NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"A poignant account of personal bravery, love, and loss and a chronicle of the tragedy of our times."
With the assistance of Robbins, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Abdi chronicles the ravages of the ongoing civil war in Somalia and her efforts to establish a safe haven amid the destruction.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"Richly researched and deeply complex--at times sufficient to bemuse as much as inform."
A biographer delivers the scholarly yet very human story of some talented women who held surprising sway in the incredible clutter of city-states that composed Renaissance Italy.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"A vividly told story of a common spice's uncommon history."
Science writer and former business reporter Shaffer traces the action-packed, often bloody trail of black pepper from its uses in ancient times as a cure-all to the intense rivalries among the Portuguese, Dutch and English to control the pepper trade in Indonesia to the rise of 19th-century American pepper merchants.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"Scripture and science meet in a pop-archaeological text; Scripture prevails."
The story of the author's claim to have found long-lost Sodom, the world's most wicked city.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"Because the names, titles and governmental forms will be unfamiliar to most Western readers, the narrative can feel like tough going at times, but the authors weave a fascinating, dark narrative web."
A true-crime murder mystery from 2011 set in a remote Chinese city, with an outsized impact on governance of the vast nation.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"One of the most thorough scholarly works on the subject."
Halsall (History/Univ. of York;
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 2008) studies the veracity of Arthurian legends.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"There is no shortage of histories of the agonizingly drawn-out debacle at Monte Cassino, but this is certainly one of the best."
NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"Long superseded by other widely denounced emblems of American exceptionalism (drones, cluster bombs, torture), napalm receives an overdue but thoroughly satisfying history."
The book begins with the story of the iconic 1972 photograph of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after being severely burned in a napalm attack. Readers expecting a polemic may be pleasantly surprised at this lucid account of the technical, political and ethical features of a notorious symbol of American inhumanity in war.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"Insightful, knowledgeable account of the "good war," intimately informed from the trenches. "
Using as a model Jeffrey Race's influential first-person Vietnam War–era analysis,
War Comes to Long An, Malkasian (
A History of Modern Wars of Attrition, 2002, etc.) evenhandedly examines the Garmser district in southern Afghanistan, where he was stationed as a political officer for the State Department between 2009 and 2011.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"Readers with an interest in the subject would do better to begin with David Roberts' far superior Once They Moved Like the Wind (1993)."
Second-tier, oddly old-fashioned military history by former naval officer Mort (
The Hemingway Patrols, 2009).
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"A lively, if narrow, look at the American century that underplays other aspects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and '70s."
A cultural historian chronicles the dominant role that Freudian psychology has come to play in our culture.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 2013
"Almost always charming, occasionally enlightening and sometimes just plain odd."
An idiosyncratic collection of interviews with American Jews on, off and some barely near the field of baseball.
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