A nail-biting, captivating look at tornados, from personal stories of those impacted by the natural disasters to the history of the struggle to understand this bewildering force of Mother Nature.May 3, 1999, is a day that Oklahomans will never forget. By the time the sun set over a ravaged plain, some 71 tornadoes had claimed around 11,000 homes and businesses and caused $1 billion in damage. One of them was a mile-wide monster of incredible power, the fiercest F5 ...

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam, by the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War“A female version of the Indiana Jones story . . . [Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt] was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame...

Enter the eye of the storm in this gripping real-life thriller—A Perfect Storm on land—that chronicles America’s biggest tornado outbreak since the beginning of recorded weather: a horrific three-day superstorm with 358 separate tornadoes touching down in twenty-one states and destroying entire towns.April 27, 2011 was the climax of a three-day superstorm that unleashed terror from Arkansas to New York. Entire communities were flattened, whole neighborhood...

“David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand.” — Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City“Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller.” — Entertainment WeeklyThe gripping true story of an epic prairie sn...

An illuminating account of a lone wolf journeying across the Alps into Italy, and what the resurgence of wolves says about our connection to nature, immigration, and one another—from an award-winning journalist.“Lone Wolf is a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told.”—Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of UnderlandFINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZEIn 2011, a lone wo...

**One of The Smithsonian’s 10 best history books of 2024One of BBC History Magazine's best books of 2024“Thoroughly researched and sprightly…. a complete history of the [Mediterranean world] with the women added back in, as they always should have been.”—The New York TimesA dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, lea...

Lisbon, 25 April 1974. Over the course of a single day, Europe’s oldest fascist regime falls. On its fiftieth anniversary, this is the story of the revolution that changed Portugal’s fate.25 April 1974, Lisbon. Over the course of a single day, Europe’s oldest fascist regime falls. On its 50th anniversary, this is the story of the revolution that changed Portugal forever.'The Carnation Revolution reads like a political thril...

From internationally bestselling historian Giles Milton comes the remarkable true story of the motley group of Allied men and women who worked to manage Stalin’s mercurial, explosive approach to diplomacy during four turbulent years of World War II.In the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, shattering what Stalin had considered an ironclad partnership. There were real fears that Stalin’s forces would be defeated or that the Soviet leader would once aga...

An “adventure tale for puzzle lovers and Indiana Jones fans alike” (The Washington Post) following three free-spirited Victorians on their twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.It was one of history’s great vanishing acts. Around 3,400 BCE, a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny s...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF FALL: WASHINGTON POST, CBS, BOSTON GLOBE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE & MORE • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book” (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world"Extraordinary...For anyone whose capacity for wonder could use a jumpstart, Rundell's essays are essential reading."—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.“Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.”—ScienceScientists and enthusiastic ...

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * A Southwest Book of the Year “Top Pick”“American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,’ Parker asserts, in this sweeping history.” —The New YorkerA revelatory work of Southwest history that recenters the American origin story two-thousand miles west of Plymouth Rock, in El Paso, Texas—heart of Indigenous power and resistance, locus of Spanish coloniz...