Vitruvian Man is the world's most famous drawing, by one of the world's most famous artists. The image - named after a Roman architect and engineer, Vitruvius - has become visual shorthand for artistic genius and scientific inquiry, and yet nobody knows anything about it. In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester examines the forces that converged in 1490 to turn an idea that had been around for centuries into this iconic image, bringing the ghost of an unknown Leonar...

"Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling WaldseemUller world map of 1507." So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the wor...

Everybody knows the picture: a man, meticulously rendered by Leonardo daVinci, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a circle and asquare. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeurof art, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the humanspirit, the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books, on coffeecups, on corporate logos, even on spacecraft. It has, in short, becomethe world's most famous cultural...

Etched in the wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform on clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh stands as the earliest classic of world literature. Its earliest surviving fragments date back to the eighteenth century BC, more than 3,700 years ago. In The Buried Book, David Damrosch tells the story of George Smith, a self-taught linguist, who one momentous afternoon in 1872 was working at the British Museum, going through a pile of Layard’s clay tablets, when he suddenly real...

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown.In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic...

The story of how we got our numbers—told through one mathematician's journey to find zeroThe invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the origin...

Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland's Atlantic shore. These "white martyrs" sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray, and move closer to an understanding of God: places where they could see angels. Columba, who founded the famous monastery at Iona, was the most well-known of these courageous men who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the...

The untold story of the slaying of a Southern town's ex-slaves and a white lawyer's historic battle to bring the perpretators to justiceFollowing the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, whereAfrican Americansand whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex-Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill...

The definitive account of the Dalton Gang and the most brazen bank heist in history, by the multiple New York Times bestselling author.The Last Outlaws is the thrilling true story of the last of one of the greatest outlaw gang. The dreaded Dalton Gang consisted of three brothers and their rotating cast of colorful accomplices who saw themselves as descended from the legendary James brothers. They soon became legends themselves, beginning their car...

What is a country? While certain basic tenets—such as the clear demarcation of a country's borders, and the acknowledgment of its sovereignty by other countries and by international governing bodies like the United Nations—seem applicable, journalist Joshua Keating's book explores exceptions to these rules, including "breakaway," "semi-autonomous," or "self-proclaimed" countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, Somaliland, a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island n...

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times—perfect for this political moment.What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe nothing to the rest of the country?With his sharp eye for detail, Thomas Frank takes us on a wide-...

Ever, Lindsay, and Josie have ushered their daughters—Bea, Olive, and Savvy—through years of dance classes. They've tended bloodied feet, stitched ribbons to countless pairs of pointe shoes, and forged friendships that seem to transcend rivalry.But now Etienne Bernay, enfant terrible of French ballet, has come to their conservatory. Not only will he direct this year's production of The Nutcracker, but he's brought along a film crew to document his search for one special st...