Nonfiction World

Travel to Mexico. Find out the facts about this country in North America.

Best-selling author Georgia Bragg delights young people with her quirky characters and unique subject matter. How They Croaked provides all the gory details of the awful ends of 19 awfully famous people. It details Ludwig Van Beethoven’s expansive finale, Henry VII’s explosive end, Albert Einstein’s great brain escape, and Marie Curie’s glowing demise.

It's no secret that federal agencies are waging a broad global war against terror. But, for the first time, in this memoir, an active Muslim American federal agent reveals his experience infiltrating and bringing down a terror cell in North America. Due to his ongoing work for the FBI, Elnoury writes under a pseudonym. An Arabic-speaking Muslim American, a patriot, a hero: To many Americans, it will be a revelation that he and his team even exist, let alone the vital and dangerous work they do keeping all Americans safe.

In an immersive, exciting narrative nonfiction format, this powerful book follows a selection of people who experienced the 2010 Haiti Earthquake.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of other countries. If we are to understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbreaking study, we must examine its prehistory throughout Europe. We must look at countries as far-flung as Romania and France, Russia and Greece, where, decades before the Nazis came to power, a deadly combination of envy, competition, nationalism, and social upheaval fueled a surge of anti-Semitism, creating the preconditions for the deportations and murder to come.

It’s time to celebrate Hanukkah! Light the menorah. Sing songs and eat tasty treats. During Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, Jews remember a war they won. This allowed them to freely practice their beliefs.

Though fashions may change, certain things never go out of style - like your favorite little black dress that can take you from a business meeting to a dinner party to a night on the town. But what makes it work is not the dress; it's how you present yourself while wearing it. A woman who is polite, well spoken, gracious, charming, and thoughtful is always welcome - though such women appear to be in short supply these days!

In Mules and Men, some of the rich cultural heritage of black America is revealed and preserved. In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her home town of Eatonville, Florida, to collect and record the oral histories, songs, and sermons, many dating back to slavery times, that she remembered hearing as a child. These highly metaphorical folktales, "big old lies", and powerful songs helped her to recover her history, and preserve an important part of American culture.

No one thought Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass would ever become friends. The former slave and the outspoken woman came from two different worlds. But they shared deep-seated beliefs in equality and the need to fight for it. Despite naysayers, hecklers, and even arsonists, Susan and Frederick became fast friends and worked together to change America.

Discover some of the most captivating mysteries of all time. Humanity has come so far and explored so much. As a species, we have more, or less conquered the entire Earth and all of its resources. We have built towering structures, intricate systems, and settled everywhere - from the tallest peaks to the deepest valleys. We have now entered what many like to think of as the enlightened, scientific era - where old superstitions and fears have been abolished, and the mysteries of the past have been solved. Basically, many of us like to think we have figured it all out.

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

In the early 1900s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lizzie Garret Anderson and Sophie Jex-Blake fought for a woman's place in the male-dominated medical field.

A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems.

David Stahel's groundbreaking new account of Operation Typhoon captures the perspectives of both the German high command and individual soldiers, revealing that despite success on the battlefield the wider German war effort was in far greater trouble than is often acknowledged.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions.

This book interweaves two narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Metis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition?

From ancient times to the present day, The World in Books offers a wide-ranging historical education through pleasure reading—and a fantastic introduction to some of the most thought-provoking, profound, and interesting nonfiction works of all time. From Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to bell hooks’s All About Love, as well as such recent classics as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Davis’s guide suggests a world of nonfiction books and explains just why they’re so historically meaningful and culturally relevant today.

Nellie McClung dared to challenge the status quo. When she was still alive, women were not allowed to vote and were treated unequally. Together with the “Famous Five”, Nellie petitioned the Supreme Court to allow women to vote and be eligible for public office. Nellie’s story was one of strength, determination, courage, and bravery.

Before their experiments, inventions, and discoveries that changed the world, the world’s most celebrated scientists had regular-kid problems just like you. Stephen Hawking hated school and preferred to spend his free time building model airplanes, inventing board games, and even building his own computer. Jane Goodall got in trouble for bringing worms and snails into her house. And Neil deGrasse Tyson had to start a dog-walking business to save up money to buy a telescope.