The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge


David McCullough - 1972
    (It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a proud American icon, and a story like no other in our history. Courage, chicanery, unprecedented ingenuity and plain blundering, heroes, rascals, all the best and worst in human nature played a part. At the center of the drama were the stricken chief engineer, Washington Roebling and his remarkable wife, Emily Warren Roebling, neither of whom ever gave up in the face of one heartbreaking setback after another. The Great Bridge is a sweeping narrative of a stupendous American achievement that rose up out of its era like a cathedral, a symbol of affirmation then and still in our time.

Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East


Martin Sixsmith - 2011
    Covering politics, music, literature and art, he explores the myths Russians have created from their history.Marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex political landscape of Russia and its unique place in the modern world.

Labrador: The Story of the World’s Favourite Dog


Ben Fogle - 2015
    Not only a great family companion, they also excel at hunting, tracking, retrieving, guiding and rescuing. But where did the breed originally come from? How did it develop? When did black, yellow and chocolate Labradors first appear? Did they really all come from Labrador in Canada and are they really all related to just one dog?In this first history of the Labrador, Ben Fogle goes in search of what makes Labradors so special. Their extraordinary companionship, intelligence, work ethic and loyalty is captured by Ben as he weaves the story of the breed into his own story of his beloved Inca.Ben visits Canada, discovers hair-raising stories of early Labrador exploits and uncovers stories of RNIB Labradors and Labradors at war, Labradors as working dogs and every other manifestation of the Labrador’s character. Exploring their origin, early characteristics, their use as gun dogs, as therapy dogs, as police dogs, as search and rescue dogs and last – and absolutely not least – as family pets, Ben tells the story of a dog breed which has captured our imagination and love for hundreds of years.

An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation


Tom Brokaw - 2001
    Photographs and time lines also commemorate important dates and events. An Army Air Corps veteran who enlisted in 1941 at age seventeen writes to describe the Bataan Death March. A black nurse tells of her encounter with wartime segregation. Other members of the Greatest Generation describe their war--in such historic episodes as Guadalcanal, the D-Day invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and Midway--as well as their lives on the home front. Starting with the Depression and Pearl Harbor, moving on through the war years in Europe, in the Pacific, and at home, this unique book preserves a people's rich historical heritage and the legacy of a nation's heroism in war and its courage in peace--in the shaping of their lives and of the world we have today.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage


Bill Bryson - 2007
    The author of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' isn't, after all, a Shakespeare scholar, a playwright, or even a biographer. Reading 'Shakespeare The World As Stage', however, one gets the sense that this eclectic Iowan is exactly the type of person the Bard himself would have selected for the task. The man who gave us 'The Mother Tongue' and 'A Walk in the Woods' approaches Shakespeare with the same freedom of spirit and curiosity that made those books such reader favorites. A refreshing take on an elusive literary master.

The Family Corleone


Edward Falco - 2012
    The city and the nation are in the depths of the Great Depression. The crime families of New York have prospered in this time, but with the coming end of Prohibition, a battle is looming that will determine which organizations will rise and which will face a violent end.For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important that his family's future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father's true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny-17 years-old, impatient and reckless-wants something else: To follow in his father's footsteps and become a part of the real family business.An exhilarating and profound novel of tradition and violence, of loyalty and betrayal, The Family Corleone will appeal to the legions of fans who can never get enough of The Godfather, as well as introduce it to a whole new generation.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (37 plays, 160 sonnets and 5 Poetry Books With Active Table of Contents)


William Shakespeare - 2016
    This collection gathers together the works by William Shakespeare in a single, convenient, high quality, and extremely low priced Kindle volume!The Comedies of William ShakespeareA Midsummer Night's DreamAll's Well That Ends WellAs You Like ItLove’s Labour ’s LostMeasure for MeasureMuch Ado About NothingThe Comedy of ErrorsThe Merchant of VeniceThe Merry Wives of WindsorThe Taming of the ShrewThe Two Gentlemen of VeronaTwelfth Night; or, What you willThe Romances of William ShakespeareCymbelinePericles, Prince of TyreThe TempestThe Winter's TaleThe Tragedies of William ShakespeareKing LearRomeo and JulietThe History of Troilus and CressidaThe Life and Death of Julius CaesarThe Life of Timon of AthensThe Tragedy of Antony and CleopatraThe Tragedy of CoriolanusThe Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of DenmarkThe Tragedy of MacbethThe Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of VeniceTitus AndronicusThe Histories of William ShakespeareThe Life and Death of King JohnThe Life and Death of King Richard the SecondThe Tragedy of King Richard the ThirdThe first part of King Henry the FourthThe second part of King Henry the FourthThe Life of King Henry VThe first part of King Henry the SixthThe second part of King Henry the SixthThe third part of King Henry the SixthThe Life of King Henry the EighthThe Poetical Works of William ShakespeareThe SonnetsSonnets to Sundry Notes of MusicA Lover's ComplaintThe Rape of LucreceVenus and AdonisThe Phoenix and the TurtleThe Passionate Pilgrim

Memoirs of a Geisha


Arthur Golden - 1997
    It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction - at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful - and completely unforgettable.

Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life


Michael Dirda - 2006
    Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word informs and enriches nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda's capacious love for and understanding of books. Favoring showing as much as telling, Dirda draws us deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to how we might better understand our lives.

Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside The Lebensborn


Ingrid von Oelhafen - 2015
    I was stolen as a baby to be part of one of the most terrible of all Nazi experiments: Lebensborn.’ Watch the 2016 interview with the author. In 1942 Erika, a baby girl from Rogaška Slatina, the Slovenian town that was renamed Sauerbrunn (another town with the same name exists in Austria, which made it harder for the author to find her roots after the war) by Nazi occupiers of the northern part of Slovenia, the only present-day European nation that was trisected and completely annexed into both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during WWII, was one of many children that were stolen from their parents by the Nazi occupiers, declared an ‘Aryan’, her true identity erased, and sent to German couples who could not have their own children under the pretense that children were saved from dysfunctional families, struck by prostitution and whatnot, so she was renamed Ingrid, and given new surname "von Oelhafen".After the war, Erika/Ingrid began to uncover her true identity, the full scale of the Lebensborn scheme and the Nazi obsession with bloodlines became clear -- including the kidnapping of up to half a million babies like her and the deliberate murder of children born into the program who were deemed ‘substandard.’The Lebensborn program was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race, leaving behind thousands of displaced victims in the wake of the Nazi regime.Written with insight and compassion, this is a powerful meditation on the personal legacy of Hitler’s vision, of Germany’s brutal past and of a divided Europe that for many years struggled to come to terms with its own history.

A Lineage of Grace


Francine Rivers - 2001
    Each was faced with extraordinary—even scandalous—challenges. Each took great personal risk to fulfill her calling. Each was destined to play a key role in the lineage of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford


Ron Hansen - 1983
    Jesse James, at the age of 34, is at the height of his fame and powers as a singularly successful outlaw. Robert Ford is the skittish younger brother of one of the James gang: he has made himself an expert on the gang, but his particular interest - his obsession - is Jesse James himself. Both drawn to him and frightened of him, the nineteen-year-old is uncertain whether he wants to serve James or destroy him or, somehow, become him.Never have these two men been portrayed and their saga explored with such poetry, such grim precision and such raw-boned feeling as Ron Hansen has brought to this masterful retelling.'Wonderful. This is great storytelling, not undermined by our knowin how it turns out. The reader is driven - by story and by language and by history... the best blend of fiction and history I've read in a long while!' -- John Irving, author of The World According to Garp

What Happened


Hillary Rodham Clinton - 2017
    Now I’m letting my guard down.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton, from the introduction of What HappenedFor the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet. In these pages, she describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward. With humor and candor, she tells readers what it took to get back on her feet—the rituals, relationships, and reading that got her through, and what the experience has taught her about life. She speaks about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics. She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future. The election of 2016 was unprecedented and historic. What Happened is the story of that campaign and its aftermath—both a deeply intimate account and a cautionary tale for the nation.

Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara's Last Mission


Richard L. Harris - 1970
    Harris offers a balanced look at the man behind the legend and the circumstances that created him and shaped his choices.

The Queen's Gambit


Walter Tevis - 1983
    Before long, it becomes apparent that hers is a prodigious talent, and as she progresses to the top of the US chess rankings she is able to forge a new life for herself. But she can never quite overcome her urge to self-destruct. For Beth, there’s more at stake than merely winning and losing.