During its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless...

A defining American story, never before told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit. With more than three million foreign-born residents today, New York has been America's defining port of entry for nearly four centuries, a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. These migrants have brought their hundreds of languages and distinct cultures to the city, and from there to the entire country. More immigrants have come...

A "riveting and illuminating" (Yuval Noah Harari) new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of the landmark bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how...

Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...

From the author of the national best seller -- Lies Across AmericaWith entries drawn from each of the 50 states, Loewen reveals that: The USS Intrepid, the "feel-good" war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam. The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Jefferson's writings to present this conflicted slave owner as a near abolitionist....

In the spring of 2002, motivated by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, National Football League stalwart Patrick Daniel Tillman turned down a multimillion-dollar contract to join the US Army. Two years later, he died while serving his country in the mountains of Afghanistan. In the process, he became an American icon. Inspired by Pat Tillman’s story, Fallen Stars captures the lives and times of Tillman (1976–2004) and four other war-hero...

Native American drumming and chant; Czech and German polka; country fiddling; African American spirituals, blues and jazz; cowboy songs; Mexican corridos; zydeco; and the sounds of a Cambodian New Year’s celebration — all are part of the amazing cultural patchwork of traditional music in Texas. In Everyday Music, author and researcher Alan Govenar brings readers face-to-face with the stories and memories of people who are as varied as the traditions...

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...

A remarkable history with elements of both In the President’s Secret ServiceThe Residence is full of surprising and moving details that illuminate day-to-day life at the White House.

"In 2020, history came tumbling down. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, Alex von Tunzelmann takes us on a fascinating global historical tour filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between...