Adult

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.

In 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to retreat and were then ambushed in the mountains by simply-equipped Afghan tribesmen. Just one British man made it through. But William Dalrymple takes us beyond the story of this colonial humiliation and illuminates the key connections between then and now.

More than one million immigrants fled the Irish famine for North America --- and more than 100,000 of them perished aboard the “coffin ships” that crossed the Atlantic. But one small ship never lost a passenger. ALL STANDING recounts the remarkable tale of the Jeanie Johnston and her ingenious crew, whose 11 voyages are the stuff of legend. Why did these individuals succeed while so many others failed? And what new lives in America were the ship’s passengers seeking?

Nicholas Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game of Ping-Pong was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts.