Adult

A major novel from one of science fiction's most powerful voices, AURORA tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system. Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, it is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in street-gang fighting, and a cycle of riots spiraled out of control. From jihadi terrorism to nuclear proliferation, the searing tale told in MIDNIGHT'S FURIES explains all too many of the headlines we read today.

For the Dauntless dive-bomber crews of the USS Enterprise returning to their home base on Oahu, Sunday, December 7, 1941 was a morning from hell. Flying directly into the Japanese ambush at Pearl Harbor, they lost a third of their squadron and witnessed the heart of America’s Navy broken and smoldering on the oil-slicked waters below. Drawing on dozens of new interviews and oral histories, author Stephen L. Moore brings to life inspiring stories of individual sacrifice and bravery --- and the sweeping saga of one of America’s greatest triumphs.

In THE NIXON DEFENSE, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Richard Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?

In A DREADFUL DECEIT, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of six African Americans to illustrate the strange history of “race” in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it --- a person’s heritage or skin color --- are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. These stories expose the fluid, contingent and contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society.

Rinker Buck’s bestseller is an epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way --- in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century --- which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

In AMERICAN CRUCIFIXION, Alex Beam tells how Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, went from charismatic leader to public enemy: How his most seismic revelation --- the doctrine of polygamy --- created a rift among his people; how that schism turned to violence; and how, ultimately, Smith could not escape the consequences of his ambition and pride.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN RUSSIA is the untold true story of the larger-than-life billionaire oligarchs who surfed the waves of privatization to reap riches after the fall of the Soviet regime: “Godfather of the Kremlin” Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician whose first entrepreneurial venture was running an automobile reselling business, and Roman Abramovich, his dashing young protégé who built a multi-billion-dollar empire of oil and aluminum.

The image of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire, stinging itself to death, was widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War. It captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with a cordon of freedom, constricting slavery and inducing the social crisis in which the peculiar institution would die. The image opens a fresh perspective on antislavery and the coming of the Civil War, brilliantly explored here by one of our greatest historians of the period.