Nonfiction

In a work rich in maritime lore and brimming with original historical detail, Eric Jay Dolin, the best-selling author of Leviathan, presents the most comprehensive history of American lighthouses ever written, telling the story of America through the prism of its beloved coastal sentinels. Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America's lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation's hardscrabble coastlines.

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My Journey Through War and Peace: Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist and Spiritual Seeker is based on Melissa Burch's experiences as a war journalist for BBC, CBS, and other networks. Her team was one of the first documentary crews allowed in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and she was featured in a New York Times story about her time in Afghanistan. She was just in her twenties when she traveled with the mujahideen, filmed an attack on a Soviet convoy, slept with an Afghan commander, and climbed 14,000-foot mountains in the Hindu Kush. 

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From the biographer of Jane Goodall comes an eccentric blend of travels and adventures based on the underlying story of two men, sometime friends and allies, who uncover through personal experience the tragedy of animal extinctions in Africa and Asia. By turns ironic, funny, and tender, it contemplates changing landscapes and a vanishing world. 

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The gripping, untold story of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and how the perpetrators of Balkan war crimes were captured by the most successful manhunt in history.

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Julian Borger is the diplomatic editor for The Guardian. He covered the Bosnian War for the BBC and the Guardian, and returned to the Balkans to report on the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

Blue Territory is a poetic immersion into the life and art of Joan Mitchell, the great American abstract expressionist painter. A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, she is not as well known as her male counterparts because she was a woman and also because she spent most of her working life in France. Still, in 2013, Bloomburg Business listed Mitchell as the bestselling female artist of all time. When asked to talk about her paintings, Joan Mitchell often responded, “If I could say it in words, I’d write a book.” Here is her book. At once unique and universal, Blue Territory is at its core an exploration of love and life, and what it means to love -- and live -- what you do. Meticulously researched and lyrically written, it will appeal to anyone interested in passionate engagement with the world. The book eschews images so as to allow the words to form them, thereby freeing the reader to imagine the paintings, much as Mitchell would have to do before picking up her brush.

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Long before activists raised concerns about the dangers of commercials airing during Saturday morning cartoons, America’s young people emerged as a group that businesses should target with goods for sale. As print culture grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, enterprising publishers raced to meet the widespread demand for magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class children, especially those whose families had leisure time and cultural aspirations to gentility. Advertisers realized that these children represented a growing market for more than magazines, and the editors chose stories to help model good consumer behavior for this important new demographic.

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Paul Ringel is Associate Professor of History at High Point University and director of the William Penn Project, a service learning initiative through which students explore the history of High Point's African-American high school during the Jim Crow era.

We're sorry to announce that the event scheduled for tonight has been canceled due to a family emergency.

Occupy Wall Street burst onto the stage of history in the fall of 2011. First by the tens, then by the tens of thousands, protestors filled the streets and laid claim to the squares of nearly 1,500 towns and cities, until, one by one, the occupations were forcibly evicted. In The Occupiers, Michael Gould-Wartofsky offers a front-seat view of the action in the streets of New York City and beyond.

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Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers:  The Making of the 99 Percent Movement, now out from Oxford University Press. Critics are calling The Occupiers "an essential book for everyone interested in understanding not just the Occupy movement but recent US history in general." Recently named Book of the Month by Le Monde Diplomatique, it has also been featured on NPR, PBS, and Vice.

Food That Works is a cookbook for busy people who want access to homemade meals Monday through Friday. This weekly food system features shopping lists, prep work, and easy recipes with minimal clean-up. This turns your fridge into the ultimate grab-n-go stocked with nutritious whole foods ready to assemble on the fly. No matter how busy your schedule, you deserve the best; this book proves that healthy homemade meals are attainable.

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Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other innovative scientific protocols. Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, sought out a varied range of non-European subjects among remote and largely non-literate peoples around the globe. Recording their dreams, stories, and innermost thoughts in a vast database, Kaplan envisioned future researchers accessing the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. Almost immediately, however, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and eventually it was forgotten.

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In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons designed to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, but it was an award he would never receive the nation's highest decoration was not given to black soldiers during World War II.

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Linda Hervieux is a journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Fodor's Paris guide, among other publications. A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, she lives in Paris, France, with her husband. This is her first book.