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The Final Twist
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking
Win at Work and Succeed at Life: 5 Principles to Free Yourself from the Cult of Overwork
Left You Dead
Protector: The epic new adventure through the battlefields of ancient Greece
Because of You: The instant Sunday Times bestseller 2020
The Wife Who Got a Life
Covet
The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the listener, and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?
Show moreOtto Penzler presents a collection of nineteen unsolved mystery stories by a number of noted authors, including Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, and Mark Twain, where the ending is left up to the listener to determine. Here are the most intriguing riddle mysteries in literary history, including tales from Bradbury, Dahl, Huxley, O. Henry, and Twain. Tantalizing, as ingenious as they are devious, the classic stories in this continually arresting collection come with an irresistible challenge: At their end they leave it to you, the listener, to determine how they end. For ultimately it's the listener who authors the fate of the brave youth as he contemplates which of the two doors in the king's arena he will choose in Frank Stockton's famous and unforgettable 'The Lady, or the Tiger?' And which of the two brothers in three-time Edgar-winner Stanley Ellin's 'Unreasonable Doubt' shoots a bullet square in the middle of their rich uncle's forehead? And just what not-so-sweet secret is the prim Miss Spence hiding behind her smile in Aldous Huxley's deliciously enigmatic tale? You decide.
Show moreThe New York Times bestseller that tells the story of an overheated stock market and the financial disaster that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. A riveting living history about Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Captures the era, the intoxicating expectancy, the hope that ruled men's heart and minds before the bubble burst and the black despair of the decade that followed.
Show moreAn examination of the US-China relationship that charts a new path for America focusing on its existing advantages. Ryan Hass charts a path forward in America's relationship and rivalry with China rooted in the relative advantages America already possesses. Hass argues that while competition will remain the defining trait of the relationship, both countries will continue to be impacted-for good or ill-by their capacity to coordinate on common challenges that neither can solve on its own, such as pandemic disease, global economic recession, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation. Hass makes the case that the United States will have greater success in outpacing China economically and outshining it in questions of governance if it focuses more on improving its own condition at home than on trying to impede Chinese initiatives. He argues that the task at hand is not to stand in China's way and turn a rising power into an enemy in the process but to renew America's advantages in its competition with China.
Show moreJ. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war-from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a 'spook,' with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.
Show moreThe Stone Dogs is the third of four books of S.M. Stirling's alternate history series, The Domination. During the cold war between the Alliance and the Domination, Frederic and Marya work for the OSS as spies and assassins. During the Draka conquest of India, Marya Lefarge is taken prisoner. She becomes a serf to Yolande Ingolfsson, who after torturing her repeatedly with a neural weapon, forces her to become a "brooder" (i.e., a surrogate mother) for her offspring, Gwendolyn. Yolande also swears vengeance on Fred Lefarge after he kills her lover, Myfanwy Venders, during the Indian Incident. As both superpowers expand into space, they prepare different doomsday weapons. Th Alliance's weapon is a computer virus ("comp plague") secretly planted in Draka military computers by spies; the Draka's is a biological virus called the Stone Dogs that causes infected personnel to go insane. Yolande discovers Marya, who has contacted the OSS, planting the comp-plague and allows her to escape with knowledge of the Stone Dogs. This forces her uncle, Archon Eric von Shrakenberg, to use the weapon prematurely. The Draka win the resulting conflict; however, their incomplete victory leads to Eric negotiating an arrangement whereupon the Alliance is allowed to launch its generation ship The New America and the remaining Alliance survivors in space are granted limited Draka citizenship.
Show moreIn 1945, US intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold but to keep its riches secret. These, combined with Japanese treasure recovered during the US occupation, and with recovered Nazi loot, would create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism. This 'Black Gold' gave Washington virtually limitless, unaccountable funds, providing an asset base to reinforce the treasuries of America's allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries for more than fifty years.
Show moreThe first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice-paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy. A man by turns quick-tempered, compassionate, and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck could be a difficult person to like. Obsessed with privacy, he was mistrustful of people. Next to writing, his favorite things were drinking and womanizing and getting married, which he did three times. And while he claimed indifference about success, his mid-career books and movie deals made him a lot of money. And yet Steinbeck also took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality, and the urgency of ecological collapse. Steinbeck remains our great social realist novelist, the writer who gave the dispossessed and the disenfranchised a voice in American life and letters. Eloquent, nuanced, and deeply researched, Mad at the World captures the full measure of the man and his work.
Show morePretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and motherhood were not enough to satisfy Marie, and she soon began to act out in troubling ways. Only when her husband, Frank, became sick with a mysterious illness, did it seem that she was ready to put someone else's needs ahead of her own. The truth was far more disturbing. Four years after Frank died, Marie's daughter, Carol, began to experience debilitating stomach pains. The young woman was near death when the horrifying reality finally emerged: Marie had poisoned her husband with arsenic and was attempting to do the same to her daughter. It was the first in a series of shocking twists that exposed Marie Hilley as a cold-blooded chameleon capable of the most sinister of crimes. From Alabama to Florida to New Hampshire, her trail of death and deceit included multiple identities, a second marriage, a false kidnapping, a fake death, several dramatic escapes, and a final act of desperation that brought the whole sordid saga to an astonishing end.
Show moreIn Under the Yoke, S.M. Stirling traces the rise of the Domination of the Draka and its long struggle with the United States and the American-led Alliance for Democracy. In this alternate history, the Americans who reject the Revolution did not scatter to the four winds and Canada; a slight change in the course of events brought them to the new Crown Colony of Drakia instead ... starting with the Cape of Good Hope and soon encompassing the whole of the right subcontinent of Southern Africa. Soon burning resentment and limitless ambition spurred the expansion of the people who called themselves the Draka.
Show moreAlthough Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing-or even a novel of the sea. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851-at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville's narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.
Show moreIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a 'brilliant' account of their stories (the New York Times). Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained-if not in the first generation, then by the second or third. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural.
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