London in April 1940 was a place of great fear and conflict. The Germans were marching. They had taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia, and were now menacing Britain. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence was the way to survive, attempted to usurp one another by any means possible. Drawing on the War Cabinet papers, other government documents, private diaries, newspaper accounts and memoirs, historian John Kelly tells the story of the summer of 1940 --- the months of the “Supreme Question” of whether or not the British were to surrender.

As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world, and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines our tomorrow. With China on the rise, so, too, are the American cities of the West coast. Today, the Pacific is ascendant. Its geological history has long transformed us --- tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis --- but its human history, from a Western perspective, is quite young, beginning with Magellan’s 16th-century circumnavigation. It is a natural wonder whose most fascinating history is currently being made.