Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, and the diverse cast that surrounded him before he was murdered in 1922-- including three beautiful, ambitious actresses, the ruthless founder of Paramount locked in a struggle for control of the film industry, a grasping...

"The shocking untold story of how the FBI partnered with white evangelicals to champion a vision of America as a white Christian nation. On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelical, but his Christian admirers anointed him as their political champion, believing he would lead America back to God. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover reveals how Hoover...

On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their...

Presents the story of civilians who have died as a result of America's recent wars, introducing some of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rescue workers who tried to save them, and the American soldiers coming to terms with their deaths. "Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, uncounted thousands of civilians have died in the fighting, and as a result of the destruction. These are deaths for which no one assumes responsibility,...

An account of the massacre at Greenwood recreates this destruction of a prosperous African American southern community near Tulsa, Oklahoma. On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. Thirty-four square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community, then known as the...

"If you value the integrity of our elections-or want a behind-the-scenes look at an attempt at overturning one-Disproven by Ken Block takes you out of the voting booth and into the chaos that was the attempt to challenge the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In November 2020, data specialist Ken Block received a phone call from the Trump Campaign. They wanted to hire him to find evidence of election fraud. What followed were late night...

Describes the devastating events of September 1894, when two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, and surrounding communities, trapping more than two thousand people and ultimately costing more than four hundred lives. "On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire in the first and only book on to chronicle...

After being dared by his son, A. J. Jacobs decided to thank every single person involved in producing his morning cup of coffee. The resulting journey takes him across the globe and transforms his life.

"Japan is a fascinating and beautiful nation of mountains, hot springs, forests, and gleaming, ultramodern cities. Made up of four main islands and thousands of smaller ones, the long narrow East Asian country is just slightly smaller than California. The Japanese name for their country, Nippon, means "sun's origin," because the Japanese once believed that the sun shines first on Japan. From their point of view, of course, this is true every morning...

"On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He...