For nearly two decades Becker has lived in China, and reported from areas where most visitors do not reach. Here he is at his most candid, reporting from all over the country: from tiny, crowded homes in the swollen cities of the southeast rim to a vast, secret network of thousands of defense bunkers in the northwest. He exposes Chinese society in all of its layers: from remote, illiterate peasants; to the rising classes of businessmen; to local despots; the twenty grades of Party apparatchicks; to the dominant, comparatively small caste of Party leaders who are often ignorant of the people they rule.Becker lets the Chinese speak for themselves, in voices that are rich and moving. He teaches a great deal about the magnitude--and the false face--of China's vaunted economic boom, and further shows the pervasive institutionalized crime that has risen out of economic poverty. In all, Becker reveals a China very different than our long-held assumptions depict. The Chinese is the hidden story of people of the world's largest nation--a nation so poorly understood and so vital to the future.

    Born to slaves in Davidson County, Tennessee, the newly freed Love struck out for Kansas after the war. He was fifteen and already endowed with a reckless and romantic readiness. In wide-open Dodge City he joined up with an outfit from the Texas Panhandle to begin a career riding the range and fighting Indians, outlaws, and the elements. Years later he would say, “I had an unusually adventurous life.” That was rare understatement. More characteristic was Love’s claim: “I carry the marks of fourteen bullet wounds on different parts of my body, most any one of which would be sufficient to kill an ordinary man, but I am not even crippled.” In 1876 a virtuoso rodeo performance in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, won him the moniker of Deadwood Dick. He became known as DD all over the West, entering into dime novels as a mysteriously dark and heroic presence. This vivid autobiography includes encounters with Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, a soon-after view of the Custer battlefield, and a successful courtship. Love left the range in 1890, the year of the official closing of the frontier. Then, as a Pullman train conductor he traveled his old trails, and those good times bring his story to a satisfying end.

    But her cherished château is struggling to sell its produce. A handful of people - among them a charming middle-aged Scotsman, a jaw-droppingly beautiful girl and a talented autistic boy - will change her life completely. But not all her visitors are who they claim to be. All she needs to do is find out who's telling the truth, save her business from bankruptcy and solve a murder. Only then might she discover that sometimes even good things come in threes.Viticulture and poetry, mental health and murder all tumble, along with the cabernets and merlots, into the fermenting vat of this dark but uplifting novel.

    In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.

    In Berlin to help mount an exhibit of priceless paintings, once thought lost, museum curator and Renaissance art expert Chris Norgren must turn detective when his boss is murdered soon after voicing concern over the paintings' authenticity.

    Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this  big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge’s book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

    According to theorists, the missing six are curled up in bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. In The Shape of Inner Space, Shing-Tung Yau, the man who mathematically proved that these manifolds exist, argues that not only is geometry fundamental to string theory, it is also fundamental to the very nature of our universe.Time and again, where Yau has gone, physics has followed. Now for the first time, readers will follow Yau’s penetrating thinking on where we’ve been, and where mathematics will take us next. A fascinating exploration of a world we are only just beginning to grasp, The Shape of Inner Space will change the way we consider the universe on both its grandest and smallest scales.

    ISIS), a group so brutal and hardline that even al-Qaida deemed them too extreme. Baghdadi, an introverted religious scholar, with a passion for soccer, now controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria. McCants shows how Baghdadi became radicalized in the Saddam Hussein era and found his path to power after connecting with other radicals in an American prison during the Iraq War, culminating in his declaration of a reborn Islamic empire bent on world conquest.

    Kennedy’s heroic actions that saved his crew—and a fascinating examination of how that extraordinary episode shaped the future president’s life.At 2:00 a.m. on the moonless night of August 2, 1943, U.S. Patrol Torpedo boat PT-109, captained by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, was struck by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri near the Solomon Islands. The American ship was cleaved in two and rocked by an explosion; two crew members died instantly; the remaining eleven survivors clung to the sinking wreckage, adrift in enemy waters. Despite injuring his back, Lt. Kennedy—towing a severely burned sailor by the strap of a life jacket—led his battered and exhausted men on a harrowing three-and-a-half mile swim to a tiny uninhabited island. Desperate for food and water, Kennedy set off on a solo reconnaissance mission, scouting two larger islands two-and-a-half miles away. Discovering water and coconuts, he returned for his men. For six days they lived off coconuts and kept out of sight of passing Japanese patrols until they were rescued.Drawing on new information from the American rescuers and recently released archives in both Japan and the U.S., PT-109 recounts this event in breathtaking detail and explores the incident’s remarkable aftermath on JFK’s life and legend. William Doyle reveals that, while the incident transformed JFK into a “war hero” and helped propel him to the U.S. Senate and the White House, the wounds he suffered during that harrowing week continued to haunt him, physically and psychologically.

    Lanzarote. A wealthy young woman elopes with an impoverished fisherman, leaving her family distraught.1968. Perdita West, secretary to a famous author, visits Lanzarote on a research trip and begins to fall in love with the unusual, beautiful little island. When, while snorkelling, a landslide traps Perdita in an underwater cave, her efforts to save herself will reveal what happened to the ill-fated couple who fell in love at this very spot almost a century ago . . .

    

    When Keggs was a butler he eavesdropped on a meeting between his employer, J.J. Bunyan, and a covey of tycoons--J.J. and his associates each agreed to put up fifty-thousand dollars, the total to go to whichever of their sons was the last to marry. Thirty years later, Keggs wants to cash in on what he knows.

    Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity.'The most brilliant British historian of his generation ... Ferguson examines the roles of "pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts" in the creation of history's largest empire ... he writes with splendid panache ... and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit' Andrew Roberts'Dazzling ... wonderfully readable' New York Review of Books'A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story - triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all' Jan Morris'Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence' Sunday Times

    Lyons explains the Middle East through every day life and experiences - his son's school, his wife's friends and his own dealings with a range of people over the six years he lived there.

    The action takes place in the Welsh Marches during the latter part of the reign of Henry II, after 1187. Eveline, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Raymond Berenger, is rescued from a Welsh siege by the forces of Damian Lacy. She is betrothed to his uncle, Sir Hugo, who leaves on a crusade. Rebels led by Ranald Lacy attempt to kidnap her, and Damian fights them off, but a confused sequence of events convinces the King that she and her beloved are in league against him.