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Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles SpencerIn September 1997, Charles Spencer stood in Westminster Abbey before a watching world and shared his grief at losing his beloved sister, Diana. Now, nearly thirty years later, he tells the astonishing story of his life with Diana and the tragic week of her death. In childhood, Charles and Diana, the youngest Spencers, were inseparable--secretly calling one another Duch and Carlos. As each other's closest confidantes, they roamed the family estate, endured extremely challenging boarding schools, survived terrifying nannies, and helped each other through the agony of their parents' divorce. Yet everything changed when Diana married the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and overnight became a global icon. Charles saw his older sister serve the world's marginalized and relish being mother to her treasured sons. But, pursued by a barbaric press as her royal marriage crumbled, she was left desperately alone. Charles always tried to be there for Diana--until that black night in August 1997.
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The Lost Voices of Pompeii: Life and Death on Pompeii's Final Day by Jess VennerAward-winning ancient historian, archaeologist, and social media sensation Dr. Jess Venner re-creates Pompeii's final day before Mount Vesuvius's eruption, revealing not just how its people died but how they lived. "The Lost Voices of Pompeii" follows ordinary citizens on what should have been an ordinary day: the newly freed Petrinus grapples with how to navigate his future in a town that isn't always welcoming; Julia Felix, a businesswoman, faces prejudice as she skirts traditional female roles; Amisusius, priest of the cult of Isis, struggles to balance politics and religion; among many other residents. Their stories weave together and apart, until they culminate in the fateful event. Some will survive, but others will fall victim to the natural disaster. Pompeii's story is often reduced to the scope of its tragedy, but Dr. Venner brings the focus back to the people themselves, capturing a civilization rich in history, traditions, and aspirations.
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53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy by Timothy W. RybackFrom internationally acclaimed historian Timothy W. Ryback, the chilling chronicle of how Adolf Hitler overturned a constitutional democracy in less than eight weeks. Charting the key events of those dramatic days in taut and compelling prose, Timothy W. Ryback evokes the raw political power and increasing inevitability of Hitler's state capture, amid heroic efforts by journalists and social democrats to save the republic, underscoring the alarming observation in the introduction to Joseph Goebbels' collected essays: The big joke on democracy is that it provides its mortal enemies with the means to its own destruction.
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The American School of Spies: The Archaeologists Who Fought the Nazis and Saved the Treasures of Ancient Greece by Stephan TaltyFrom the New York Times bestselling author, the incredible true story of the American archaeologists and classicists who went undercover as OSS spies during World War II to fight the Nazis and protect the world's most precious relics. These men and women, along with their Greek allies, went undercover and tried desperately to protect some of the world's most significant treasures. The archaeologists hid priceless artifacts in ancient caves, bank vaults, and even underneath the city of Athens itself. They created fakes to give over to the Nazis to appease their lust for these remarkable works. Ultimately, when it became clear the cat-and- mouse game on its own wasn't going to save Athens, they brought in an army of Greek American soldiers to beat back the Nazi regime and save their homeland.
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Babylon: The Biography of a Metropolis by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones'Babylon' is a name that has a double life: it denotes the great ancient Mesopotamian city with a long and complex history, and it is also a fictive allusion with a wide variety of connotations, from the Hebrew bible's Tower of Babel, through the New Testament's 'Whore of Babylon' to the iconic song 'The Rivers of Babylon’ in the 1970s.
The kingdom of Babylonia came in to being and, governed from mighty Babylon, setting the agenda for what civilization meant. This fascinating book explores Babylon's reputation as a city with a dual legacy by exploring its rich ancient past and its astonishing mythic legacy.
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The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished from History by Sam KeanSpanning a million years of history, the mysteries in these pages include fabled relics, legendary cities, mythical species, and undeciphered languages that have bedeviled seekers for centuries. Perhaps the single most common theme across all of history is loss. The loss of lands, loss of sacred objects, loss of languages, of rights, of life--the past groans with disappearances of all kinds. This enthralling narrative collects the most spellbinding tales of these experiences and weaves them into a thoughtful meditation on what it all means across the sweep of human history and the scope of human lives, including: The long-lost city of Troy, the hidden tomb of Genghis Khan, the destruction of the fabled library of Alexandria, the near-destruction of the Mona Lisa and other art, the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the extinction--and potential resurrection--of dodos, mammoths, and other iconic species. Provocative, surprising, and above all entertaining, this globe-trotting narrative acknowledges the sheer scale of humanity's losses, celebrates the treasures we have managed to retain, and reveals why they continue to captivate us centuries later.
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Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Marion GibsonFrom the bestselling author of Witchcraft, the captivating, compassionate account of a moral panic that swept across Britain during the English Civil War, leaving hundreds of so-called witches dead in its wake. Predating the Salem witch trials by decades--though linked by ideology and, in some cases, by ancestry--these trials began in southeastern England and the Scottish Lowlands in the early 1640s and spread rapidly through Britain. Fueled by religiosity, misogyny, and the economic stresses of war, the trials soon grew into a mass panic that transformed the nation--and led to the deaths of over three hundred people during a ten-year span. Moving across England and Scotland, "Witchland" shows how the chaos and economic deprivation of wartime can exacerbate existing divides within communities, leaving those already without power particularly vulnerable. Drawing on newly discovered historical documents, Gibson gives voice to the accused and defenseless--telling stories that have been hidden for centuries. With each chapter focusing on a different town and the lives and deaths of the people within it, "Witchland" is a gripping historical drama that plays out on both the small scale of the town square and the large scale of the nation.
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