In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality. Donald spent 50 years studying Lincoln, tracing his rise from humble origins...

"Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, ... nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West"--Dust jacket...

Having lost her longtime pet dog, Massachusetts journalist Luttrell volunteers to help train service dogs on the weekends; the rest of the week, the animals are taught by inmates as part of the Prison PUP program.

"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem. Perhaps this is because these two amazing women never knew each other--Wollstonecraft died of infection at the age of 38, a week after giving birth to her daughter. Nevertheless their lives were closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies...

"An acerbic, no holds barred indictment of business as usual in Washington, DC--where our elected leaders provide a fig leaf for those who really hold the levers of power--by a 28-year veteran of the Hill, the bestselling author of The Party Is Over Have you ever noticed that behind all the mud-slinging and invective there isn't much difference between the parties? For all of his big talk and promises of change, Obama is basically Bush lite. And Hillary--or...

"In her twenties, Alexandra Heminsley spent more time drinking white wine than she did in pursuit of athletic excellence. When she decided to take up running in her thirties, she had high hopes for a blissful runner's high and immediate physical transformation. After eating three slices of toast with honey and spending ninety minutes on iTunes creating the perfect playlist, she hit the streets--and failed miserably. The stories of her first runs turn...

In this portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, "harboring no preconceptions of what he might find." What he discovered was for him overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets, a land of difficult, often...

Richard Rex is professor of Reformation history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Queens' College. His books include Tudors: The Illustrated History and Henry VIII and the English Reformation. He lives in Cambridge. A major new account of the most intensely creative years of Luther's career The Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the sixteenth...

In this searing memoir, the author, "the girl" at the center of the infamous Roman Polanski sexual assault case, breaks a virtual thirty-five year silence to tell her story and reflect on the events of that day and their lifelong repercussions. March 1977, Southern California. Roman Polanski drives a rented Mercedes along Mulholland Drive to Jack Nicholson's house. Sitting next to him is an aspiring actress, Samantha Geimer, recently arrived from...

In 1946, America had just exited the biggest war in modern history and was about to enter another of a kind no one had fought before. We think of this moment as the brilliant start of America Triumphant, in world politics and economics. But the reality is murkier: 1946 brought tension between industry and labor, political disunity, bad veteran morale, housing crises, inflation, a Soviet menace-all shadowed by an indecisiveness that would plague decision...