A splendid original tale, Alfred Buber is warm, smart, romantic, but his life is as barren as an ice floe, an embarrassing collage of successes and humiliations that add up to... nothing. He lives as if he has landed in a strange country, nowhere he recognizes.Can an-oh-so respectable Boston lawyer, out of options, out of hope, lonely beyond measure, stray way outside the lines and find love?Can he step into the tawdry dark, and back into the wholesome light, and not be aff...

The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries—from their rise to power to their eventual downfall.**"A feat of both scholarship and storytelling." —**Wall Street JournalIn The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built—and then lost—over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs gained control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteen...

A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires.**"Truly extraordinary." —**Times (London)At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history.Assyria’s wide-rangin...

A prize-winning historian’s major new history of the Second World War, arguing that Stalin’s USSR was the war’s driving force.**“A provocative revisionist take on the Second World War … McMeekin is a formidable researcher.” —**Financial TimesWe remember World War II as a struggle between good and evil, with Hitler propelling events and the Allied powers saving the day. But Hitler’s armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his emp...

A spirited history of the English country house in its golden ageFor generations, the great palaces of Britain were home to living histories, noble families that had reigned for centuries. But by the end of the nineteenth century, members of elite society found themselves, for the first time, in the company of arrivistes. Their new neighbors—from chorus girls to millionaire greengrocers to guano impresarios—lacked lineage and were unencumbered by the weight of trad...

The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society—even if, after more than two hundred years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all of their brilliance and vengefulness...

The history of Germany’s fractured republic and how it gave way to the Third Reich, from the breakthrough of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler.**"Elegant and sobering." —**New York TimesAmid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship...

The definitive history of the self-destruction of the autocratic Romanov dynasty.**“Filled with revelations and fresh insights and rich with observations.” —**The Wall Street JournalIn 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest, that culminated in Tsar Nicholas II’s dramatic fall from power. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, a trove of new archival discoveries confirms t...

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a remarkable examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the listener into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history—and sometimes about the modern world too.In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He ...

“Remarkable… the best overview of America’s misadventure in Southeast Asia, and it is sure to become the standard one-volume book on the war.” – Thomas E. Ricks, New York TimesThe Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to bat...

The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.**"Gripping." —**New York Times**“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —**NPR Books?Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bon...

**"A terrifying and timely account of resistance in the face of the greatest of evils.”—Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of The First WaveAn enthralling story that vividly resurrects the web of everyday Germans who resisted Nazi rule**Nazi Germany is remembered as a nation of willing fanatics. But beneath the surface, countless ordinary, everyday Germans actively resisted Hitler. Some passed industrial secrets to Allied spies. Some forged pa...