"A biography of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture."--

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

"A nuanced and deeply-reported account of the collapse of Venezuela, and what it could mean for the rest of the world. Today, Venezuela is a country of perpetual crisis-a country of rolling blackouts, nearly worthless currency, uncertain supply of water and food, and extreme poverty. In the same land where oil-the largest reserve in the world-sits so close to the surface that it bubbles from the ground, where gold and other mineral resources are abundant,...

That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire - a highly developed culture - is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They encountered groups such as the Tlaxcaltecs, who suffered from the Aztec rule and were ready to enter into alliances with the foreigners to overthrow their old enemy. In addition, the conquerors benefited from the diseases brought from Europe, which killed...

When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the country's most visible Black man, Booker T. Washington, into his circle of counselors in 1901, the two confronted a shocking and violent wave of racist outrage. In the previous decade, Jim Crow laws had legalized discrimination in the South, eroding social and economic gains for former slaves. Lynching was on the rise, and Black Americans faced new barriers to voting. Slavery had been abolished, but if...

In July 1865, "Wild Bill" Hickok shot and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, MO--the first quick-draw duel on the frontier. Thus began the reputation that made him a marked man to every gunslinger in the Wild West. James Butler Hickock was known across the frontier as a soldier, Union spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, and actor. Wild Bill became a legend, crossing paths with General Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as Ben Thompson...

"If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now is an insider's collection of funny and warmhearted stories about coming of age in the Los Angeles suburb famed for birthing the Kardashian-Jenners and the Bling Ring. For Via Bleidner, transferring to Calabasas High from the private Catholic school she's attended since second grade is a culture shock, not to mention absolutely lonely. Suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar world of celebrities, affluenza, and...

"A literary memoir about fleeing the Soviet Union, where she abandoned her estranged, alcoholic mother, and the author's subsequent quest to find the mother she left behind, after emigrating to America and becoming a mother herself"--

"In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community,...

"A grand narrative history of the boundary that began as a simple demarcation between the feuding Pennsylvania and Maryland colonies but became a byword for the fundamental national division between the slavery-preserving South and abolitionist North"--