NONFICTION
Released: April 4, 2013
"The author does a solid job analyzing the birth and development of Dracula and illustrating the character traits Stoker cherry-picked from his wide circle of friends."
Steinmeyer (
The Last Greatest Magician in the World, 2011, etc.) reveals the variety of influences on Stoker's most (some would say only) memorable work of fiction.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 3, 2013
"An angry but fascinating account of negligence, incompetence and injustice justified (as it still is) in the name of national security."
Turning up a surprising amount of hitherto hidden material and talkative survivors, Brown (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County;
A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, 2005) writes a vivid, often hair-raising history of the great plutonium factories and the privileged cities built around them.
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NONFICTION
Released: April 3, 2013
"A clear explanation of a complicated, and severely flawed, idea."
NONFICTION
Released: April 2, 2013
"Not as groundbreaking as the author imagines, but a solid retelling of an always-interesting tale of the first great urban-planning achievement."
A mildly revisionist history that gives principal credit for the modernization of Paris to the monarch rather than the prefect.
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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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