History

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The classic chronicle of a “terribly misguided and terribly funny” (The Washington Post) hike of the Appalachian Trail, from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body “The best way of escaping into nature...

(Available after March 30th, 2023) Few names from the 20th Century political landscape are more recognizable than J. Edgar Hoover. Now, decades of research have been compiled in this first major biography in over a quarter of a century of this...

The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfiction   Fragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned— Focusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer...

People commonly view evolution as a process of competition between individuals—known as "survival of the fittest"—with the individual representing the "unit of selection." Richard Dawkins offers a controversial reinterpretation of that idea in The...

“As you read these pages you will understand why I so admire [Peter Wohlleben] and am so in love with his work.”—JANE GOODALL   Nature is full of surprises: deciduous trees affect the rotation of the Earth, cranes sabotage the production of Iberian ham,...

High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago. Called the Burgess Shale, it holds the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived - a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in incredible...

Seventeenth-century pirate proletariats and Madagascar royalty as avant-garde “influencers” in the evolution of Enlightenment concepts of democratic governance, a pirate tale you haven’t read but should. The distinguished anthropologist, David Graeber,...

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for NonfictionOne of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022A Kirkus Best World History Book of 2022One of Smithsonian's 10 Best History Books of 2022Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for...

A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels—poets, novelists, philosophers—who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories,...

A fascinating portrait of a radical age through the writers associated with a London publisher and bookseller—from William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft to Benjamin FranklinOnce a week, in late eighteenth-century London, writers of contrasting...

From Jenny Uglow, one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of a love affair and a dynamic artistic partnership between the wars.In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the...

One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in...

(Available after June 30th, 2023)A bestselling historian uncovers the surprising roots of America’s long alliance with Israel and its troubling consequences Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it,...

A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to...

'A highly entertaining read, deftly melding social history with sporting memoir and travelogue' -- Mail on SundayA history of Latin America through cricketCricket was the first sport played in almost every country of the Americas - earlier than football,...

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and...

For music nerds, there’s a slew of behind-the-scenes documentaries and podcasts. The Sinner and the Saint is Kevin Birmingham’s literature AND true-crime version of that. Here is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. All that went into the making of and...

Now an eight-part docuseries on Apple TV+Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, share the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them—women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done.She...

(Available after 14-30 days) A Penguin Classic“Age can never dull this kind of writing,” writes the Chicago Tribune of John Steinbeck’s dispatches from World War II, filed for the New York Herald Tribune in 1943, which vividly captured the human side of...

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize • Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography AwardShortlisted for the Costa Biography Award • Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn...