"The riveting, secret story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China. Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin's means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing "unprecedented" about...

Wolfgang Puck is one of the world’s leading cooks and restauranteurs. The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook takes its inspiration from his famous Los Angeles restaurants Spago and Chinois on Main. Puck delights in blending the East with the West, creating innovative dishes inspired by the cuisines of France, Italy, and the Orient. Issued for the first time in paperback, the Wolfgang Puck Cookbook details over two hundred of the triumphant...

Herod the Great is a well-studied, yet controversial, figure. Examine in depth his brilliant methods and materials, including the construction of Masada, which involved many logistical challenges as giant marble tesserae slabs were shipped across the desert and hoisted up as walls. Discover Herod's most startling and mesmerizing architectural invention.

With Rome's fracture into eastern and western camps, the story of the empire's decline begins to get complicated. Learn how to navigate the tricky waters of Chapters 29 to 33, which examine cataclysmic events including the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. and the loss of North Africa to the Vandals.

Learn about the Silk Roads, a series of networks connecting ancient cultures.

"In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors-- Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda-- grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities,...

"Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's intimate story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships."--

"Amitav Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family-the climax of a yearslong project"-- When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those...