About the Book This is the incredible rise and unbelievable fall of a woman whose energy and ambition is often overshadowed by Napoleon’s military might. In this triumphant biography, Kate Williams tells Josephine’s searing story, of sexual obsession, politics and surviving as a woman in a man’s world. Abandoned in Paris by her aristocratic husband,…
Continue ReadingWell, my break from editing is over, and now I’m back at it full-time, which is AWESOME. It does, however, mean that my reading progress has slowed down a bit. That being said, I’ve got some incredible books going right now. While I haven’t finished reading these three, I am in love with them all,…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff. “These…
Continue ReadingAbout the Book Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit….
Continue ReadingAbout 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…
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