Russian playwright and historian Radzinsky mines  sources never before available to create a  fascinating portrait of the monarch, and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days.  Updated for the paperback edition.

    It helped in the American conquest of California, the launch of the Republican Party, and the ignition of the western Indian wars. And along the way, Lake Tahoe even found the time to invent the ski industry, spark the sexual revolution, and win countless Academy Awards. Tahoe beneath the Surface brings this hidden history of America s largest mountain lake to life through the stories of its most celebrated residents and visitors over the last ten thousand years. It mixes local Washoe Indian legends with tales of murderous Mafia dons, and Rat Pack tunes with Steinbeck novels. It establishes Tahoe as one of America s literary hot spots by tracing the steps of more than a dozen authors including Bertrand Russell, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Michael Ondaatje. Tahoe beneath the Surface reveals how the lake transformed the lives of conservationists like John Muir, humorists like Mark Twain, and Hollywood icons like Frank Sinatra. It even touches upon some of the darker aspects of American history, including anti-Chinese racism and the Kennedy assassination. Despite the impact Lake Tahoe has had on America, environmental threats loom large, and Tahoe Blue a term that Lankford uses to encompass the whole range of life, beauty, and meaning the lake represents grows increasingly vulnerable. In Tahoe beneath the Surface, human history and natural history combine in a most engaging way, one that will both inform and inspire all who would keep Tahoe blue.

    At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as "The Killer of Little Shepherds," terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years--until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era's most renowned criminologist. The two men--intelligent and bold--typified the Belle Epoque, a period of immense scientific achievement and fascination with science's promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition. With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher's infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal profiling, as Fourquet painstakingly collects eyewitness accounts and constructs a map of Vacher's crimes. We follow the tense and exciting events leading to the murderer's arrest. And we witness the twists and turns of the trial, celebrated in its day. In an attempt to disprove Vacher's defense by reason of insanity, Fourquet recruits Lacassagne, who in the previous decades had revolutionized criminal science by refining the use of blood-spatter evidence, systematizing the autopsy, and doing groundbreaking research in psychology. Lacassagne's efforts lead to a gripping courtroom denouement. "The Killer of Little Shepherds" is an important contribution to the history of criminal justice, impressively researched and thrillingly told.

    Book by Yost, Nellie Snyder

    As publication loomed, Mrs. Gaskell was keen to escape the reviews. So, leaving her dull minister husband and dreary provincial city behind, she set off with her daughters to Rome. There she met a dazzling group of artists and writers, among them the American critic Charles Eliot Norton. Seventeen years her junior, Norton was her one true love. They could not be together--it would be an unthinkable breach of convention--but by his side and amidst that splendid circle, Mrs. Gaskell knew she had reached the "tip-top point of [her] life." In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her PhD--about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-19th century--and falling head over heels for a soulful American screenwriter in another city. As her long-distance romance founders and her passion for academia never quite materializes, she is drawn to Mrs. Gaskell. Could this indomitable Victorian author rescue Nell's pursuit of love, family and a writing career? Lively, witty, and impossible to put down, The Victorian and the Romantic is a moving chronicle of two women each charting a way of life beyond the rules of her time.

    A terrorist attack on Australian soil. For seventeen hours Islamic State-inspired gunman Man Haron Monis held his captives in a terrifying drama that paralysed Sydney and kept a nation glued to its television screens. Two hostages were killed and three seriously wounded. The others would have their lives changed for ever.Despite the police leadership declaring it was well prepared for a terrorist attack, many shortcomings on the night revealed a response that fell seriously short of that promise. Deborah Snow lays bare what happened behind the scenes in the cafe as the hostages tried to keep themselves alive while waiting for a police response that didn't come. She also takes us into the police command posts as communications, equipment and decision-making structures broke down. Hurtling towards its inevitable and tragic conclusion, Siege draws us into a vortex of police missteps, extraordinary bravery and profound grief to reveal what happened during that awful day. Shocking, compelling and revealing Siege will take its place as the classic account of these events.

    Estranged from Ada’s father, who was infamously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Ada’s mathematician mother is determined to save her only child from her perilous Byron heritage. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada’s mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination—or worse yet, passion or poetry—is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes.When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize that her delightful new friendship with inventor Charles Babbage—brilliant, charming, and occasionally curmudgeonly—will shape her destiny. Intrigued by the prototype of his first calculating machine, the Difference Engine, and enthralled by the plans for his even more advanced Analytical Engine, Ada resolves to help Babbage realize his extraordinary vision, unique in her understanding of how his invention could transform the world. All the while, she passionately studies mathematics—ignoring skeptics who consider it an unusual, even unhealthy pursuit for a woman—falls in love, discovers the shocking secrets behind her parents’ estrangement, and comes to terms with the unquenchable fire of her imagination.

    1415 was a year of religious persecution, personal suffering and one horrendous battle. This book presents the story of that year.

    Refusing to cave in to society's rules, Eleanor's exuberant style, wavering voice and lack of Hollywood beauty are fodder for the media.First Lady for thirteen years, Eleanor redefines and exploits this role to a position ofpower. Using her influence she champions for Jews, African Americans and women. Living through two world wars Eleanor witnesses thousands of graves, broken bodies and grieving families. After visiting troops in the Pacific she says:"If we don't make this a more decent world to live in I don't see how we can look these boys in the eyes."She defies a post-war return to status quo and establishes the Universal Declarationof Human Rights within the U.N. She earns her way to being named "First Lady of the World." The audacity of this woman to live out her own destiny challenges us to do the same. After all, it's not about Eleanor. Her story is history.  It's about us.

    In The Sisters of Henry VIII, Maria Perry brings history alive by examining the lives of these extraordinary women and their influence on Europe in the Tudor Age. Margaret became queen of Scotland at age thirteen; family members arranged beautiful Mary's betrothal to the aging king of France when she was twelve. But both women chose their second husbands for love: Margaret married and divorced twice after Henry's advancing armies slaughtered her first husband and kidnapped her children; Mary risked execution by proposing to the handsome duke of Suffolk. Groundbreaking in both depth and scope, Perry's work rescues two remarkable princesses from the shadows of history and offers a fresh interpretation of a royal family and an era sure to fascinate readers of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser.

    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    In the tradition of “true crime” books, The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the center of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set including the infamous Lord Lucan who disappeared following the murder of his children’s nanny.

    . . Baer's fine book gives a panoramic and thought-provoking account of over half a millennium of Ottoman and - it now goes without saying - European history' Guardian'A winning portrait of seven centuries of empire, teeming with life and colour, human interest and oddity, cruelty and oppression mixed with pleasure, benevolence and great artistic beauty' Sunday Times'A superb, gripping and refreshing new history - finely written and filled with fascinating characters and analysis - that places the dynasty where it belongs: at the centre of European history' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem'A book as sweeping, colorful, and rich in extraordinary characters as the empire which it describes' Tom HollandThe Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans.Recounting the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty's demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide.Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West.

    Here the trials and triumphs of the early Muslims as individuals are well-portrayed. Their various paths to Islam - sometimes direct, sometimes long and tortuous, their devotion to the noble Prophet, their endeavours in peace time and their exploits in war - all serve to cast them in a heroic mould. This is the first of two (formerly published as a series of three) books based on original Arabic sources and written in a style that is lively and often gripping. The lives of the Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, is a rich storehouse of knowledge, guidance and inspiration. The men and women whose stories are told here helped to lay the foundations of a new world order, and it is only fitting that they should be more widely known.