Back History | August Newsletter

SelectReads News
Simple News Pro
  History  
War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944

IRIS ORIGO · NYRB Classics
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback

A bestseller upon its original publication in the 1980s, these diaries reveal life during WWII in Tuscany and include stunning rediscovered photographsIn the Second World War, Italy was torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born...
Read More check catalog
 
 
The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family

HELEN RAPPAPORT · St. Martin's Press
Pages: 464
Format: Hardcover

Investigating the murder of the Russian Imperial Family, Helen Rappaport embarks on a quest to uncover the many international plots to save them, why they failed, and who was responsible.The murder of the Romanov family in July 1918 horrified the world and its aftershocks still reverberate...
Read More check catalog
 
 
The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire

DEBORAH BAKER · Graywolf Press
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover

A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in IndiaJohn Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers -- W. H. Auden...
Read More check catalog
 
 
The Fighters

C. J. Chivers · Simon & Schuster
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover

Pulitzer Prize-winning conflict journalist C.J. Chivers follows the arcs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the experiences of those who fought them, as Stephen Ambrose did for the grunts of WWII, and Michael Herr's classic Dispatches did for Vietnam.Almost 2.5 million Americans...
Read More check catalog
 
 
Secret Treasure of Oak Island: The Amazing True Story of a Centuries-Old Treasure Hunt

D'ARCY O'CONNOR · Lyons Press
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback

It started on a summer afternoon in 1795 when a young man named Daniel McGinnis found what appeared to be an old site on an island off the Acadian coast, a coastline fabled for the skullduggery of pirates. The notorious Captain Kidd was rumored to have left part of his treasure somewhere...
Read More check catalog
 
 
Chopin's Piano: In Search of the Instrument that Transformed Music

PAUL KILDEA · W. W. Norton & Company
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover

The captivating story of Frédéric Chopin and the fate of both his Mallorquin piano and musical Romanticism from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.In November 1838, Frédéric Chopin, George Sand, and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They...
Read More check catalog
 
 
De Gaulle

Julian Jackson · Belknap Press
Pages: 928
Format: Hardcover

A definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France, drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world...
Read More check catalog
 
 
The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865

Janet Elizabeth Croon · Savas Beatie
Pages: 480
Format: Hardcover

LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty 12-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860--just as secession and the Civil War began...
Read More check catalog
 
 
How the Post Office Created America: A History

Winifred Gallagher · Penguin Books
Pages: 336
Format: Print book

The definitive history of the US Postal Service, the least appreciated and analyzed of America's great institutions, and an examination of how this remarkable organization created America. The post office, Winifred Gallagher argues, has been not just a witness to but a foundational influence...
Read More check catalog
 
 
The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Fortune in the American West

GREGORY CROUCH · Scribner
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover

The rags-to-riches American frontier tale of an Irish immigrant who outwits, outworks, and outmaneuvers thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada's Comstock Lode - the rich body of gold and silver so immensely valuable that it changed the destiny of the United States.Born in 1831, John...
Read More check catalog