Robert Wernick: 25 books

The images are seared in our memory from World War II: photographs of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin seated together in a marble courtyard at Yalta. As this uneasy alliance of leaders convened on the Black Sea, they offered hope to a world ravaged by war. Later, the so-called...

Here, from New York Times bestselling author Robert Wernick, are the surprising and little-told stories of some of literature's greats - the man who created Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans; the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie; Sherlock Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle; the Jungle Book's author, Rudyard...

The original sketch for the Biltmore, George Washington Vanderbilt's grand estate in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, laid out plans for a modest Tuscan villa. But ambition quickly took wing. The house swelled to 225 rooms and became - until 2012 when it was topped by the home of a billionaire...

In the eighth century, The Vikings, the water-borne warriors of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, conquered much of the British Isles. They pillaged the coast of France, pushed inland to sack Paris, and seized Normandy. Sweeping south down the great rivers of central Europe, they overwhelmed the Slavs...

Here, from New York Times bestselling author Robert Wernick, is the unforgettable story of the Byzantine Empire, which dominated the world for more than 1,000 years. Here, too, are the stories of the extraordinary emperors and generals who brought the empire into being and ultimately presided over...

Dame Agatha Christie's words and thoughts live on in her amazing body of work, and the Queen of Crime, as the mystery writer was dubbed in her lifetime, shows every sign of lasting. Here, in this short-form book by award-winning journalist Robert Wernick, is her surprising and little-told story.

Creators of the eternal images of children's books have usually been quiet, retiring, private individuals, like the Reverend Mr. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who gave us Alice, or A.A. Milne, of Winnie the Pooh fame, or Charles Schultz, who dreamed up Charlie Brown and his crew. A vastly...

Nothing in Jack London's life was unequivocal. He was a self-taught man whose lack of formal education gave him no coherent structure for his views. His convictions as a socialist were constantly at war with his frontier individualism; his proclivities as a carouser belied his lofty principles. He...

British author Rudyard Kipling is well-known for his many novels, short stories, and poems in which he created a world teeming with unforgettable people, animals, and wisdom. The foundation of his literary career was laid in the gloomy house where his mother left him and his sister to be raised by...

A child of the Romantic Age, George Sand had high standards for love, maintaining that life should be ruled by emotion and instinct, the heart rather than the brain. But underneath her romantic impulses was a bedrock of common sense. While other Romantics like Lord Byron and Alfred de Musset found...

Arthur Conan Doyle was a prolific writer proficient in a number of genres. He authored historical works - Micah Clarke, The White Company, and The Great Shadow to name a few - and more than 100 short stories unrelated to Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote an operetta, the Professor Challenger and Captain...

More and more readers, and droves of scholars, are turning to the pages of Moby Dick and other masterpieces by Herman Melville for an excursion into the world of the great American novel. But in his own era, New Englander Melville, whose real-life adventures were the source for his spellbinding fiction,...

Ezra Pound, the expatriate American poet, returned home in ignominy, and the postwar world watched as a literary giant was charged with treason. Here, in this short-form book by award-winning journalist Robert Wernick, is the strange, inscrutable case of Ezra Pound.

Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall - though second cousins - were opposites. Jefferson believed in states' rights - that the colonies that ratified the Constitution did so as sovereign states. He wanted the weakest federal government possible. Marshall knew that a federal government without the power...