The story of the talented American engineers and adventurers who labored to conquer gravity in a flying machine.When Orville and Wilbur Wright soared over Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina's outer banks and solved the problem of aerial navigation, they wrote the last chapter in a long story. For decades prior, a small community of engineers, scientists, and dreamers—men named Chanute and Langley and Herring—had tried to make the ascent in every conceivable craft, ...

The reissue of this definitive biography heralds the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight.Brilliant, self-trained engineers, the Wright brothers had a unique blend of native talent, character, and family experience that perfectly suited them to the task of invention but left them ill-prepared to face a world of skeptics, rivals, and officials. Using a treasure trove of Wright family correspondence and diaries, Tom Crouch skillfully weaves ...

Discover the incredible history of the Smithsonian as it grew to meet the needs of a nationFollow the fascinating growth and development of the world's largest museum and research complex during its first 60 years. The English chemist and mineralogist James Smithson never visited the United States, yet he bequeathed his estate to the country to establish the Smithsonian Institution. The rest is history, told in rich detail in Smithson's Gamble. This book r...

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers––and fortune hunters––than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa's legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.One o...

Born into a theatrical family, Chaplin's father died of drink while his mother, unable to bear the poverty, suffered from bouts of insanity, Chaplin embarked on a film-making career which won him immeasurable success, as well as intense controversy. His extraordinary autobiography was first published in 1964 and was written almost entirely without reference to documentation - simply as an astonishing feat of memory by a 75 year old man. It is an incomparably vivid reconstruction of a poor ...

"A brilliant full-length portrait of Franklin Roosevelt the politician"—the first in an award-winning two-volume biography ( The Christian Science Monitor).Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest serving president in United States history, reshaping the country during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II. But before his ascension to the presidency, FDR laid the groundwork for his unprecedented run with decades of canny political maneuvering...

"Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring…A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester tells the breathtaking saga of the Atlantic Ocean in a masterful work of narrative nonfiction. A gifted storyteller and...

The rivetingly strange story of the world's most expensive bottle of wine, and the even stranger characters whose lives have intersected with it.The New York Times bestseller, updated with a new epilogue, that tells the true story of a 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux—supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it.Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years?...

An illustrated A-to-Z tribute to old-fashioned items worth rediscovering: "Wistful . . . charming . . . like a stroll down memory lane." — ElleWhatever happened to cuckoo clocks? Or bed curtains? Why do we have so many "friends" while doing away with the much more useful word "acquaintance"? All of these things, plus hot toddies, riddles, proverbs, corsets, calling cards, and many more, are due for a revival.Throughout this whimsical, beautifully ill...

The real story of T. E. Lawrence's life as told by the author of I, Claudius. "A combination of history, biography, and . . . an amazingly human tale" ( Boston Evening Transcript).Immortalized in the film Lawrence of Arabia, the real T. E. Lawrence was a leader, a war strategist, and a scholar, and is here immortalized in an intimate biography written by his close friend, the award-winning British novelist, poet and classicist Robert Grav...

The "extraordinarily informed" account of how US cryptographers broke Japan's Purple cipher to change the course of World War II ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).Marching Orders tells the story of how the American military's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes during World War II led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and hastened the end of the devastating conflict. With unprecedented access to over one million pages of US Army documents ...

Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading pa...