From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history. Throughout human history. certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period. This book tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens...

"In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian ... Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation places truth itself--a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence--at the center of the nation's history. The American experiment rests...

In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, a highly-entertaining history of the World Series, based on years of archival research and interviews with hundreds of players and managers, filled with never-before-heard details of the most exciting and fascinating tales from 117 years of the Fall Classic. The World Series is baseball's greatest stage. From Babe Ruth's famous called shot, to Jackie Robinson stealing...

It was the war that lasted ten thousand days. The war that inspired scores of songs. The war that sparked dozens of riots. And in this stirring chronicle, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Philip Caputo writes about our country's most controversial war -- the Vietnam War -- for young readers. From the first stirrings of unrest in Vietnam under French colonial rule, to American intervention, to the battle at Hamburger Hill, to the Tet Offensive, to...

Using sticky notes, an author tries to convince her publisher that her book is about figs, not pigs, but the wording, illustrations, and even recipes present pigs as growing on trees, and tasty with orange and ginger sauce.