“[A] magical, profound, and elegant look at the continued need for high quality in our throw away society.” —Douglas Brinkley, HistorianThis intensely human story, which moves from an ageless workshop in Brooklyn to the rehearsal rooms of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and across the globe to Cremona, the birthplace of Stradivari, opens up for the reader the insular and fascinating realm of music, musicians, and the craftsmanship that is essential to tha...

"With its tough humor, profound cynicism, and unerring nose for corruption and hypocrisy, City of Nets offers a distinctly Brechtian vision of Hollywood." — The Village VoiceIn 1939, fifty million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering. The 1940s became the decade of Hollyw...

In the tradition of The Botany of Desire and Wicked Plants, a witty and engaging history of the first botanists interwoven with stories of today's extraordinary plants found in the garden and the lab.In Paradise Under Glass, Ruth Kassinger recounted with grace and humor her journey from brown thumb to green, sharing lessons she learned from building a home conservatory in the wake of a devastating personal crisis.In A Garden of Marvels, s...

"Delightful, enlightening . . . The twisty history of the hybrid divider perfectly embodies the transience of language." — VultureThe semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was...

In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock—the day that shattered the Sixties' promise of peace and love ...

An "eminently provocative and readable" history examining six critical battles of the early twentieth century ( The Wall Street Journal).Sir Alistair Horne has been a close observer of war and history for more than fifty years and in this wise and masterly work, he revisits six battles of the past century and examines the strategies, leadership, preparation, and geopolitical goals of aggressors and defenders to reveal the one trait that links them all: hub...

Unraveling the Myth: How Hollywood's Studio System Blended Business and ArtIn Genius of the System, renowned film historian Thomas Schatz provides an indispensable account of Hollywood's traditional blend of business and art during the studio era. Schatz challenges the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifled artistic talent, revealing instead the genius of a system built on collaboration and conflict. Drawing from industry documents, he t...

"Fascinating and beautiful . . . if only chemistry had been like this at school." —Matt Ridley, New York Times–bestselling author of Genome, in Prospect magazineLike the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We do not know what most...

A New York Times New & Noteworthy BookOne of the Daily Beast's 5 Essential Books to Read Before the ElectionA collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change—including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and moreJust one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that...

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE • Bestselling author Richard Reeves provides an authoritative account of the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens during World War IILess than three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and inflamed the nation, President Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring parts of four western states to be a war zone operating under military...

**A New York Times–bestseller from an intelligence insider reveals the "fascinating new research" revealing Hemingway's hidden life in espionage ( New York Review of Books).A riveting epic, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in espionage and intelligence.While he was the historian at the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, former American intelligence officer and U.S. Marine colonel, un...

The groundbreaking and revelatory tale of the most dangerous years of the Cold War and the two leaders who held the fate of the world in their hands.This bestselling history takes us into the tumultuous period from 1960 through 1963 when the Berlin Wall was built and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the abyss. In this compelling narrative, author Michael Beschloss, praised by Newsweek as "th...