Nir Rosen has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as the reporter who managed to get inside Fallujah at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters, and as one of the few Western reporters able to report the truth from Iraq. Still in his twenties, a freelancer who has written for The ... more »

History has never been more fun than it is in this fact-filled compendium of historical fiascoes and embarrassingly bad ideas. Throughout history, the rich and powerful, and even just the dim-witted, have made horrifically bad decisions that have had resounding effects on our world. From kings to corporate ... more »

While America held its breath in the days immediately following 9/11, a small but determined group of CIA agents covertly began to change history. This is the riveting first-person account of the treacherous top-secret mission inside Afghanistan to set the stage for the defeat of the Taliban and launch ... more »

Here is history that reads like fiction: the riveting story of two founding fathers of American industry--Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick--and the bloody steelworkers' strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Author Les Standiford begins at the bitter end, when the ... more »

Twenty years ago Paul Johnson published Intellectuals , biographical essays forming what Kingsley Amis described as a valuable and entertaining Rogues’ Gallery of Adventures of the Mind . It was a bestseller in many of the score of languages into which it was translated, but also criticized for describing ... more »

The extraordinary story of Andrew Jackson--the colorful, dynamic, and forceful president who ushered in the Age of Democracy and set a still young America on its path to greatness--told by the bestselling author of The First American . The most famous American of his time, Andrew Jackson is a seminal ... more »

One of the great secrets of the Cold War, hidden for decades, is revealed at last. Early in 1968 a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine sank in the waters off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Compelling evidence, assembled here for the first time, strongly suggests ... more »

You've heard of the scheme. Now comes the man behind it. In Mitchell Zuckoff's exhilarating book, the first nonfiction account of Charles Ponzi, we meet the charismatic rogue who launched the most famous and extraordinary scam in the annals of American finance. It was a time when anything seemed possible ... more »

Before he was voted into office, Bill Clinton said he wanted to be a transforming leader, a president who would fashion real and lasting change in peoples' lives, in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How has Clinton measured up against his own stated goals and the aspirations and performances ... more »

Two hundred years ago the British Isles would have been a serious competitor in any branch of industry, but that situation has gradually changed with the developing world. Now too much of our landscape is littered with disused mines, silent mills, empty factories, and the ruinous remains of once thriving ... more »

"We forget, living in this era of heavily patented research and closely guarded results, how wonderfully exciting the scientific world used to be. In Stealing God's Thunder, the story of Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightening rod and the resulting consequences, that sense of wonder and ... more »

[The Book of] Revelation has served as a language arsenal in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history. Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelation demonization ... more »