History

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Hardcover)

By Bruce C. Levine

$30.00

ISBN: 9781400067039

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Published: Random House - January 8th, 2013

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It's satisfying to dip into the ongoing stream of historical Civil War literature and be able to say "This is a good one!". Levine looks into the Confederacy's complex subcultures, classes and motivations and comes up with some fascinating fresh  insights, as well as succinct renderings of pertinent battles and campaigns.

Gary

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (Paperback)

By J. Hoberman

$19.95

ISBN: 9781595588333

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Published: New Press - September 4th, 2012

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A delicious sociopolitical examination/rumination of the Cold War US via popular culture.  Though primarily a film critic, Hoberman has always put his reviews (even back when he was the Village Voice film critic) in a larger cultural context.  It lives up to the cover art!

Gary

The Second World War (Hardcover)

By Antony Beevor

$35.00

ISBN: 9780316023740

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Published: Little, Brown and Company - June 5th, 2012

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Beevor has written several excellent books about particular aspects of the war, and now his complete overview of the subject is  a superb addition to the latest generation of WW2 literature. He writes a compelling narrative and brings fresh insights and perspective and pulls it all together beautifully.

Gary

War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (Hardcover)

By James M. McPherson

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ISBN: 9780807835883

Availability: Out of Print

Published: University of North Carolina Press - September 17th, 2012

Huzzah!  A new book by the Pulitzer-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, my choice for the go-to one-volume history of the Civil War.  Here he treats the naval aspect of the conflict with the same compelling narrative style as Battle Cry, including blockade runners, extraordinary battles for dominance of the crucial Mississippi River and the total game-changing introduction of ironclads.
Gary

The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Hardcover)

By W. Jeffrey Bolster

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ISBN: 9780674047655

Availability: Out of Print

Published: Belknap Press - October 8th, 2012

Closely examining detailed records from explorer’s diaries to fisherman’s logs and government reports, Bolster has assembled a comprehensive environmental history of the devastating human impact on life in the North Atlantic. He shows definitively the present crisis in the fishery is the legacy of continual overfishing during the past five hundred years. This book is a major contribution to both coastal marine studies and American history.
Dale

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Paperback)

By Stephen Greenblatt

$16.95

ISBN: 9780393343403

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Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 4th, 2012

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A veritable intellectual historical thriller concerning the wire-thin survival into modern times of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - an astonishingly humanist view arrived at centuries before the Enlightenment. It reads like a novel, and reminds us of how tenuous can be the survival of ideas - especially when a power structure like the Roman Church is trying to obliterate them.

Gary

Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (Hardcover)

By Christopher Kemp

$22.50

ISBN: 9780226430362

Availability: Available at Warehouse

Published: University of Chicago Press - May 15th, 2012

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Ambergris, a biliary secretion of sperm whales, is one of the most expensive substances on earth.   And though it has been used as everything from a perfume fixative to a seasoning, we still know remarkably little about it.  Kemp's quirky little book bobs through an ocean of information about this fragrant flotsam, picking over New Zealand beaches, whaling histories, seventeenth century newspapers, perfumer's manuals, and the latest marine research in order to bring us the weird, wandering story of this strange commodity.

Kim

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Paperback)

By Anna Funder

$15.99

ISBN: 9780062077325

Availability: Available at Warehouse

Published: Harper Perennial - September 20th, 2011

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Seven
years after the fall of the Wall in 1989, Funder travels to the former
East Germany to interview both the victims and the victimizers of the
world’s once most notorious police states. Originally published abroad
in 2003 and now seeing its first U.S. publication, the personal stories
she relates of courage, heartbreak, and the sometime absurdities of life
in GDR are still powerful and compelling.Dale

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Hardcover)

By Charles C. Mann

$35.00

ISBN: 9780307265722

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Published: Knopf - August 9th, 2011

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Charles Mann has done it again. Like his previous book, 1491, Mann synthesizes current historical scholarship and gives us a radically new and fascinating interpretation of the enormous, world-wide changes brought about with the European discovery of the New World, known as the Columbian Exchange.

Dale

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Hardcover)

By Ian W. Toll

$35.00

ISBN: 9780393068139

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Published: W. W. Norton & Company - November 14th, 2011

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Toll (author of the superb Six Frigates) starts with a horrific narrative of Pearl Harbor, goes through the savage learning curve of the Battle of the Coral Sea (this was all a new kind of warfare) and climaxes with a spectacular account of Midway.  In-depth portraits of the major players add an exciting dimension to the great naval duel.

Gary