A New York Times Notable BookA lively, immersive history by an award-winning urbanist of New York City’s transformation, and the lessons it offers for the city’s future.Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it bec...

In this "brilliantly imagined and neatly plotted" Civil War novel (Boston Globe), two battle-scarred companies-one Union, one Confederate-embark on a series of baseball games amid the carnage at Spotsylvania. "Wonderfully conceived and eloquently executed" (Caleb Carr). Maps.

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him "the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington." For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation's most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education

An inspiring new vision for America's public schools from one of the nation's top educatorsAmerican fourth graders score twelfth in the world in math skills, after Latvia and Hungary. Our eighth graders are fifteenth, below Malaysia and Slovakia. And by the time they're fifteen years old, our students have slipped off the map—to twenty-fourth place internationally.If these stats don't make you angry or ashamed or plain sad, then at the very least they should make you...

May, 1864. In a moment of quiet during the endgame between Grant and Lee, a Union and a Confederate company meet, not entirely by accident. The Union soldiers are a motley company of Irish, English, and German stock, all ragged and worn from the Battle of the Wilderness. Left behind to guard their army’s flank, they decide to relax with a baseball and bat when, as if by magic, a company of Alabama infantry appears from the woods. These ordinary soldiers determine to play baseball with the ...

A New York Times Notable BookA lively, immersive history by an award-winning urbanist of New York City’s transformation, and the lessons it offers for the city’s future.Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it bec...

A cultural history of Chicago at midcentury, with its incredible mix of architects, politicians, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and actors who helped shape modern AmericaThough today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities m...

America was made by the railroads. The opening of the Baltimore & Ohio line—the first American railroad—in the 1830s sparked a national revolution in the way that people lived thanks to the speed and convenience of train travel. Built through heroic effort, the American railroad network was bigger in every sense than Europe's, and facilitated everything from long-distance travel to commuting and transporting goods to waging war. It united far-flung parts of the country, boosted economic de...

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to...

R. F. Kuang's instant #1 New York Times bestselling novel!Babel is a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.**Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal....

"A thrilling, transportative adventure that is everything promised–Chakraborty's storytelling is fantasy at its best." -- R.F. Kuang, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and The Poppy War***"***An exhilarating, propulsive adventure, stitched from the threads of real history, Amina’s adventures are the reason to read fantasy." -- Ava Reid, internationally bestselling author of Juniper & Thorn

INSTANT#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER!“An epic fantasy odyssey begins.” — Entertainment Weekly"A richly rendered world . . . Kaner writes action that's both fun and intelligible . . . If "The Last of Us" didn't slake your thirst for stories of a grizzled fighter taking a tough kid on the road, then Godkiller should be your jam.” — Charlie Jane Anders, The Washingt...