About the Book For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of civilization. David Abulafia’s The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book The riveting story of the most infamous American con man you’ve never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, until his assassination in 1856. In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters–human, animal, and natural–that have shaped an extraordinary life. Taking us nearly from pole to pole–from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth–and…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup’ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book Precariously positioned between China and India, Burma’s population has suffered dictatorship, natural disaster, and the dark legacies of colonial rule. But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. World leaders such as Barack Obama…
Continue ReadingWell, I figure it’s time I sit down and lay down an update for those of you who are interested. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my own books. I am TERRIBLE at self-promotion. As you may or may not know, Of Honey and Wildfires dropped in April, and it’s going well. It’s…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book The gripping story of a team of Nazi hunters at the U.S. Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two.In 1990, in a drafty basement archive in Prague, two American historians made a startling discovery:…
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