Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other -- a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cult...more

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. His Shakespeare is like no o...more

A study of the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, includes coverage of such cultures as the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Viking colony on Greenland, tracing patterns of environmental damage, climate change, poor political choices, and other factors that were pi...more

One of the best-kept secrets of the Washington world was finally revealed in 2005, when W. Mark Felt, a retired FBI agent, was identified as the insider source referred to as "Deep Throat" in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's 1970s Watergate saga, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. This revelation freed Woodward to publish THE SECRET MAN, which fleshes out t...more

“No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”  —H. L. Mencken H. L. Mencken was wrong.In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications:
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In 1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS, Charles C. Mann presents an accessible history that effectively wipes away generations of high-school teaching that trivialized, dismissed, or was just flat-out wrong about the peoples that inhabited what we have come to call the Americas prior to the contact with Columbus. Mann presents a hu...more

For Jimmy Carter, religion and politics go hand in hand. The former president has always found his evangelical Christian faith to be a source of inspiration and strength in shaping his politics. Yet in OUR ENDANGERED VALUES, Carter claims that the rise of the fundamentalist right in America threatens the most basic American principle of separation ...more

Picking up where Bible expert Bart Ehrman's New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus left off, Jesus, Interrupted addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches—and it's not what most people think. Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed: The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was a...more

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest ran...more