"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect,...

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...

"The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper--and a gripping portrait of Victorian London--[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from teh favtory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, rand coffeehouses, lived...

The author follows in the footsteps of America's most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators to offer a new perspective on how the most powerful nation on Earth came together. Illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings and ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree.

"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of presidents including, besides...

Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. From ballet's origins in the...