| The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World by Nathaniel PhilbrickHistorian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick’s sweeping latest explores the wide-ranging impact of the California Gold Rush, detailing how it spurred America toward civil war and led to technological advancements including the transatlantic railroad and the motion picture industry. Featuring profiles of figures from the era, this propulsive chronicle also utilizes more than 80 maps and illustrations. For fans of: Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West by Peter Cozzens. |
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Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes
by Lindsey Fitzharris
Throughout nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the surgeon Joseph Bell was known for his extraordinary talent for detection and diagnosis. To the amazement of onlookers at the Royal Infirmary, he could read a patient's ailments, occupation, and personal habits from a single glance. Though such deductive powers were all quite elementary to Bell, they had a profound influence on the medical student and budding writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon enough, Bell's methods helped spark the creation of fiction's most iconic detective. Since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, he has become a global phenomenon. Yet the man Conan Doyle credited as Sherlock's prototype has slipped into the shadows. In Sleuth-Hound, the New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris brings Bell center stage, recounting how his work took him from ward to witness box as a medical detective probing murder and misdeeds. He worked closely and covertly with the police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn and a pioneering ballistics expert named Dr. Watson, and even collaborated with Conan Doyle to overturn a homicide conviction. Bell's forensic investigations took him from gaslit alleyways to Gilded Age drawing rooms, put him on the trail of poisoners and child killers, and even drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper. By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man's gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations. His sharp mind forever changed the way we read bodies, detect crimes, and serve justice.
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The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age
by Neil Price
For centuries, Vikings have been stereotyped as brutish and violent pillagers. But now, based on the latest archaeological research, preeminent scholar Neil Price reveals the true diversity and individuality of the Viking Age. From an arctic hunter to a woman of Persian ancestry; from a Sami nomad to a bear endowed with personhood; from Viking raiders to Rus' river traders; from sorceresses to shape-shifters; from immigrants to diplomats; from followers of many gods, to the worshippers of one; from settlers to farmers--as we meet all these and many more, Price enlists the full range of modern archaeological knowledge to reconstruct Norse lives in personal detail, presenting a new and complex image of the Viking Age. Taking the reader from Greenland to Greece and across three centuries, Price demonstrates that Vikings--in all of their heterogeneity--were both surprisingly similar to us today, and also thrillingly strange. Densely peopled, beautifully rendered, and impressively wide-reaching, The Sea-King and the Sorceress sheds a light on the realities of life in the Viking diaspora.
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The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America's Undoing in the Middle East
by Kim Ghattas
On January 18, 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was assassinated by a pair of gunmen outside his office. His murder, in the wake of the bombing of the US Marines' barracks, Palestinian guerrilla warfare, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, was just one more shocking headline in a city ravaged by the chaos of nine years of war. There was no investigation. Four decades later, the question of who killed Malcolm, and why, is still not fully resolved. In The Best Kind of American, Kim Ghattas embarks on a quest to shed new light on Kerr's forgotten assassination, weaving together the family's story with that of Lebanon's warlords and peacemakers, Hezbollah hostage takers and Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and American presidents from Reagan to Trump. She also tells the definitive story of how Beirut came to be the point of origin for the policies and people who went on to shape the Middle East for decades, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was then assassinated in a joint US-Israeli strike in the opening salvo of their 2026 war against the Islamic Republic. With the nuance, clarity, and storytelling that made Black Wave an era-defining work on the Middle East, Ghattas delivers a riveting, deeply human saga--a must-read for understanding why this conflict continues to shape today's world.
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Castles: A Fortified History of the World
by Dan Jones
Castles have been built to defend humanity for millennia--from the walls of Troy in the Bronze Age and the desert bastion of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria; to Windsor Castle and the Tower of London; to Himeji in Japan and Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. They have inspired terror and passion, foiled conquering forces, and been deployed as the ultimate expression of wealth, status, and supremacy. In Castles, Jones leads readers on a journey through the many eras of castle-building and across continents as each stronghold tells a unique story of power, politics, and survival, revealing the shifting tides of warfare, the rise and fall of empires, the resilience of people under siege, and the flourishing of new ideas. Blending rich storytelling, deep research, and beautiful original illustrations, Castles is an epic story of why humans build fortifications and how they powerfully capture our imagination. With Jones's trademark scholarship and flair, he shows how defiance, endurance, and ambition have been carved into the landscapes we've inherited.
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The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon
by Michael Dobbs
The year is 1983. Ronald Reagan is obsessed by biblical prophecies of Armageddon. A computer revolution is changing everything--from the way we track incoming ballistic missiles to how we share and consume information. And then, over just three months, a series of dramatic events encapsulates the president's worst nightmares. In rapid succession, a South Korean airliner is shot down over the Soviet Union after straying off course because of pilot-computer miscommunication. A glitchy Soviet early warning system mistakenly reports an incoming US missile attack. The Kremlin puts its nuclear forces on high alert in response to a routine NATO nuclear release exercise. Reagan deploys missiles capable of destroying the Kremlin in six minutes from their launch positions in West Germany. Soviet nuclear submarines are stationed off Cape Hatteras, ready to obliterate the White House in the same amount of time. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon Reagan recalled many years later, in a little-noticed passage in his memoirs. How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? In The Six Minute War, the former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post explores the challenge confronting fallible human leaders responding to ever-shrinking warning times of a nuclear attack. A nail-biting narrative of the Cold War crisis that heralded the fall of the Soviet Union, The Six Minute War poses an existential question: can we trust the machines at such life-or-death moments--or will we be destroyed by our own technological hubris?
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Uniting the States: Six Crucial Moments That Forged the American Miracle
by Brian Kilmeade
Brian Kilmeade's page-turning and riveting storytelling transports us to 1770 and the unshakeable John Adams as he does the unthinkable and defends the British soldiers accused at the Boston Massacre--but he is willing to risk his life and reputation to establish the rule of law as an essential American value. Then there is George Washington, who, outnumbered and outgunned against the most powerful military force in the world, innovates a new way of warfare and an improbable road to victory in the Revolutionary War. Captain Daniel Shays follows, a man who loses everything to stand up for the little man while helping to inspire the Constitutional Convention.The visionary Thomas Jefferson remakes the country in 1803, doubling its boundaries by masterminding the Louisiana Purchase from none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. James Madison challenges the British Goliath again, declaring the War of 1812 and rallying the United States in its first foray into making America a respected world power. Finally, John Quincy Adams, the conscience of the country, launches the nation's hardest-ever conversation, attempting to erase America's original sin. When the colonists threw off British rule, they launched a great experiment in democracy. Self-government by the people, with a sworn commitment to equality and liberty for all, had never been tried. In the pages of this book, Brian Kilmeade tells us how the six heroes united the fledgling United States of America in its early decades, setting our nation on a trajectory unlike any other.
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