After the fall of France in June 1940, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and total victory was a narrow stretch of water and the defiance of the British people. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart, and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination. By early 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place.

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

Majestic in its sweep, rich in ideas and argument, and packed with news and revelations, Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases—founding editor of National Review, the 20th century’s most influential political journal; syndicated columnist and TV debater; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; wisecracking candidate for mayor of New York; and bestselling novelist and memoirist.

A groundbreaking history of pirates, Enemies of All combines narrative adventure with deeply researched analysis, engrossing listeners in the rise of piracy in the later seventeenth century, the debates about piracy in contemporary law and popular media, as well as the imperial efforts to suppress piracy in the early eighteenth century.