W: 7744 books

One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments. Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical...

“Plutarch regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter, in government as in life.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across...

**New York Times Bestseller In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American...

A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction The image of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire, stinging itself to death, was widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War. It captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with...

**A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist “Essential reading for the twenty-first [century].” —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review** In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system...

“A beautifully written story, a box of delights, a treasure trove: final proof of truth’s superiority over fiction.”—Andrew Roberts A sparkling anecdotal account with the pace of an epic, about the men and women who created turning points in history. Rebecca Fraser's dramatic portrayal...

This unforgettable narrative follows the astonishing career and epic manhunt for Whitey Bulger—a gangster whose life was more sensational than fiction. Raised in a South Boston housing project, James "Whitey" Bulger became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. In this riveting...

The New York Times best-selling biography of one of America’s most storied military figures. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 burning of Atlanta solidified his legacy as a ruthless leader. Evolving from a spirited student at West Point, Sherman became a general who fought in some...

"The best and most balanced of the Lee biographies."—New York Review of Books The life of Robert E. Lee is a story not of defeat but of triumph—triumph in clearing his family name, triumph in marrying properly, triumph over the mighty Mississippi in his work as an engineer, and...

“Excellent . . . deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided...

Longlisted for the National Book Award. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy,...

In this remarkable and assured debut, Tova Mirvis tells the story of the close-knit, carefully structured world of the Orthodox community in Memphis, Tennessee, a world that unravels when Batsheva, newly widowed and a convert to Judaism, and her five-year-old daughter, Ayala, move in. Batsheva...

"An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Employing the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of the slave-labor camps of Starachowice, Poland, Christopher R. Browning draws the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities,...

"The Right Stuff without the hype, Yeager without the ego."—Washington Post Book World "While the jet-jockey competitiveness, the undercurrent of fear, the victories and foul-ups of jet sweeps have been described many times, few such chronicles have done it so grippingly and...