The definitive biography, mesmerizing and “richly textured ” (Chicago Tribune), that inspired the acclaimed documentary, Letters from Baghdad. • With a new Afterword • "Desert Queen...plucks Gertrude Bell out of the shadow of Lawrence of Arabia." —The Boston GlobeHere is the story of Gertrude Bell, who explored, mapped, and excavated the Arab world throughout the early twentieth century. Recruited by British intelligence during W...

No woman in the Gilded Age made as much money as Hetty Green. Now the acclaimed author of Desert Queen delivers the definitive biography of America’s first female tycoon, “an investment pioneer who matched her male counterparts in ambition and guile, and never backed down from a fight…. Filled with colorful historical details of an economic time that eerily parallels our own.” —San Francisco ChronicleHetty Green was a strong woman who forged her o...

**A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE"A compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller"—The Wall Street Journal"Suspense, élan and a generous helping of glamour: Think George Smiley in a mink-trimmed coat."—The New York Times Book ReviewThe true story of socialite Marguerite Harrison, who spied for U.S. military intelligence in Russia and Germany in the fraught period between the world wars**Born a privileged child of Am...

**A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE"A compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller"—The Wall Street Journal"Suspense, élan and a generous helping of glamour: Think George Smiley in a mink-trimmed coat."—The New York Times Book ReviewThe true story of socialite Marguerite Harrison, who spied for U.S. military intelligence in Russia and Germany in the fraught period between the world wars**Born a privileged child of Am...

Turning her back on her privileged life in Victorian England, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fired by her innate curiosity, journeyed the world and became fascinated with all things Arab. Traveling the length and breadth of the Arab region, armed with a love for its language and its people, she not only produced several enormously popular books based on her experiences but became instrumental to the British foreign office. When World War I erupted, and the British needed the loyalty of the Ara...

A captivating biography of America's first female tycoon, Hetty Green, the iconoclast who forged one of the greatest fortunes of her time.No woman in the Gilded Age made as much money as Hetty Green. At the time of her death in 1916, she was worth at least 100 million dollars, equal to more than 2 billion dollars today. A strong believer in women being financially independent, she offered valuable lessons for the present times.Abandoned at birth by her neuro...

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman (""Elegant and scrupulous""—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa (""A mesmerizing page-turner""—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.No cloistered don, this tall, mar...

The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores.In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open oc...

A new thriller from "the greatest living writer of espionage fiction"-- Houston ChronicleAutumn 1937: War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys ...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND ONE OF KIRKUS REVIEWS' BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARIt is 1943—the height of the Second World War. With the men away at the front, Berlin has become a city of women.On the surface, Sigrid Schröder is the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime....

The gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris.As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. But while trying to solv...

China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China's Pearl River Delta.As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before...