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From the acclaimed biographer of explorers Magellan, Columbus, and Francis Drake comes a unique exploration of life and influence of Jules Verne, the novelist whose mind spun the greatest adventures ever told and whose daring and prescient imagination sparked a lasting transformation of modern society and technology, inspiring everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut to Jeff Bezos.

When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she 'lived under the pressure of the prophecy.' Did the prophecy come true with the arrival at court of a mysterious, barely literate moujhik from Siberia, Grigori Rasputin? In this extraordinary portrait of an enigmatic character, Antony Beevor brings listeners closer than ever before to Rasputin’s scandalous life and death.

Filled with captivating facts about color words and colors themselves—did you know that the word “puke” used to be a highly fashionable color before it was associated with vomit?—and fueled by Stamper’s inexhaustible curiosity, True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor.

In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life.

JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten infected. The virus kills in just over a week and they’re trapped in a hot zone with the clock ticking. If there’s going to be a rescue it has to happen now. The very notion of getting the patients out is a radical and dangerous idea. Bringing them home might cause an outbreak of Ebola here in the US. No one’s certain if it can or should be done or if they’ll even survive the flight.

Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska's extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century's most devastating events.

Modern Syria has seen violence, repression, and autocracy, suffering through tragedy after tragedy over the past century. Yet the history of Syria is not just a tale of dictators and generals. From the 1800s to the 2020s, the Syrian people have engaged in a passionate struggle for justice, equality, and a better future. Whether fighting for national independence from French colonial rule, battling local landowning elites to share of the country’s wealth, or rising up against the Assad regime, the Syrian people have fiercely clung to their right to live with respect and dignity.

Lending intimate historical detail and thrilling historical narrative, swinging from Moscow to Paris to Mexico, and taking in a cast of morally conflicted Russian spies, fanatical Mexican painters, and innocent American idealists, The Death of Trotsky delves into the lives of two fascinating, complex men locked in a life-or-death struggle that will bend the course of history.

Who was the first fascist? Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Morès was the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he took France by storm with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Morès invoked the fasces – the ancient Roman bundle of wooden rods – to symbolize the society he wished to create: a union of all social classes against their enemy, the Jews. In The First Fascist, award-winning historian Sergio Luzzatto explores the untold story of the rise and fall of the Marquis as well as his ominous legacy.

In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet as a space of unprecedented connection and opportunity, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. The online world that sprouted up behind the firewall was no less vibrant for being controlled, and in the years that followed China incubated a booming tech culture and a digital public square.

Dara Shukoh—the emperor Shah Jahan's favourite son, and heir-apparent to the Mughal throne prior to being defeated by Aurangzib—has sometimes been portrayed as an effete prince, incompetent in military and administrative matters. But his tolerance towards other faiths, and the myths and anecdotes surrounding him, continue to fuel the popular imagination. Even today, over 350 years after his death, the debate rages on: if this 'good' Mughal had ascended the throne instead of his pugnacious younger brother, how would that have changed the course of Indian history?

In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power.

In the early days of the Cold War, the United States faced a crisis in intelligence analysis. A series of intelligence failures in 1949 and 1950, including the failure to warn about the North Korean invasion of South Korea, made it clear that gut instinct and traditional practices were no longer sufficient for intelligence analysis in the nuclear age. The new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, had a mandate to reform it.

Daring to Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved and, wherever possible, in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, and the pregnant mutineer Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass; and the countless rebels, insurgents, and conspirators. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the role of powerful women as campaigners, warriors, and disrupters.

In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. When it became clear that the Allies were unwilling to spare any forces from the war effort to save civilians, the Jewish community in Palestine came up with a daring plan.

On May 19, 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from England on what should have been an uneventful voyage. When their vessel sank in the Atlantic, Captain Thomas Dudley and his crew found themselves adrift in a tiny lifeboat. As days turned to weeks, they faced an unthinkable choice: starve to death or resort to cannibalism. Their decision to sacrifice the youngest – 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker – ignited a firestorm of controversy upon their rescue.

This sweeping new history of Mexico spans 500 dramatic years of conquest, innovation, and revolution. It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Paul Gillingham's superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures.

In this trailblazing work of revisionist history, Professor Clifton Crais argues that the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s should be seen not as the Anthropocene, but the Mortecene: the Age of Killing. Drawing on years of scholarship and a range of new sources, THE KILLING AGE turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror: how it has shaped who we are, what we value, what we fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day―June 6, 1944―the lives of British soldiers changed. Thirty-five thousand infantrymen, airmen, and special service operatives were sent headfirst into the whitest heat of war, almost overnight.

In the 1960's, California's Yosemite Valley was the center of the rock-climbing universe. Young nonconformists—many of them the finest rock climbers in the world—channeled their energy toward the largely untouched walls and cracks. Soon climbers from around the globe were coming to Camp 4—gathering spot for the creators of the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing—to see what all the fuss was about.