**A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. The Sunday Times (UK) Classical Music Book of 2018 and one of The Economist’s Best Books of 2018.**“A magisterial portrait.” —**Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times Book ReviewA landmark biography of the Polish composer by a leading authority on Chopin and his timeBased on ten years of research and a vast cache of primary sources ...

A landmark biography of the Polish composer by a leading authority on Chopin and his time.Based on ten years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dis...

Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called "the most important story" he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon.Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketchin...

"Everyone who cares about the human adventure will find new information and new angles of vision."—Martin E. Marty, The New York Times Book ReviewThis extraordinary work delves into the subject of religion in the prehistoric and ancient worlds—humankind's earliest quests for meaning. From Neanderthal burials to the mythology of the Iron Age, to the religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Israel, India, and beyond, it offers both an apprec...

**This program is read by the author.National Geographic Explorer and TED Prize-winner Dr. Sarah Parcak welcomes you to the exciting new world of space archaeology, a growing field that is sparking extraordinary discoveries from ancient civilizations across the globe.**In Archaeology from Space, Sarah Parcak shows the evolution, major discoveries, and future potential of the young field of satellite archaeology. From surprise advancements after the declassification...

The Civil War battle waged on September 17, 1862, at Antietam Creek, Maryland, was one of the bloodiest in the nation’s history. On this single day, the battle claimed nearly twenty-three thousand casualties. In Landscape Turned Red, the renowned historian Stephen Sears draws on a remarkable cache of diaries, dispatches, and letters to recreate the vivid drama of Antietam as experienced not only by its leaders but also by its soldiers, both Union and Confederate. Combining brillia...

Take a tour through the wilder side of art history and discover true tales of murder, forgery, trickery, and great art—featuring jaw-dropping profiles of Da Vinci, Dali, and moreWith outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. You'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his ass...

The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in Virginia“If anyone today knows colonial Virginia, it is James Horn.” —Wall Street JournalAlong the banks of the James River, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a month of one another that would profoundly shape the course of history. At the end of July, the G...

"The best, the liveliest and most illuminating" account of Rockefeller, Morgan, and the other men who seized American economic power after the Civil War (The New Republic).John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick . . . their names carry a powerful historical ring, still echoing today in the countless institutions that are part of their legacy, fro...

I'm Staying with My Boys is a firsthand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation. Sgt. John Basilone held off 3,000 Japanese troops at Guadalcanal after his fifteen-member unit was reduced to three men. At Iwo Jima he single-handedly destroyed an enemy blockhouse, allowing his unit to capture an airfield. Minutes later he was killed by an enemy artillery round. He was the only Marine in World War II to have received the Medal of Honor, the Navy...

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never toldOn September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites....

The remarkable autobiography of the globally-recognized human rights champion whose heroism inspired the film Hotel Rwanda“Fascinating…your book is called An Ordinary Man, yet you took on an extraordinary feat with courage, determination, and diplomacy.” – Oprah, O, The Oprah Magazine**As Rwanda was thrown into chaos during the 1994 genocide, Rusesabagina, a hotel manager, turned the luxurious Hotel Milles Collin...