East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she's been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department, and finds himself in the middle not only of the seminal events of the civil rights battle, but a much more personal battle of his own. Cameron Dewar,...

"Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn't get fixed." So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Ken Follett's nerve-racking drama of international tension. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country's secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war...

"Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment--your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?"--

"Tim Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a "fresh way of looking at maps" (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has. Now, in this revelatory new book, Marshall takes us into ten regions that are set to shape global politics and power. Find out why the Earth's atmosphere is the world's...

"An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource--microchip technology--with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil--the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything--from missiles to microwaves,...

"A collection of the finest New York Times columns written by Roger Cohen, and an extended commentary on the years in which he wrote them"--

"During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation's extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist explains, with electrifying clarity, why some of her contemporaries have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states. Across the world today, from the U.S. to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while different forms of authoritarianism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum argues...

"Seven years ago, Mia Briscoe was at a frat party with her friend Serena when a fire broke out. Everyone was accounted for except Serena. Now an investigative journalist, Mia discovers photos from that night and begins to uncover a sinister string of events. But some powerful people will do anything to keep her from learning the truth. CIA operative Olivia Hildebrand is on a mission in Iran to exfiltrate a betrayed undercover operative and is nearly...

A collection of primary source documents that focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. International in scope, each title is devoted to one topic.