Free: 1426 books
Persian Mirrors
The Elusive Face of Iran
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2000
No American reporter has more experience covering Iran or more access to the private corners of Iranian society than Elaine Sciolino. As a correspondent for Newsweek and The New York Times, she has reported on the key events of the past two decades. She was aboard the airplane that brought Ayatollah...
Driving with Plato
The Meaning of Life's Milestones
Language: English
Release Date: May 3, 2011
Learn to ride a bicycle with Einstein, have your first kiss with Kant, get your first job with Adam Smith, and weather midlife with Dante. Let history’s greatest minds illuminate life’s turning points.
In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down...
In the Valley of Mist
Kashmir: One Family In A Changing World
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2009
A personal, moving, and vibrant picture of one of the most beautiful and troubled places in the world, described through the experiences of one family, whose fortunes have changed dramatically with those of the region.
If there is a paradise on earth, it is definitely here, here and only here,"...
by Anne Roiphe
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 1999
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 1999
In this captivating memoir, novelist Anne Roiphe shows us what it was really like to grow up rich and Jewish in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Revisiting the world of her childhood, Roiphe brings alive a cast of characters who are both difficult to love and impossible to forget. Through the eyes...
From Hardtack to Homefries
An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2010
Barbara Haber, one of America's most respected authorities on the history of food, has spent years excavating fascinating stories of the ways in which meals cooked and served by women have shaped American history. As any cook knows, every meal, and every diet, has a story -- whether it relates to...
My Love Affair with America
The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative
Language: English
Release Date: February 21, 2001
In this touching and delightful memoir, Norman Podhoretz charts the ups and downs of his lifelong love affair with his native land, and warns that to turn against America, from the Right no less than from the Left, is to fall into the rankest ingratitude. While telling the story of how he himself...
Ex-Friends
Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2001
Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz...
The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat
Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance
Language: English
Release Date: May 8, 2012
In the 1950s, America was a land of overdone roast beef and canned green beans—a gastronomic wasteland. Most restaurants relied on frozen, second-rate ingredients and served bogus “Continental” cuisine. Authentic French, Italian, and Chinese foods were virtually unknown. There was no such thing...
Feet Of Clay
The Power and Charisma of Gurus
Language: English
Release Date: May 19, 2015
How do gurus get their power? Gurus are extraordinary individuals who attract fanatical followers and wield incredible and at times destructive control over them.
In this remarkable study, Anthony Storr, the acclaimed author of Solitude and Music and the Mind, examines why we are so enthralled...
by Nicholas Christopher
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2010
Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war...
by David P. Jordan
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2013
In changing forever the political landscape of the modern world, the French Revolution was driven by a new personality: the confirmed, self-aware revolutionary. Maximilien Robespierre originated the role, inspiring such devoted twentieth-century disciples as Lenin—who deemed Robespierre a Bolshevik...
The Scorpion's Tail
The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan-And How It Threatens America
Language: English
Release Date: November 16, 2010
The war in Afghanistan has raged on longer than any war in U.S. history, and far from suppressing the insurgency being waged by radical Islamic militants, it has led to stronger alliances among al Qaeda, the Taliban, and a host of once-autonomous militant groups and has inspired a flood of new recruits....
A Life in Smoke
A Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2006
"I accepted the certainty of my untimely death with gallows humor and a calculator. I'd read somewhere that each cigarette you smoke knocks seven minutes off your time on the planet. To amuse myself, I did the math: 153,000 cigarettes = two years of my life, up in smoke."
Julia Hansen first...
When the Mississippi Ran Backwards
Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2007
From Jay Feldmen comes an enlightening work about how the most powerful earthquakes in the history of America united the Indians in one last desperate rebellion, reversed the Mississippi River, revealed a seamy murder in the Jefferson family, and altered the course of the War of 1812.
On December...