The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece fornearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strangeaccounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In thisgroundbreaking work, three experts—a mycologist, a chemist, and ahistorian—argue persuasively that the sacred potion given toparticipants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactiveentheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show thatnatural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual ritualsacross history and cultures. Although controversial when firstpublished in 1978, the book’s hypothesis has become more widelyaccepted in recent years, as knowledge of ethnobotany has deepened.The authors have played critical roles in the modern rediscovery ofentheogens, and The Road to Eleusis presents an authoritativeexposition of their views. The book’s themes of the universality ofexperiential religion, the suppression of that knowledge byexploitative forces, and the use of psychedelics to reconcile theh

Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato ,Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year asa foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him toexperience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk theminefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and toexplore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war goneterribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, IfI Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.

In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot wastaken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained ina jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years laterBizot became the intermediary between the now victorious KhmerRouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in PhnomPenh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safetyacross the Thai border. Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its centerlies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a mannamed Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the KhmerRouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector andfriend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing inits understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at oncewrenching and redemptive.

This sweeping history provides the reader with a betterunderstanding of America’s consumer society, obsession withshopping, and devotion to brands. Focusing on the advertisingcampaigns of Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Wrigley’s, Gillette, and Kodak,Strasser shows how companies created both national brands andnational markets. These new brands eventually displaced genericmanufacturers and created a new desire for brand-name goods. Thebook also details the rise and development of department storessuch as Macy’s, grocery store chains such as A P and PigglyWiggly, and mail-order companies like Sears Roebuck and MontgomeryWard.

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousandsof years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their godsdevelop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicistRobin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of the ancientworld, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuingit through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how theintrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around theMediterranean, encountering strange new sights—volcanic mountains,vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones—and weaving them into themyths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become thecornerstone of Western civilization.

An examination of the polarized characters and careers ofWilliam Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson creates a work thatis at once a dual biography, military history, and analysis of theAmerican penchant for patriotic bloodshed. Reprint. NYT.

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across thenight sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to theArctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning ofdoom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrimsprepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, theatmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men andwomen readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divineretribution. Against this background, and amid deep economicdepression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile. Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built athriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, andcattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts,New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence fromlandscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglecteddocuments, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly originalaccount of the Mayflower project and the first decade of thePlymouth Colon

The companion volume to Stars in Their Courses, thismarvelous account of Grant's siege of the Mississippi port ofVicksburg continues Foote's narrative of the great battles of theCivil War--culled from his massive three-volume history--recountinga campaign which Lincoln called "one of the most brilliant in theworld."

David Kenyon Webster’s memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionallycharged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war.Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned justafter his discharge, Webster gives a first hand account of life in E Company, 101st Airborne Division , crafting a memoir thatresonates with the immediacy of a gripping novel. From the beaches of Normandy to the blood-dimmed battlefields ofHolland, here are acts of courage and cowardice, moments ofirritating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, andpitched urban warfare. Offering a remarkable snapshot of what itwas like to enter Germany in the last days of World War II, Websterpresents a vivid, varied cast of young paratroopers from all walksof life, and unforgettable glimpses of enemy soldiers and haplesscivilians caught up in the melee. Parachute Infantry is at onceharsh and moving, boisterous and tragic, and stands today as anunsurpassed chronicle of war--how men fight it, survive it, andremember it.

In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth,Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted theConfederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against theConfederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones Countyengaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyondthe scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almostforgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and JohnStauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroicand unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within Civil-Warera Southern society. No man better exemplified these complexitiesthan Newton Knight, a pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South whorefused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton.

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

The experience of war has affected every generation in thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a storyto tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran's History Project, a newpermanent department of the Library of Congress, has beencollecting and preserving the memories of veterans. In addition tomore than 50,000 recorded oral histories, the Veteran's HistoryProject has amassed thousands of letters, photographs, scrapbooks,and invaluable mementos from nearly a century of warfare. In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of thiscollection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history ofthe experience of war, weaving together veterans' stories from inWorld Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Thestories are organized thematically into sections-from signing up tocoming home, generations of veterans recall individual experiencesthat together tell the extraordinary story of America at war.Letters, photographs, sketches and paintings enrich the compellingoral hi

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.

Georges Duby, one of this century's great medieval historians,has brought to life with exceptional brilliance and imaginationWilliam Marshal, adviser to the Plantagenets, knightextraordinaire, the flower of chivalry. A marvel of historicalreconstruction, William Marshal is based on a biographical poemwritten in the thirteenth century, and offers an evocation ofchivalric life -- the contests and tournaments, the rites of war,the daily details of medieval existence -- unlike any we have everseen. An enchanting and profoundly instructive book....Owing in signalpart to the imaginative scholarship of Georges Duby, darkness ismore and more receding from the Dark Ages." George Steiner New Yorker "A small masterpiece of its genre....It is a splendid story andProfessor Duby tells it splendidly....Duby has reconstructed aliving picture of a particular sector of society at a crucialmoment, at the brink of great change. The vividness, the intimacy,and the historical perception with which he presents his picture ofth

No one in Vietnam had to tell door gunner and gunship crewchief Al Sever that the odds didn’t look good. He volunteered forthe job well aware that hanging out of slow-moving choppers overhot LZs blazing with enemy fire was not conducive to a long life.But that wasn’t going to stop Specialist Sever. From Da Nang to Cu Chi and the Mekong Delta, Sever spentthirty-one months in Vietnam, fighting in eleven of the war’ssixteen campaigns. Every morning when his gunship lifted off, oftento the clacking and muzzle flashes of AK-47s hidden in the dawnfog, Sever knew he might not return. This raw, gritty,gut-wrenching firsthand account of American boys fighting and dyingin Vietnam captures all the hell, horror, and heroism of thattragic war.

John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice has been dubbed“indispensable” by none other than Jan Morris. Now, in his secondbook on the city once known as La Serenissima, Norwich advances thestory in this elegant chronicle of a hundred years of Venice’shighs and lows, from its ignominious capture by Napoleon in 1797 tothe dawn of the 20th century. An obligatory stop on the Grand Tour for any cultured Englishman(and, later, Americans), Venice limped into the 19th century–firstunder the yoke of France, then as an outpost of the AustrianHapsburgs, stripped of riches yet indelibly the most ravishing cityin Italy. Even when subsumed into a unified Italy in 1866, itremained a magnet for aesthetes of all stripes–subject or settingof books by Ruskin and James, a muse to poets and musicians, in itsway the most gracious courtesan of all European cities. Byrefracting images of Venice through the visits of such extravagant(and sometimes debauched) artists as Lord Byron, Richard Wagner,and the inimi

Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immenselypleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Romanempire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see theburgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats,artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and founda self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, thiseconomically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-awaresociety stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczektraces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe andRussia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combiningfamily anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keenunderstanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us anexceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearlyextinguished, has an influential radiance still.

David Herbert Donald, Lincoln biographer and winner of thePulitzer Prize, has revised and updated his classic and influentialbook on Lincoln and the era he dominated. When Lincoln Reconsidered was first published it ushered in theprocess of rethinking the Civil War that continues to this day. Inthe third edition, David provides two important new essays, onLincoln's patchy education—which we find was more extensive thaneven the great man realized—and on Lincoln's complex and conflictedrelationship to the rule of law. Together with a new preface and athoroughly updated bibliographical essay, Lincoln Reconsidered willcontinue to be a touchstone of Lincoln scholarship for decades tocome.

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A derangedactor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre,escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he methis fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteriathat followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of thosewere executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classicelements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even morefascinating. Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremostLincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to adeeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account ofthe Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array ofarchival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on thebackground and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of hisplot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates ofthe conspirators. Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects commonmisperceptions and analy

For the first time in one enthralling book, here is theincredible true story of the numerous attempts to assassinate AdolfHitler and change the course of history. Disraeli once declared that “assassination never changed anything,”and yet the idea that World War II and the horrors of the Holocaustmight have been averted with a single bullet or bomb has remained atantalizing one for half a century. What historian Roger Moorhousereveals in Killing Hitler is just how close–and how often–historycame to taking a radically different path between Adolf Hitler’srise to power and his ignominious suicide. Few leaders, in any century, can have been the target of so manyassassination attempts, with such momentous consequences in thebalance. Hitler’s almost fifty would-be assassins ranged fromsimple craftsmen to high-ranking soldiers, from the apolitical tothe ideologically obsessed, from Polish Resistance fighters topatriotic Wehrmacht officers, and from enemy agents to his closestassociates. And yet, up to