In 1924, Robert Frisbie arrived on the island of Puka-Puka, one of the most remote in the South Pacific, to run a trading post. Within months he had learned the language and become absorbed into the ways of its ancient, indigenous community – fishing, picnicking, swimming, sleeping and falling in love. Fortunately for us he also had a pitch-perfect ear for stories.Before the book is done, we feel the power of the surf and the coral reefs, hear death chants and witness thirty torch-...

"A gloriously strange book, both whimsical and brooding."—Jeremy Jackson, PeopleThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided to replace Salt Cove's signature wooden bridge with a concrete monstrosity. The authorities are unreasoning and unyielding. The town decides on secession. Jessica Stoddard is a quirky seventy-two-year-old who is determined to keep a record of the event for posterity. She has a passion for the truth, but her account is not entirely r...

George Weller was a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the war’s end in September 1945, under General MacArthur’s media blackout, correspondents were forbidden to enter both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But instead of obediently staying with the press corps in northern Japan, Weller broke away. The intrepid newspaperman reached Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb hit the city. Boldly presenting himself as a U.S. colonel to the Japa...

Walter Cronkite called him “one of our best war correspondents.” His stories from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific during World War II won him the Pulitzer Prize. Now, George Weller is immortalized in a collection of fearless, intrepid dispatches that crisscross a shattered globe. Edited by his son, Weller’s War provides an eyewitness look at modern history’s greatest upheaval, and also contains never-published reporting alongside excerpts from three books. From battlefront to beachhea...

Kip—a New York jazz pianist whose career was cut short by a neurological disease—returns from a failed suicide attempt with a vivid, detailed memory of his journey through the afterlife. Resembling the world as he knows it, but unlimited in space and time, it’s unlike any eternity he has contemplated. Its residents are those who choose not to reincarnate, which would erase all memory of who they once were. Kip has a quest: to find his beloved Lucy, a yoga teacher who shared his apartment f...

Packed with startling revelations, this inside look at the secret side of the Cold War exposes just how close America came to total annihilation."With access to newly declassified documents, Keeney delivers a jolting year-by-year history of SAC's transformation into a massive worldwide force primed to launch bombers within 15 minutes of the order." — Publishers WeeklyOne of the most detailed pictures yet of the com...

Just before midnight on February 13, 1950, three engines of a US Air Force B-36 intercontinental bomber caught fire over Canada's northwest coast. The crew jumped, and the plane ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The fact that the huge aircraft had been carrying a Mark IV nuclear bomb was kept carefully hidden. Three years later, the wreck of the bomber was found by accident in a remote location in the coastal mountains of British Columbia, three hours' flying time in the opposite dir...

The basis for Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove: A chilling Cold War thriller in which unchecked power unleashes total nuclear disaster.Air Force Brigadier General Quinten is a dying man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he can make the world a better place by ordering a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Receiving word of the attack already underway, the president of the United States and his advisors now must work frantic...

**The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal.“A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Fascinating.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine“Perilous and gripping . . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together an engrossing account of bot...

Iran has been threatening to wipe Israel off the map while actively developing the nuclear means to do so. The Islamic Republic will soon enter the so-called “zone of immunity” by transferring all centrifuges and other key components of its nuclear weapons program into Fordo. This nuclear enrichment facility near Qom was built under hundreds of feet of rock and is thus highly fortified against aerial attack by Israeli fighter jets. But even the hardened Fordo facility could be vulnerable t...

The acclaimed naval historian vividly narrates a true story of Cold War submarine espionage from the perspective of the vessel's commanding officer.In Stalking the Red Bear, US Naval historian Peter Sasgen reveals the untold story of a covert submarine operation that took place deep within Soviet-controlled waters. Told in novelistic fashion, with names changed to protect sensitive military secrets, this work brings readers beneath the waves and inside the ...

The last great untold story of World War II, the career of Hitler's "Super Fighter" intended to destroy the RAF in the Battle of Britain and why it never succeeded.The super-secret Heinkel He113 fighter was designed to be a high-speed, high-altitude fighter that could outperform, outgun and outfight any other aircraft in the world when it entered service with the Luftwaffe in 1940.