“Enough absorbing science to concede that plants continue to inspire and amaze us.” ―The Wall Street JournalHow does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect’s tiny, spindly legs? And how do cherry blossoms know when to bloom? Can they remember the weather? For centuries we have marveled at …
“As a sex writer, Jesse Bering is fearless―and peerless.” ―Dan Savage”You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through.” We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in Perv, there is a spectrum of perversion along which we all sit. Whether it’s voyeurism, exhibitionism, or your run-of-the-mill foot …
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalistWinner of the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction. An Economist Best Book of 2014.A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformationFrom abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy-or an …
Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence
A uniquely comprehensive and rich account of the Soviet intelligence services, Jonathan Haslam’s Near and Distant Neighbors charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet intelligence from the October Revolution to the end of the Cold War.Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service–which focused on codes and ciphers–lurking in the shadows. Drawing on …
The dramatic history of America’s tropical paradiseThe history of Hawaii may be said to be the story of arrivals―from the eruption of volcanoes on the ocean floor 18,000 feet below, the first hardy seeds that over millennia found their way to the islands, and the confused birds blown from their migratory routes, to the early Polynesian adventurers who …
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer …
A trip through Paris as it will never be again-dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemianParis, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In …
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
A monumental work of nonfiction on a wartime atrocity, its sixty-year denial, and the impact of its truthJan Gross’s hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian’s disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was …
In March of 1933, a disused factory surrounded by barbed wire held 223 prisoners in the town of Dachau. By the end of 1945, the SS concentration camp system had become an overwhelming landscape of terror. Twenty-two large camps and over one thousand satellite camps throughout Germany and Europe were at the heart of the Nazi campaign of …
The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America― particularly California―in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and …