New World History

A creature that has already survived for 65 million years is not so easy to forget. Six years have passed since Gerry's extraordinary adventure at Lake Ness, but he hasn't made much of his own life since then. When echoes from his past return to remind him of his multiple inadequacies, Gerry finds a new lease of life at the thought of returning to the lake that made him a hero. Montworth is still a small town but a sense of newness pervades the place these days. It's not long before Gerry reacquaints himself with Barbara and Larry, and a plan is made to take a trip to the lake beyond the ...

In a world that forbids romance, they’re about to commit the ultimate crime. In the final days of the last great war, an explosion destroyed most of the landmass, leaving behind a world of islands and a dwindling population. In its wake, those who remain split into male and female islands. Eighteen-year-old Ariel always follows her heart, even if it means going down dangerous paths. Over the years she tries to forget the roguish best friend she lost when he came of age and was taken away. Now, as Mating Season approaches, she fears the duty she is compelled to fulfil. Ariel's world is ...

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: The Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

On the afternoon of January 16, 1942, three men boarded a TBD Devastator aircraft - a low-wing, single-engine torpedo-bomber - for an antisubmarine patrol flight. Although it was to be a relatively short flight, they became lost...

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on autopilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvelous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists—from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world—to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator.

A fascinating look at a neglected Allied front in the Southern hemisphere, Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, 1942 follows its successful predecessors as a captivating historical document of a pivotal era in history.

The mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in remote New Guinea in 1961 has kept the world, and even Michael's powerful, influential family, guessing for years. Now, Carl Hoffman uncovers startling new evidence that finally tells the full, astonishing story.

On May 13, 1945, 24 American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Unlike the peaceful Tibetan monks of James Hilton’s best-selling novel Lost Horizon, this Shangri-La was home to spear-carrying tribesmen, warriors rumored to be cannibals. But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through.

Brave New World July – September 1945 With Europe sifting through the rubble of a long and bitter war, the Japanese, true to their cultural heritage refused to surrender. The prospect of a protracted land campaign, resulting in the deaths of many more American military personnel, was too high a price to pay, leaving Truman to take the decision to end World War II swiftly, with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

Eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi himself; the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life; and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world.

Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm traveled from 1748 to 1750 through the colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Quebec. As one of the students of Carl Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial nomenclature system, Kalm spent considerable time with the members of an international network of natural philosophers including Peter Collinson in London, Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram in Philadelphia, and the Jesuits in Quebec. Kalm identified plant life, and recorded how the colonists changed the landscape. He speculated on the geological forces that created the Hudson River Valley, may have ...

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

Pirates and Emperors is a brilliant exploration of the role of the United States in the Middle East that exposes how the media manipulates public opinion about what constitutes "terrorism". Chomsky masterfully argues that appreciating the differences between state terror and nongovernmental terror is crucial to stopping terrorism and understanding why atrocities like the bombing of the World Trade Center and the killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists happen.

On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the Southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1st Marine Division making the amphibious assault, Pacific High Command was confident that victory would be theirs in just a few days. They were drastically wrong.

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for "a new Bretton Woods" to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of 44 nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization.

Born into the Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after 20 years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture, East and West - joining them with a fierce moral clarity and a propulsive style.