Propelled by the discovery of an ancient book and a cache ofyellowing letters, a young woman plunges into a labyrinth where thesecrets of her family's past connect to an inconceivable evil: thedark reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that mayhave kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for thethe truth becomes an adventure of monumental propportions, takingus from monasteries and dusty libraries to the captitals of EasternEurope - in a feat of storytelling so rich, so exciting, sosuspenseful that it has enthralled readers around he world.

John Keegan, whose many books, including classic histories ofthe two world wars, have confirmed him as the premier miltaryhistorian of our time, here presents a masterly look at the valueand limitations of intelligence in the conduct of war. Intelligence gathering is an immensely complicated and vulnerableendeavor. And it often fails. Until the invention of the telegraphand radio, information often traveled no faster than a horse couldride, yet intelligence helped defeat Napoleon. In the twentiethcentury, photo analysts didn’t recognize Germany’s V-2 rockets forwhat they were; on the other hand, intelligence helped lead tovictory over the Japanese at Midway. In Intelligence inWar , John Keegan illustrates that only when paired withforce has military intelligence been an effective tool, as it mayone day be in besting al-Qaeda.

“Reads like a novel. A fast-paced page-turner, it haseverything: sex, wit, humor, and adventures. But it is animpressively researched and important story.” —David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer Vienna, 1814 is an evocative and brilliantly researched accountof the most audacious and extravagant peace conference in modernEuropean history. With the feared Napoleon Bonaparte presumablydefeated and exiled to the small island of Elba, heads of some 216states gathered in Vienna to begin piecing together the ruins ofhis toppled empire. Major questions loomed: What would be done withFrance? How were the newly liberated territories to be divided?What type of restitution would be offered to families of thedeceased? But this unprecedented gathering of kings, dignitaries,and diplomatic leaders unfurled a seemingly endless stream ofpersonal vendettas, long-simmering feuds, and romanticentanglements that threatened to undermine the crucial work athand, even as their hard-fought policy dec

This acclaimed book on the Wright Brothers takes the readerstraight to the heart of their remarkable achievement, focusing onthe technology and offering a clear, concise chronicle of preciselywhat they accomplished and how they did it. This book deals withthe process of the invention of the airplane and how the brothersidentified and resolved a range of technical puzzles that othershad attempted to solve for a century. Step by step, the book details the path of invention (includingthe important wind tunnel experiments of 1901) which culminated inthe momentous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first majormilestone in aviation history. Enhanced by original photos,designs, drawings, notebooks, letters and diaries of the WrightBrothers, Visions of a Flying Machine is a fascinating book thatwill be of interest to engineers, historians, enthusiasts, oranyone interested in the process of invention.

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, PulitzerPrize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the greatuntold stories of American history: the decades-long migration ofblack citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities,in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus ofalmost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkersoncompares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples inhistory. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gainedaccess to new data and official records, to write this definitiveand vividly dramatic account of how these American journeysunfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this storythrough the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, whoin 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi forChicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in oldage, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senateseat; sh

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner Over a frigid few weeks in the winter of 1741, ten fires blazedacross Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw moreevidence of a slave uprising. In the end, thirteen black men wereburned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than onehundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath CityHall. In New York Burning , Bancroft Prize-winning historian JillLepore recounts these dramatic events, re-creating, withpath-breaking research, the nascent New York of the seventeenthcentury. Even then, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures,communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth ofthe population. Exploring the political and social climate of thetimes, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with stateintrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the whitepolitical pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear andviolence.

"Brilliant . . . Indispensable." LosAngeles Times Here is the story of the rise and fall of the notorious Bonannocrime family of New York as only best-selling author Gay Talesecould tell it.

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to AlviseMocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. Buttheir life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed whenVenice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia's painful series ofmiscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; herimpassioned affair with an Austrian officer; the glamour and strainof her career as a hostess in Vienna; and her amazing firsthandaccount of the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. With his brave andarticulate heroine, Andrea di Robilant has once again reachedacross the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring historyto rich and vivid life on the page.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S.Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left onehundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concisemasterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of asociety traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured ina mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his ownencounters with ordinary Indians–from a supercilious prince to anengineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless–Naipaulcaptures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible toforeigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both theburgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantrasto purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and theNaxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritualmurder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of itsprose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishinginsight an

On April 29, 1968, the North Vietnamese Army is spotted lessthan four miles from the U.S. Marines’ Dong Ha Combat Base. Intensefighting develops in nearby Dai Do as the 2d Battalion, 4thMarines, known as “the Magnificent Bastards,” struggles to ejectNVA forces from this strategic position. Yet the BLT 2/4 Marines defy the brutal onslaught. Pressingforward, America’s finest warriors rout the NVA from theirfortress-hamlets–often in deadly hand-to-hand combat. At the end oftwo weeks of desperate, grinding battles, the Marines and theinfantry battalion supporting them are torn to shreds. But againstall odds, they beat back their savage adversary. The MagnificentBastards captures that gripping conflict in all its horror, hell,and heroism. “Superb . . . among the best writing on the Vietnam War . . .Nolan has skillfully woven operational records and oral historyinto a fascinating narrative that puts the reader in the thick ofthe action.” –Jon T. Hoffman, author of Chesty “

On 22 June 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, onehundred fifty divisions advancing on three axes in a surpriseattack that overwhelmed and destroyed whatever opposition theRussians were able to muster. The German High Command was under theimpression that the Red Army could be destroyed west of the DneprRiver and that there would be no need for conducting operations incold, snow, and mud. They were wrong. In reality, the extreme conditions of the German war in Russiawere so brutal that past experiences simply paled before them.Everything in Russia--the land, the weather, the distances, andabove all the people--was harder, harsher, more unforgiving, andmore deadly than anything the German soldier had ever facedbefore. Based on the recollections of four veteran German commanders ofthose battles, FIGHTING IN HELL describes in detail what happenedwhen the world's best-publicized "supermen" met the world's mostbrutal fighting. It is not a tale for the squeamish.

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and SebastianJunger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventurein which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a greathistorical mystery–and make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was morethan a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents,braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigatingthrough wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselvesto their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than oncein the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers wereprepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in thefrigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: aWorld War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wastelandof twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried underdecades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on

“Dray captures the genius and ingenuity of Franklin’s scientificthinking and then does something even more fascinating: He showshow science shaped his diplomacy, politics, and Enlightenmentphilosophy.” –Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An AmericanLife Today we think of Benjamin Franklin as a founder of Americanindependence who also dabbled in science. But in Franklin’s day,the era of Enlightenment, long before he was an eminent statesman,he was famous for his revolutionary scientific work. Pulitzer Prizefinalist Philip Dray uses the evolution of Franklin’s scientificcuriosity and empirical thinking as a metaphor for America’sstruggle to establish its fundamental values. He recounts howFranklin unlocked one of the greatest natural mysteries of his day,the seemingly unknowable powers of lightning and electricity. Richin historical detail and based on numerous primary sources,Stealing God’s Thunder is a fascinating original look at one of ourmost beloved and complex founding fathers

A firsthand look at the Battle of Gettysburg offers Union andConfederate viewpoints of the conflict, recreating the three daysand discussing the decisions of Lee, Longstreet, and Meade.Reprint.

A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing fromByzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forestsof northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy tothe final moments of a millennial city under siege…. Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificentempire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than athousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer andHerodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, wouldnever have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of theenormous debt we owe them. The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifyingideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats ofdaring. In Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells tells of themissionaries, mystics, philosophers, and artists who against greatodds and often at peril of their own lives spread Greek ideas tothe Italians, the Arabs, and the Slavs. Their heroic efforts inspired the Renaissance, the golden age ofIslamic lear

An analysis of the Civil War, drawing on letters and diariesby more than one thousand soldiers, gives voice to the personalreasons behind the war, offering insight into the ideology thatshaped both sides. Reprint. PW.

In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with awicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (ormaking up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, andthe Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knifefights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge.Spark-ling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, thiscollection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literaryvoice.

This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101stAirborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as“the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’sso-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south ofBaghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably thecountry’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks,suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring achronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heartplatoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, overtheir year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline,substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the mostheinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the IraqWar—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-bloodedexecution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldierswould be overrun at

More than 100 compelling, true stories of personal heroismand valor– in a special expanded edition honoring courage in theface of war Here are dramatic accounts of the fearless actions thatearned American soldiers in Vietnam our highest militarydistinction–the Medal of Honor. Edward F. Murphy, head of the Medalof Honor Historical Society, re-creates the heroic acts ofindividual soldiers from official documents, Medal of Honorcitations, contemporary accounts, and, where possible, interviewswith survivors. Complete with a list of all Vietnam Medal of Honor recipients, thisbook offers a unique perspective on the war–from the early days ofU.S. involvement through the return home of the last soldiers. Itpays a fitting tribute to these patriotic, selfless souls.

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean is about30 million people scattered across an arc of islands -- Jamaica,Haiti, Barbados, Antigua, Martinique, Trinidad, amongothers-separated by the languages and cultures of their colonizers,but joined together, nevertheless, by a common heritage. Forwhether French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Danish,or-latterly-American, the nationality of their masters has madeonly a notional difference to the peoples of the Caribbean. Thehistory of the Caribbean is dominated by the history of sugar,which is inseparable from the history of slavery; which wasinseparable, until recently, from the systematic degradation oflabor in the region. Here, for the first time, is a definitive workabout a profoundly important but neglected and misrepresented areaof the world.

A "full-dress history of the war by one of our mostdistinguished military writers" (NEW YORK TIMES), WORLD WAR I takesus from the first shots in Sarajevo to the signing of the peacetreaty in Versailles and through every bunker, foxhole, andminefield in between. General S.L.A. Marshall drew on his uniquefirsthand experience as a soldier and a lifetime of militaryservice to pen this forthright, forward-thinking history of whatpeople once believed would be the last great war. Newly introducedby the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David M. Kennedy, WORLDWAR I is a classic example of unflinching military history that iscertain to inform, enrich, and deepen our understanding of thisgreat cataclysm.