This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.
--Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN

This seminal book, which has been called one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought by Carl Rogers and one of the great books of our time by Harold Kushner, has been translated into more than fifty languages and sold over sixteen million copies. An enduring work of survival literature, according to the New York Times, Viktor Frankl's riveting account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, and his insightful exploration of the human will to find meaning in spite of the worst adversity, has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. At the heart of Frankl's theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for meaning) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl's classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles.

A must-read companion to this classic work, a new, never-before-published work by Frankl entitled Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, is now available in English.

A brutally moving work of art--widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written--Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime's leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?

Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.

Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist's eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies--like Goebbels, the regime's propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust's chief architect--to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten--like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler's People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.

Nearly a century after Hitler's rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility--and even between pathological evil and rational choice--are never easily drawn.

A thrilling tale of military and political genius... Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer. --The Washington Post

Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.

Andrew Roberts's Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon's thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon's sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.

From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier

An ideal pairing of talent and material. ... Engrossing. ... A deft and ambitious storyteller. -- Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review

In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.

THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF A RENAISSANCE-ERA EXECUTIONER AND HIS WORLD, BASED ON A RARE AND OVERLOOKED JOURNAL.

In a dusty German bookshop, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington stumbled upon a remarkable document: the journal of a sixteenth-century executioner. The journal gave an account of the 394 people Meister Frantz Schmidt executed, and the hundreds more he tortured, flogged, or disfigured for more than forty-five years in the city of Nuremberg. But the portrait of Schmidt that gradually emerged was not that of a monster. Could a man who practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate--even progressive?

In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidt's journal. Deemed an official outcast, Meister Frantz sought to prove himself worthy of honor and free his children from the stigma of his profession. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt's life and work: the shocking, but often familiar, crimes of the day; the medical practice that he felt was his true calling; and his lifelong struggle to reconcile his craft with his religious faith.

In this groundbreaking and intimate portrait, Harrington shows us that our thinking about justice and punishment, and our sense of our own humanity, are not so remote from the world of The Faithful Executioner.

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.

From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Young and beautiful--becoming cultural and fashion icons of their time--they also played a pivotal role in ruling their realms during a tempestuous era characterized by unprecedented political and technological change.

Fearless, adventurous, and independent, Elisabeth and Eugénie represented a new kind of empress--one who rebelled against tradition and anticipated and embraced modern values. Yet both women endured hardship in their private and public lives. Elisabeth was plagued by a mother-in-law who snatched her infant children away and undermined her authority at court. Eugénie's husband was an infamous philanderer who could not match the military prowess of his namesake. Between them, Elisabeth and Eugénie were personally involved in every major international confrontation in their turbulent century, which witnessed thrilling technological advances as well as revolutions, assassinations, and wars.

With her characteristic jump-off-the-page writing and in-depth research, Nancy Goldstone brings to life these two remarkable women, as Europe goes through the convulsions that led up to the international landscape we recognize today.

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.

From On James Baldwin

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. All art, he wrote, is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author's tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.

During World War II, Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, after the war her heroism, like that of many others, was suppressed by communist Poland and remained virtually unknown for 60 years. Unknown, that is, until three high school girls from an economically depressed, rural school district in southeast Kansas stumbled upon a tantalizing reference to Sendler's rescues, which they fashioned into a history project, a play they called Life in a Jar. Their innocent drama was first seen in Kansas, then the Midwest, then New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and finally Poland, where they elevated Irena Sendler to a national hero, championing her legacy of tolerance and respect for all people. Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project is a Holocaust history and more. It is the inspirational story of Protestant students from Kansas, each carrying her own painful burden, each called in her own complex way to the history of a Catholic woman who knocked on Jewish doors in the Warsaw ghetto and, in Sendler's own words, tried to talk the mothers out of their children. Inspired by Irena Sendler, they are living examples of the power of one person to change the world and models for young people everywhere.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy--exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling--does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

Extraordinary...a great American biography (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this cinematic and deeply engaging (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass's newspapers. Absorbing and even moving...a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass's (The Wall Street Journal), Blight's biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass's two marriages and his complex extended family. David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass...a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century (The Boston Globe).

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.

Ernest Hemingway's classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s remains one of his most beloved works. Filled with tender memories of his first wife Hadley and their son Jack; irreverent portraits of literary luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft, A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized. It is an elegy to a remarkable group of expatriates and a testament to the risks and rewards of the writerly life.

Shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary history of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

As King James I's favorite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

With a novelist's touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

From kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this immersive and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.

Separated from her family in the confusion and horror of World War II, seven-year-old Tomiko Higa struggles to survive on the battlefield of Okinawa, Japan. There, as some of the fiercest fighting of the war rages around her, she must live alone, with nothing to fall back on but her own wits and daring. Fleeing from encroaching enemy forces, searching desperately for her lost sisters, taking scraps of food from the knapsacks of dead soldiers, risking death at every turn, Tomiko somehow finds the strength and courage to survive.

Many years later she decided to tell this story. Originally intended for juvenile readers, it is sure to move adults as well, because it is such a vivid portrait of the unintended civilian casualties of any war.

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers--bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio--changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed.

In this enjoyable, fast-paced tale (The Economist), master historian David McCullough shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly (The Washington Post) and captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished (The Wall Street Journal). He draws on the extensive Wright family papers to profile not only the brothers but their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. Essential reading, this is a story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency...about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished...The Wright Brothers soars (The New York Times Book Review).

In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement. The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey.

Literature and film have produced very few images of a certain group of heroic soldiers who died on foreign beaches, fields and jungles. The African American soldier, in segregated units, fought and died on those battlefields, and for the most part, their contribution has been largely overlooked.

The story of William A. Morris Jr.'s service in the all black 369th Coast Artillery Regiment and the 4251st Trucking Company during World War II is a story of a black soldier from a small town fighting for a country that is still wrestling with the ugliness of racism.

At the core of this soldier's story, there is a miracle. Morris' unique story has a real heroine, a dog named Trixie. This little terrier mutt found him in England just before D-Day and stayed with him throughout the war, from Omaha Beach to the Battle of the Bulge.
He saved her life and she saved his.

This book follows William and Trixie's journey from the horrors of war in Europe to the arms of Morris' family back home. It is a story of hope, courage, faith and love. More than just a story of a black soldier and his dog, The Soldier That Wagged Her Tail holds a universal message that inspires all of us.

An exciting story of a Texas Ranger, adventurer, and immigration officer who became a symbol of his age while gambling with death in the wild frontier regions of Texas, Arizona, and Old and New Mexico. Charles Goodnight knew the West of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Dick Wooton, St. Vrain, and Lucien Maxwell. He ranged a country as vast as Bridger ranged. He rode with the boldness of Fremont, guided by the craft of Carson. His vigorous zest for life enabled him to live intensely and amply, and in this book by J. Evetts Haley, himself no stranger to the West, provides a fully readable and important western biography, vividly told, thrilling, witty, and completely authentic.

A splendid book--humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit. --The New York Times Book Review

The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers--re-examined here as Founding Brothers--combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes--Hamilton and Burr's deadly duel, Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, Adams' administration and political partnership with his wife, the debate about where to place the capital, Franklin's attempt to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery and Madison's attempts to block him, and Jefferson and Adams' famous correspondence--Founding Brothers brings to life the vital issues and personalities from the most important decade in our nation's history.