Edgar Award Winner for Best Fact Crime. "An entertaining account of the eternal struggle between high art and low cunning." — TimeIn the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in L...

"Mesmerizing account of an amateur artist who made millions selling forged paintings to art-obsessed Nazis and business tycoons" ( Kirkus, starred review).**New York Times–BestsellerA New York Times Staff Pick"Dolnick brilliantly re-creates the circumstances that made possible one of the most audacious frauds of the twentieth century. . . . An incomparable page turner." — Boston Globe

New York Times–bestselling Author: An "entertainingly written" account of the scientific revolution that emerged amid the horrors of seventeenth-century London ( Kirkus Reviews).In the late seventeenth century, chaos and disease reigned. Streets overflowed with filth and the murder rate was five times higher than it is today. Sickness was divine punishment, astronomy and astrology were indistinguishable, and the world's most brilliant, ambitious, a...

Why cracking the code of human conception took centuries of wild theories, misogynist blunders, and ludicrous mistakesThroughout most of human history, babies were surprises. People knew the basics: men and women had sex, and sometimes babies followed. But beyond that the origins of life were a colossal mystery. The Seeds of Life is the remarkable and rollicking story of how a series of blundering geniuses and brilliant amateurs struggled for two centuries...

A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell.In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splen...

Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition.On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis*—*and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory ...

A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell.In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splen...

Why cracking the code of human conception took centuries of wild theories, misogynist blunders, and ludicrous mistakesThroughout most of human history, babies were surprises. People knew the basics: men and women had sex, and sometimes babies followed. But beyond that the origins of life were a colossal mystery. The Seeds of Life is the remarkable and rollicking story of how a series of blundering geniuses and brilliant amateurs struggled for two centuries...

The true story of one museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld: "Boser cracks the cold case of the art world's greatest unsolved mystery." — Vanity FairShortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and ...

The author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade’s leaders.In the long view, history is seen as a series of events—but the course of those events is determined by individuals and their actions. During the next te...

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, C...

Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. A smalltime thief in 1920s Boston, he is told to cuff her while his accomplices raid the casino she works for. But Joe falls in love with Emma - and his life changes for ever.That meeting is the beginning of Joe's journey to becoming one of the nation's most feared and respected gangsters. It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama and pain. And it is a journey into the soul of prohibition-era America...A pow...