Helen Plum Library

"Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz ... collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.... The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf. Three years...

"John Lennon was one of the world's most influential people. Mark David Chapman was one of the most invisible. By the end of 1980, the Beatles had been broken up for a decade -- a decade John Lennon had spent in search of his true identity: singer, songwriter, activist, burn out. "It's the perfect time to be coming back," he declared. Except that Lennon was a marked man. As early as the Beatles' controversial 1966 American tour, the band had feared...

"The best-selling author of "Hitler: Ascent" and "Hitler: Downfall" reconstructs the chaotic, otherworldly last days of Nazi Germany. On April 30, 1945, in a bunker deep beneath the Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his newly wedded wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves. But Nazi Germany lived on, however briefly. The subsequent eight days were among the most turbulent in history, witnessing not only the final battles of World War II and the collapse...

An investigative journalist defends his theory that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide, as commonly believed, and instead escaped from Germany to Indonesia at the end of World War II, where he married and worked in a hospital

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": what happened to British explorer Percy Fawcett. In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many convinced that the Amazon was...

My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. Sarah Tarlow has devoted her working life to the study of death, burial practices, and the rituals of grief. She is also a widow. Shortly after her appointment as the Chair of Archaeology at the University of Leicester, her partner Mark began to suffer from a bitter, drawn-out and undiagnosed illness, leaving him unable to care for himself. Eventually, two weeks after they married, Mark waits for...

"The Two-Headed Whale vividly brings to life the spectacular scenery and wildlife of the vast Southern Oceans, set alongside the true-life story of Anthony Ford, the boy in the grave, as he sailed the same seas and toiled in an industry where profits outranked human life. Drawing together threads of nature and travel writing with an unflinching narrative of life aboard a whaling factory ship and the legacy it left behind, The Two-Headed Whale leaves...

"On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone. Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage - to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act...

"Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin's inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would...