Adult

Scandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the world’s most engaging royal historian chronicles the world’s most fascinating imperial dynasty: the Romanovs, whose 300-year reign was remarkable for its shocking violence, spectacular excess and unimaginable venality. In this incredibly entertaining history, Michael Farquhar collects the best, most captivating true tales of Romanov iniquity.

Some historians claim that Richard III's "black legend" is nothing more than political propaganda. Yet such an interpretation, according to Desmond Seward, suggests a refusal to face the facts of history. Even in the king's lifetime, there were rumors about his involvement in the murders of Henry VI and of his nephews, while his reign was considered by many to be a nightmare, not least for the king himself. The real Richard III was both a chilling and compelling monarch, a peculiarly grim young English precursor of Machiavelli's Prince.

President Nixon's voice-activated taping system captured every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room and other key locations in the White House, and at Camp David --- 3,700 hours of recordings between 1971 and 1973. Yet less than five percent of those conversations have ever been transcribed and published. Now, thanks to professor Luke Nichter's massive effort to digitize and transcribe the tapes, the world can finally read an unprecedented account of one of the most important and controversial presidencies in U.S. history.

After suffering a stinging defeat in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Richard Nixon's political career was proclaimed dead by everyone. Yet on January 20, 1969, he would stand taking the oath of office as the 37th President of the United States. Patrick J. Buchanan --- who served as one of two staff members to Nixon --- gives a first-hand account of those pivotal years, in which Nixon worked to reverse his political fortunes in a decade marked by revolution, the Vietnam War, assassinations, and the rise of the New Left.

The Hundred Years War was fought between 1337 and 1453 over English claims to both the throne of France by right of inheritance and large parts of the country that had been at one time Norman or, later, English. The fighting ebbed and flowed, but despite their superior tactics and great victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the English could never hope to secure their claims in perpetuity: France was wealthier and far more populous, and while the English won the battles, they could not hope to hold forever the lands they conquered.

America’s first “celebrity” general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some of them were exalted in the public eye. Others were known only to intimates --- his family, friends and lovers, and the soldiers under his command. In this rich and layered portrait, Robert L. O’Connell captures the man in full for the first time. Sherman was, as O’Connell puts it, the “human embodiment of Manifest Destiny.”

When the German army found themselves desperate for a typhus vaccine, they turned to Rudolf Weigl. The success of Weigl's techniques gave him cover during the Nazi's reign, so he hired otherwise doomed men, protecting them from atrocity. Among the scientists saved was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to recreate the vaccine, Fleck had to make a choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience.

Billy Williams came to colonial Burma in 1920, fresh from service in World War I, to a job as a “forest man” for a British teak company. Mesmerized by the intelligence, character and even humor of the great animals who hauled logs through the remote jungles, he became increasingly skilled at treating their illnesses and injuries, and championed more humane treatment for them. In ELEPHANT COMPANY, Vicki Constantine Croke chronicles Williams’s growing love for elephants as the animals provide him lessons in courage, trust and gratitude.

It's a late-summer night in Berlin and notorious criminal Ragnar Desche isn't too happy. He's just found his brother, Oskar, dead, frozen stiff and sitting in his home next to a swimming pool full of marijuana plants. Someone's flooded the pool and stolen a Range Rover, but what's worse is that Ragnar's huge cache of drugs is missing-and he's going to want it back. Meanwhile, nearby, a group of teenage girls are out at the movies. Thinking about boys and worrying about acne, they notice that the prettiest member of their clique is missing. She hasn't been seen for days, and the trouble she's found herself in is about to set all of the girls on a collision course with the Desche gang and drag them into a fight for their lives --- a fight that might turn out to be more evenly matched than it first appears.

Sergeant Lester Ferris, who is about to be retired, is serving out his time on the backwater island of Mancreu, a former British colony in legal limbo, belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an international community concerned for their own safety. The perfect place for Lester is also the perfect location for a multinational array of shady businesses. Meanwhile, he befriends a brilliant, Internet-addled street kid with a comic-book fixation who will need a new home when the island dies.