Adult

Packed with beautiful, breathtaking full-color photographs, UNLIKELY LOVES is a celebration of love between species. Here are stories of parental love, like the Dalmatian who mothers a newborn lamb --- a lamb that just happens to be white with black spots! Stories of playful love, including the fox and the hound who become inseparable. And stories of orphaned animals who have found family-like ties in unexpected combinations, like the elephant who’s bonded with sea lions, goats, and other animals in her walks around the Oregon Zoo.

Check out the Educator's Guide for the kid-friendly Unlikely Friendships series here.

On December 9, 1938, the state of Georgia executed six black men in 81 minutes in Tattnall Prison’s electric chair. While they were arrested, convicted, sentenced and executed in as little as six weeks, E. D. Rivers, the governor of the state, oversaw a pardon racket for white killers and criminals, allowed the Ku Klux Klan to infiltrate his administration, and bankrupted the state. David Beasley’s WITHOUT MERCY is the story of the stunning injustice of these executions.

Just over a century ago, British troops were fighting a vicious frontier war against Pashtun tribeman on the North West Frontier --- the great-great-grandfathers of the Taliban and tribal insurgents in modern-day Afghanistan. Winston Churchill, then a young cavalry lieutenant, wrote a vivid account of what he saw during his first major campaign. In CHURCHILL'S FIRST WAR, Con Coughlin tells the story of that campaign, a story of high adventure and imperial success, which contains many lessons and warnings for today.

THE RISE OF THE TUDORS is a tale of brutal feuds and deadly civil wars, and the remarkable rise of the Tudor family from obscure Welsh gentry to the throne of England --- a story that began 60 years earlier with Owen Tudor's affair with Henry V's widow, Katherine of Valois. Drawing on eyewitness reports, newly discovered manuscripts and the latest archaeological evidence, Chris Skidmore vividly recreates this battle-scarred world and the reshaping of British history.

DANUBIA plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Full of music, piracy, religion and fighting, it is the history of a strange dynasty, and the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in rival gods, and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna.

Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But here, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some 1,500 African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence --- not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force.

Acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd leads readers into the endgame of World War I, showing how the timely arrival of American men and materiel --- as well as the bravery of French, British and Commonwealth soldiers --- helped to turn the tide on the Western Front. An epic tale ranging from the ravaged fields of Flanders to the revolutionary streets of Berlin, HUNDRED DAYS recalls the bravery and sacrifice that finally silenced the guns of Europe.

In this new telling of Mexico’s Second Empire and Louis Napoléon’s installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, MAXIMILIAN AND CARLOTA brings the dramatic and tragic story of this six-year-siege to life.

At the age of 24, in 1913, Adolf Hitler was eking out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Nothing marked him in any way as exceptional, but he did possess certain distinguishing characteristics: a capacity to hate, an inability to accept criticism, and a massive overconfidence in his own abilities. This is the focus of Laurence Rees’s social, psychological and historical investigation into a personality that would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.