Adult

In THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of MONSOON and BALKAN GHOSTS, builds on the insights, discoveries and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene.

As the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination draws near, the events of that fateful day will undoubtedly be on the minds of many throughout the world. Here, Dean Owen curates a fascinating collection of interviews and thought-provoking commentaries from notable men and women connected to that notorious Friday afternoon.

Based on new information, MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Thomas Jefferson’s faraway world. Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profit” gained from his slaves --- and thanks to the skewed morals of the political and social world that he and thousands of others readily inhabited.

FORMER PEOPLE is the story of how a centuries-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the tsar and empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families --- the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns --- it reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on.

Acclaimed historian Peter Ackroyd tells the epic story of England itself. He takes us from the primeval forests of England’s prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He describes the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French.

For decades, a major piece of World War II history has gone virtually unwritten. The war began in China, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, yet its drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter and political intrigue remains little known in the West. No 20th-century event was as crucial in shaping China’s worldview, and no one can understand China, and its relationship with America today, without this definitive work.

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the 19th century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated. In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history.

A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution’s complex and contested involvement in slavery --- setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown’s troubling past was far from unique. In EBONY AND IVY, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery and the American academy.

When a powerful firebomb destroys part of an art gallery in an exclusive London district, FBI Profiler Karen Vail is dispatched to England to work with Scotland Yard. But Vail soon discovers that at the heart of the bombing lies a 440-year-old manuscript that holds clues to England's past --- with content so explosive that a group of political radicals is bent on destroying it at all costs.

The Reinholds lie in their home stabbed and bludgeoned almost beyond recognition. Those who knew them are stunned by the evidence that they were murdered by their own son, Jerry. With the money he’s stolen from his parents and a long list of grievances, he intends to finally make his mark on the world. Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her team already know the who, how and why of this murder. What they need to pinpoint is where Jerry is going to strike next.