. exposes the unseen neurobiological cause of violence—a compulsive desire for retribution—and offers a profound new understanding of human behavior and breakthrough framework for making our lives and communities safer.**“This riveting, science-based exploration of why we feel pleasure from other people’s pain is a must-read.”—Anna Lembke, MD, author of Dopamine NationA Next ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent, topic-by-topic guide to Project 2025, with everything you need to know about how the second Trump administration is remaking America—from a go-to authority at The AtlanticWhen President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, news spread about his implementation of Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The debates—and anx...

The radical, paradigm-shifting international bestseller that destroys our delusions about energy consumption and will change the way we talk about climate change.We have long been taught that humanity’s relationship with energy is one of progress, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear—until at some future point everything will be replaced by “green” energy. But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argu...

**WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Through the “revelatory and gut-wrenching” (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across America.“An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that ca...