NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO MaxFor five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—f...

This is a book to appeal to anyone with an interest in China, be they first time tourists, seasoned business people, or even the idly curious. Accessible, revelatory and entertaining, it will help you discover this extraordinary nation for yourself.

***NATIONAL BEST SELLER***A vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention taking place in America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media. A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts.For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immig...

When her five-year-old son passed the rigorous entrance exams to one of Japan's top private elementary schools, Makihara, a single mother, thought they were on their way. Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite.But it didn't turn out that way. Taro had other things in mind. While...

A Look into the Privileged World of the American Aristocracy of the Early Twentieth CenturyFlora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world.But money itself is not the source of happiness. Glimpses into the elegance of a Vanderbilt ball thrown by her great-grandparents and the yearly p...

Seduced by the government’s offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century.Jonathan Raban’s stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader’s dreams strips away the myth—while preserving the romance—that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

Brought to you by Penguin.Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with...

Ghosting the News tells the most troubling media story of our time: How democracy suffers when local news dies. Reporting on news-impoverished areas in the U.S. and around the world, America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage but also surveys some new efforts to keep local news alive -- from non-profit digital sites to an effort modeled on the Peace Corps. No nostalgic paean to the roar of rumbling presses, Ghosting th...

In Uncovered, Leah Lax tells her story—beginning as a young teen who left her liberal, secular home for life as a Hasidic Jew and ending as a forty-something woman who has to abandon the only world she's known for thirty years in order to achieve personal freedom. In understated, crystalline prose, Lax details her experiences with arranged marriage, fundamentalist faith, and motherhood during her years with the Hasidim, and explores how her creative, sexual, and spiritual longings...

The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection—but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was forty-seven years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her w...

History comes alive in this textured account of the rivalry between Harry Houdini and the so-called Witch of Lime Street, whose iconic lives intersected at a time when science was on the verge of embracing the paranormal.The 1920s are famous as the golden age of jazz and glamour, but it was also an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. A desperate search f...

KIRKUS REVIEWS: "A meticulously researched historical account presented in the form of a thrilling political drama."GRAND PRIZE ~ Best Book, Chanticleer International Book AwardsTheodora: actress, prostitute, mistress, feminist. And Byzantine Empress of the Roman world. Stephen: handsome Syrian boy, wizard's apprentice, palace eunuch. And Secretary to the Empress. How does this unlikely pair bec...