Stephen Kotkin continues his definitive biography of Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror through to the coming of the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history. When we left Stalin at the end of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, it was 1928, and he had finally climbed the mountaintop and achieved dictatorial power of the Soviet empire. The vastest peasant economy in the world would be transformed...

From bestselling, prize-winning author Russell Shorto comes a grand and strange history of the on-going debate between religion and science-seen through the oddly momentous journey of the skull and bones of the great French philosopher Rene Descartes. In this book Shorto brilliantly shows how this argument first started with Descartes and how his ideas (and bones) have remained central to this theoretical struggle for over 350 years. On a brutal winter's...

A noted criminal defense attorney, Robert Rotenberg delivers a courtroom drama that successfully evokes the multicultural city of Toronto even as it keeps readers on the edges of their seats. In the tale, the "Voice of Canada" radio host confesses to murder-but the case is far from closed.

Jack Welch knows how to win. During his forty-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits. Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack's...

The Cold War dominated international relations for forty-five years. It shaped the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union and deeply affected their societies, domestic situations, and their government institutions. Hardly any part of the world escaped its influence. David Painter provides a compact and analytical study that examines the origins, course, and end of the Cold War. His overview is global in perspective, with an emphasis...

In Berlin, two former French intelligence agents hire Klaus Reiner, a ruthlessly effective hit man, to eliminate an American industrialist vacationing in southwestern France. Reiner easily locates his target in the small village of Taziac, but the hit is compromised when three innocent people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Inspector Paul Mazarelle, formerly of Paris but now living in Taziac, charged with bringing his experience in...

Donald Kagan-Yale's Sterling Professor of Classics and History-delivers a compelling new look at revisionism in Thucydides' classic History of the Peloponnesian War. To determine how accurate and dispassionate the Athenian general really was, Kagan exposes his epic to an enlightening and thorough analysis. Using contemporary and modern sources, Kagan reveals the exiled aristocrat's biases, prejudices, and his clear intention to spin events in his...

Robert Rotenberg's compelling tale, Stray Bullets, is the story of a spontaneous shooting at a Toronto donut franchise, a firefight that leaves a four-year-old boy dead and a crucial eyewitness, an illegal alien, vanished into the night. Ari Greene, the officer in charge of the Tim Hortons shooting struggles to separate the facts of the case from the many conflicting eyewitness accounts. How many shots were fired, and from how many guns? Which witnesses-if...

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world It has the quality of myth: A poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian Empire, reinvents himself as a revolutionary and finds a leadership role within a small group of marginal zealots. When the old world is unexpectedly brought down in a total war, the band seizes control of the country, and the new regime it founds as...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a 'head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,' is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally...