By Peter Ackroyd St. Martin’s Press, $29.99, 496 pages The scope of this book is grand. The style in which England’s history is narrated is unconventional. Imagining that there are still five forthcoming volumes is simply impressive. Covering England’s earliest prehistory to …
By Jill Lepore Knopf, $27.95, 282 pages As many people will say, as they get older, “Life used to be simpler.” Our advancements in science and medicine have expanded life. In the 1800’s, the average age in America was sixteen, …
By Geoffrey C. Ward Knopf, $28.95, 432 pages Before Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff, there was Ferdinand Ward. Somewhat forgotten today, he managed to rock Wall Street and ruin former President Ulysses S. Grant among others. This unflinching biography of the …
By Huw Davies Yale University Press, $38.00, 303 pages More of a study in nineteenth century warfare than a biography of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, this story begins with his purchase of rank and subsequent bungling of his first real …
By Steven H. Jaffe Basic Books, $29.99, 404 pages New York is one of the most important cities on the planet. It’s a financial center, a social crossroads, and a symbol of America in all its idealism, hubris, triumphs and stumbles. Its …
By Charles Pellegrino Wiley, $27.95, 333 pages Pellegrino’s writing has captured so much information in a readable and compassionate way. He offers information from deep-sea explorations of more than twenty-five years complemented by firsthand accounts of the tragedy from Titanic survivors. …
By Raymond Bonner Knopf, $26.95, 299 pages In 1982, an elderly white widow was murdered in a small South Carolina town. Within days, a semiliterate and mentally retarded black man was arrested on flimsy evidence. He was found guilty and sentenced …
By Anne-Marie O’Connor Knopf, $30.00, 368 pages Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” is a painting that stays with you. What will haunt you is the story behind the painting and the Bloch-Bauer family, from its creation in Belle Epoque Vienna …
By Scott Weidensaul Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.00, 445 pages Scott Weidensaul has spent years of research on this invaluable treatise. In offering a most coherent, if necessarily fragmentary, overview of the American frontier before it was “America,” from the 1500s to …
By Eric Sandweiss Oxford University Press, $39.95 240 pages Chronicled in this classic collection of Kodakchrome photos is a pictorial history of America in the years between 1938-1969. The photographs are spellbinding as they relate the changing emotions of the landscape …
By David Treuer Atlantic Monthly Press, $26.00, 368 pages Over time and the course of history, there has been a grim perception of what life must be like living on the various Indian reservations in America. That’s not to say that …
By Editors of LIFE Magazine Life, $29.95, 144 pages Published by LIFE Books, Titanic: The Tragedy That Shook the World — One Century Later follows the tradition of LIFE Magazine by telling the story mainly with photographs. Many were taken by Frank …
By Stephen R. Bown Thomas Dunne, $27.99, 304 pages Stephen Bown illustrates how the papal bulls decreed by Pope Alexander VI and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal impacted the political and cultural shape of the world. It …
By Hallie Fryd Zest Books, $13.99, 221 pages For as long as there have been celebrities, there has been a public obsession with scandal. As a society, we’re enthralled by the failures, shortcomings, misadventures and criminal wrongdoing of those we’ve elevated …
By Sophie Perinot NAL, $15.00, 498 pages “How typical of men to think that by their brotherly embrace they are the authors of history and fortune,” writes Sophie Perinot in her spectacular debut novel The Sister Queens. “Marguerite and I …
