Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century

by Sam Kashner

This well-researched narrative, which makes good use of Burton's engaging love letters and diary entries, offers juicy details of his epic alcoholism and her towering tantrums. But from the binges and bling emerges a revealing portrait of the magnetic qualities that glued the couple together.

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War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

by Sarah Ellison

A ten-year Journal veteran and thoroughly versed in the paper's culture, the author capably describes the newsroom dynamic, both pre- and post-Murdoch. It's a measure of Ellison's evenhandedness that, while clearly no Murdoch fan, she candidly exposes the ownership and management deficiencies that made a journalistic icon so vulnerable to capture.

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Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson

by Timothy M. Gay
Historian Timothy M. Gay has unearthed long-forgotten exhibitions where Paige and Dean dueled, and he tells the story of their pioneering escapades in this engaging book. Long before they ever heard of Robinson or Larry Doby, baseball fans from Brooklyn to Enid, Oklahoma, watched black and white players battle on the same diamond.
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Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century

by Michael Hiltzik

As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the American century. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga of the dam's conception, design, and construction to tell the broader story of America's efforts to come to grips with titanic social, economic, and natural forces.

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Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

Lawrence James illuminates the culture of this singular caste, shows how its infatuation with classical art has forged England's heritage, how its love of sport has shaped the nation's pastimes and values, and how its scandals have entertained its public. Impeccably researched, balanced, and brilliantly told, Aristocrats is an enthralling story of survival, a stunning history of wealth, power, and influence.

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A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle or World War II

by Richard Snow
Snow has transformed the faraway and half-forgotten world of the Atlantic convoys into a narrative as touching and exciting as it is melancholy and memorable. Few better accounts have ever been crafted about this cruelest of wars, fought for year after year on the most imperturbably cruel of the world's great oceans.
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Parisians: An Adventure History in Paris

by Graham Robb

This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten. A young artillery lieutenant, strolling through the Palais-Royal, observes disapprovingly the courtesans plying their trade.

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Zoo Story: Life and Death in the Garden of Captives

by Thomas French

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist French goes behind the scenes at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo in this absorbing and balanced account that reveals extinction, conservation, and captivity issues in all their moral complexities and features a very memorable cast. A thoughtful and moving but unsentimental portrait of life in captivity and a broad introduction to some of its most salient and intractable dilemmas.

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Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality

by Jonathan Weiner
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner comes a fast-paced and astonishing scientific adventure story: has the long-sought secret of eternal youth at last been found? A rollicking scientific adventure story in the grand manner of Oliver Sacks, this is science writing of the hightes order and with the highest stakes. Could we live forever? And if we could … would we want to?

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Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter

by Randy L. Schmidt

Little Girl Blue is an intimate profile of Karen Carpenter, a girl from a modest Connecticut upbringing who became a Southern California superstar. Based on exclusive interviews with her innermost circle of girlfriends and nearly 100 others, including professional associates, childhood friends, and lovers, it tells a story as touching, warm, and involving as any of Karen's greatest songs.

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Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language

by Robert McCrum

In this provocative and compelling new look at the course of empire, Robert McCrum, co-author of the best-selling book and television series The Story of English, shows how the language of the Anglo-American imperium has become the world's lingua franca. In the twenty-first century, writes the author, English + Microsoft = Globish.

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The Notebook

by José Saramago

Provocative and lyrical, The Notebook is a record of a year in the life of Saramago, Nobel laureate and author of Blindness. Available for the first time in English, this work offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one of the most original writers of our time.

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The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely

Behavioral economist and bestselling author Ariely (Predictably Irrational) returns to offer a much-needed take on the irrational decisions that influence our dating lives, our workplace experiences, and our temptation to cheat in any and all areas.

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Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

by Paul Greenberg

In Four Fish, Paul Greenberg uses the history of bass, cod, salmon, and tuna to show how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception. Hugely informative, sincere, and infectiously curious and enthusiastic.

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Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England

by Anthony Julius
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Philip Roth says of this book: "This is essential history, and so it is fortunate it has been written by a man with the extraordinary fluency, staggering erudition, scholarly integrity, intellectual acumen, and moral discernment of Anthony Julius."

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Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain
In the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business — and for Anthony Bourdain. His description of an encounter with Food Network's Sandra Lee is both hilarious and deeply scary.

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