"A charming personal account, accompanied by nearly 100 illustrations, that underscores how owls and other birds enrich our lives." -- Kirkus Reviews Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award For a quarter of a century, Tony Angell and his family shared the remarkable experience of closely observing pairs of western screech owls that occupied a nesting box outside the window of their forest home. The journals in which the author recorded his observations,...

Why, in the minutes before John F. Kennedy was murdered, was a blood-red carpet installed in the Oval Office? If Abraham Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, where did he sleep? Why was one president nearly killed in the White House on inauguration day, and another secretly sworn in? What really happened in the Situation Room on September 11, 2001? History leaps off the page in this "riveting," "fast-moving" and "highly entertaining" book...

West Point's Class of 1915 is the academy's most important in history. The cadets of the United States Military Academy, West Point, are intimately twined with the country's history. The graduating class of 1915, the class the stars fell on, was particularly noteworthy. Of the 164 graduates that year, 59 (36%) attained the rank of general, the most of any class in. Although Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, both five-star generals, are the most...

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed...

You never knew that theoretical physics could be so simple! In this exciting and significant book, Andrew Thomas reveals how all unifications in physics have been based on incredibly simple ideas. Using a logical approach, Thomas explains how the great twentieth-century theories of relativity and quantum mechanics share a common base and how they can be linked using an idea so simple that anyone can understand it. An idea which is so simple that it...

The adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet fifty years later we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power-over the right to vote, the central pillar of our democracy. A groundbreaking narrative history of voting rights since 1965, Give Us the Ballot tells the story of what happened...

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels on which his reputation rests?Wrestling with these...

The War on Terror has led to fourteen years of armed conflict, the longest war in America's history. Al Qaeda, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, has been replaced by multiple jihadist and terror organizations, including the most notorious-ISIS. Spiral is what we can call a perpetual and continuously widening war that has put the country in a "state of exception." Bush's promise that we have "taken the gloves off" and Obama's inability to...

James and Elle Eversman are a young couple traveling through the Mojave desert on their way to a new life. When their car mysteriously breaks down, they are stranded in the middle of nowhere without much water and no cell phone reception. A mile away, a deadly sniper has them in his crosshairs. They are pinned down behind their broken-down car, surrounded by open ground in all directions. There's nowhere to run and no one to help them. How can they...

In The Good Book, thirty-two of today's most prominent writers share never-before-published pieces about passages in the Bible that are most meaningful to them. The Good Book collects new pieces by writers from many different faiths and ethnicities, including literary fiction writers (Colm Toibin, Edwidge Danticat, Tobias Wolff, and Rick Moody); bestselling nonfiction writers (A. J. Jacobs, Ian Frazier, Adam Gopnik, and Thomas Lynch); notable figures...