The heart-pounding history of how Pope Pius XII—often labeled “Hitler’s Pope”—was in fact an anti-Nazi spymaster, plotting against the Third Reich during World War II.**“A groundbreaking new history of the Vatican-German Resistance. . . . Writing with the craft of a novelist and the conscience of a meticulous scholar, Riebling has produced a masterly account.” —**National ReviewThe Vatican’s silence in the face of Nazi atrocities r...

Prophetic when first published and even more relevant now, Wedge is the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself.Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents, Wedge reveals and recreates—battle by battle, bungle by bungle—the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI an...

The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang—the Green Beret at the center of America’s covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror.Army Colonel Walter Patrick Lang led the life that many men would love to live. He faced firefights on three continents and led a band of Pentagon ruffians who stalked some of the world’s worst villains. When America was losing the War on Terror, he leveraged the lessons of his life to correct the course of his coun...

The Vatican’s silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him “Hitler’s Pope.” But a key part of the story has remained untold.Pius ran the world’s largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazi...

The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang—the Green Beret at the center of America’s covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror.Army Colonel Walter Patrick Lang led the life that many men would love to live. He faced firefights on three continents and led a band of Pentagon ruffians who stalked some of the world’s worst villains. When America was losing the War on Terror, he leveraged the lessons of his life to correct the course of his coun...

From an award-winning historian and New York Times bestselling author, a gripping, fly-on-the-wall account of the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln's decision to go to war against the Confederacy.1861: The Lost Peace is the story of President Lincoln’s difficult and courageous decision at a time when the country wrestled with deep moral questions of epic proportions.Through Jay Winik’s singular reporting and storytelling, readers will le...

You don't need a big title or a business degree in order to lead with impact. What you need is practical wisdom: the insight, judgment, and strength of character that all great leaders have, but that most business schools and corporate workshops don't teach. The Greats on Leadership gets you there.Jocelyn Davis takes you on an in-depth tour of the best leadership ideas of the past 25 centuries, featuring classic authors from Plato to Winston Churchill, Shakespeare to Jane ...

A delightful journey through the psychology and science of music, Why You Love Music is the perfect book for anyone who loves a tune.Music plays a hugely important role in our emotional, intellectual, and even physical lives. It impacts the ways we work, relax, behave, and feel. It can make us smile or cry, it helps us bond with the people around us, and it even has the power to alleviate a range of medical conditions. The songs you love (and hate, and eve...

To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a "cousins' war." The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in fifteenth-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since.As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a ...

**A gripping history of the Nazi invasion of Poland, the true onset of World War II“Exemplary...About as good as military history can be.” —Timothy Snyder, New York Times**For Americans, World War II began in December 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Europe, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s soldiers invaded Poland, followed later that month by Stalin’s Red Army. The conflict that ensued saw the debut of many of the features that woul...

The history of the shadowy Werewolf guerrilla bands formed at end of the Second World War as the last desperate defence of Nazis.Founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1944 when it became clear Germany would be invaded, the Werewolf guerrilla movement was given the task of slowing down the Allied advance to allow time for the success of negotiations or wonder weapons. Staying behind in territory occupied by the Allies, its mission was to carry out acts of sabotage, arson a...

The link between Hitler's Third Reich and European royalty has gone largely unexplored due to the secrecy surrounding royal families. Now, in Royals and the Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos uses unprecedented access to royal archives to tell the fascinating story of the Princes of Hesse and the important role they played in the Nazi regime. Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England, had been humiliated by defeat in WWI and, like much of the Ge...