The “intelligent and sweeping” (Booklist) story of the crucial year that prefigured the events of the American Revolution in 1776—and how Boston’s smallpox epidemic was at the center of it all.In The Fever of 1721 Stephen Coss brings to life the amazing cast of characters who changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution: Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, son of the President of Harvard College; Zabdi...

In The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of history, including Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's grand avenues; James and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin; and Elisha Cooke and his protégé Samuel Adams.During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would...

The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation by Upton Sinclair is a scathing critique of organized religion as an institution entangled with wealth, power, and class oppression. Sinclair argues that religious establishments often serve the interests of the rich, legitimizing social inequality and discouraging reform. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, he exposes financial corruption, dogma, and the exploitation of faith for profit. From mainstream denomination...

Stirring portraits of five commanders whose dynamic leadership changed the course of war and history by prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson.Prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores the nature of leadership with his usual depth and vivid prose in The Savior Generals, a set of brilliantly executed pocket biographies of five generals (Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus) who sin...

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and one of the leading young environmental journalists and bloggers working today, immerses readers in the world of those who study hurricanes. What was once an arcane branch of meteorology (itself an arcane science) has become embroiled in one of the most politicized and hotly contested debates in American science: whether or not the recent hurricane disasters—culminating in Katrina—are connected to global warming.Moon...

In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often "very amusing" look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews).Arguing that Nixon was a reflection of the country that elected him, Wills examines not only the psychology of the man himself and his relationshi...

"Ferris is a master analogist who conveys his insights on the history of cosmology with a lyrical flair." —The New York Times Book ReviewIn The Science of Liberty, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—called "the best popular science writer in the English language today" by the Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by the Washington Post—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of l...

Jimmy Breslin can sniff out a story like he can sniff out a rat. Here, he tells a lifetime of anecdotes in his inimitable New York voice, giving us a view through the keyhole of the people and places that define the Mafia—characters like Sammy the Bull, the original snitch, and Gaspipe Casso, named for his weapon of choice; and hangouts like Pep McGuire’s, the legendary watering hole where reporters and gangsters (all hailing from the same working class neighborhoods) rubbed elbows and tra...

Finally, the truth from a Washington insider: An audacious and desperately needed primer on how America’s Ruling Class have upended the Constitution and taken over our country—and how we must unite to regain control of our liberty.A Ruling Class have emerged in America against the hopes and designs of our Founders. Over the last hundred years, they have rejected the Constitution and expanded their own power, slowly at first and now rapidly. These people think that ...

“A roaring getaway car of guilty pleasures” (The New York Times Book Review), Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade is a fascinating, critically acclaimed chronicle of the rises and falls of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes and the fans who love him—now with a new afterword.Since his debut in Detective Comics #27, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop Art sensation; a pointy-eared ...

Born into a prominent Shia Muslim family in Pakistan, Ali had it all—prestige, security, wealth, social status. The Cost is the extraordinary story of his dramatic encounter with Jesus that would change everything.That life-altering choice to follow Jesus would turn Ali from a typical teenager into a target of a terrorist organization based in his hometown—a target they would soon act on.The Cost is the riveting and remarkable journey of a young man who le...

Security agent Christopher Kruse lost his wife and young daughter in the south of France. In Come Barbarians he investigated and stopped the people responsible for their deaths. He has remained in France working for the ambitious mayor of Paris, wandering streets haunted by his lost family and watching over a woman and her daughter. But when a charismatic politician is murdered by a grenade attack in the Jewish quarter, Kruse catapults back into the maelstrom of organized crime an...