Malcolm Hillgartner

A narrative chronicle of World War I's Arab Revolt explores the pivotal roles of a small group of adventurers and low-level officers who orchestrated a secret effort to control the Middle East, demonstrating how they instigated jihad against British forces, built an elaborate intelligence ring and forged ties to gain valuable oil concessions.

The year is 1967. Malcolm Pomerantz is twelve, geeky, and socially awkward, while his seriously bright sister, Amalia, is spirited and beautiful. Each is the other's best friend, united by a boundless interest in the world beyond their dysfunctional parents' unhappy home. But even the troubled Pomerantz household will seem to be a haven compared to the house next door, after an enigmatic and very secretive new neighbor takes up residence in the darkest...

Prior to 9/11, the United States had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although often in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence agency. While the US was trying to quell extremists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as "Directorate S," was covertly training, arming, and seeking to legitimize the Taliban, in order to enlarge Pakistan's sphere of...

A top historian offers a compelling history of perhaps the most remarkable holiday season in 20th-century history--December 1941--a Christmas season that played out in the shadows of the Pearl Harbor attack and the start of America's involvement in World War II. Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock--in some cases overseas, elation--was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating...

An erudite scholar and an elegant writer, Gordon S. Wood has won both numerous awards and a broad readership since the 1969 publication of his widely acclaimed The Creation of the American Republic. With The Purpose of the Past, Wood has essentially created a history of American history, assessing the current state of history vis-à-vis the work of some of its most important scholars-doling out praise and scorn with equal measure....

"An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from an award-winning author. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, but we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. In Crossings, Ben Goldfarb delves into the new science of road ecology to explore how roads have transformed our world. Millions of animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, and roads fragment...

Acclaimed journalist Charles Glass looks to the American expatriate experience of Nazi-occupied Paris to reveal a fascinating forgotten history of the greatest generation.

In Americans in Paris, tales of adventure, intrigue, passion, deceit, and survival unfold season by season as renowned journalist Charles Glass tells the story of a remarkable cast of expatriates and their struggles in Nazi Paris. Before the Second World War began, approximately

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Drawing from more than 250 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers' epic Showtime era, this spectacular account of one of America's greatest sports sagas is jam-packed with colorful characters, vicious rivalries and 1980s-style excess.

Here is, for the first time, the full and unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912–1982), written with unprecedented access to essential sources. Cheever was a soul in conflict, a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen, a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer, a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia, whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time

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"San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door--his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient's troubles...