E. L. James

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed 3-Volume Boxed Set

When Anastasia Steele, a young literature student, interviews wealthy young entrepreneur Christian Grey for her campus magazine, their initial meeting introduces Anastasia to an exciting new world that will change them both forever.

Fifty Shades Trilogy

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Martha Moody

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Martha Moody's national bestseller—a compassionate and tender novel about best friends from college. A testament to the power of female friendship. When Clare Mann arrives at Oberlin in 1973, she’s never met anyone like Sally Rose. Rich and beautiful, Sally is utterly foreign to a middle-class, Midwestern Protestant like Clare—and utterly fascinating. The fascination only grows when Sally brings her home to L.A. Mr. Rose—charismatic, charming, and owner of a profitable business shrouded in secrey—is nearly as compelling a figure to Clare as he is to his own daughter. California seems like paradise after winters in Ohio. And Clare begins to look forward desperately to these visits, to carefree rides in Sally’s Kharmann Ghia and lazy poolside days. As the years pass, Clare becomes a doctor and Sally a lawyer, always remaining roommates at heart, a plane ride or phone call away. Marriages and divorces and births and deaths do not separate them. But secrets might—for as Clare watches, the Rose family begins to self-destruct before her eyes. And the things she knows are the kinds of things that no one wants to tell a best friend.

Best Friends

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Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie tells the tale of a former Scots Guard-turned-hired gun, a freelance soldier of fortune, who also happens to be one hell of a nice guy.

Gun Seller

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Deborah Rodríguez

The Art of Friendship and Freedom

In the tradition of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a look at the lives of women in Afghanistan through the lens of The Kabul Beauty School.

The Kabul Beauty School

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Jean Nadeau

Julie Barlow

Why We Love France but Not the French

The French... -Smoke, drink and eat more fat than anyone in the world, yet live longer and have fewer heart problems than Americans -Work 35-hour weeks, and take seven weeks of paid holidays per year, but are still the world's fourth-biggest economic power So what makes the French so different? Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong is a journey into the French heart, mind and soul. Decrypting French ideas about land, privacy and language, Nadeau and Barlow weave together the threads of French society--from centralization and the Napoleonic Code to elite education and even street protests--giving us, for the first time, a complete picture of the French. "[A] readable and insightful piece of work." --Montreal Mirror "In an era of irrational reactions to all things French, here is an eminently rational answer to the question, 'Why are the French like that?'" --Library Journal "A must-read." --Edmonton Journal

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

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Andrew Pettegree

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The dawn of print was a major turning point in the early modern world. It rescued ancient learning from obscurity, transformed knowledge of the natural and physical world, and brought the thrill of book ownership to the masses. But, as Andrew Pettegree reveals in this work of great historical merit, the story of the post-Gutenberg world was rather more complicated than we have often come to believe. The Book in the Renaissance reconstructs the first 150 years of the world of print, exploring the complex web of religious, economic, and cultural concerns surrounding the printed word. From its very beginnings, the printed book had to straddle financial and religious imperatives, as well as the very different requirements and constraints of the many countries who embraced it, and, as Pettegree argues, the process was far from a runaway success. More than ideas, the success or failure of books depended upon patrons and markets, precarious strategies and the thwarting of piracy, and the ebb and flow of popular demand. Owing to his state-of-the-art and highly detailed research, Pettegree crafts an authoritative, lucid, and truly pioneering work of cultural history about a major development in the evolution of European society.

The Book in the Renaissance

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John Julius Norwich

Venice in the 19th Century

A history of 19th century Venice tells the story of the once powerful city through the eyes of some of its most illustrious visitors, including Napoleon, Byron, Ruskin, Whistler, and Wagner.

Paradise of Cities

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Mary Laven

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent

Venice in the late Renaissance was a city of fabulous wealth, reckless creativity, and growing social unrest as its maritime empire crumbled. It was also a city of walls and secrets, ghettos, and cloisters-including fifty convents housing three thousand nuns, many of them refined, upper-class women who had been immured against their will. In this utterly fascinating book, Cambridge historian Mary Laven uncovers the long-hidden stories of the "virgins of Venice" and the secret, and often surprising, lives they led. Sifting through records kept during the Counter-Reformation, Laven has pieced together a detailed and dramatic tapestry of resourceful, determined, and passionate women who managed to lead fulfilling lives despite their virtual imprisonment. Far from being precincts of piety and silence, the convents of Venice were hotbeds of political scheming, colorful pageantry, gorgeous decoration, and illicit love affairs. One nun was so determined to sleep with her lover that she painstakingly chipped a hole in a stone wall so he could climb through under cover of night. Another expressed her individuality through obsessive gift giving while keeping records of the dangerous flirtations going on around her. Still others exercised considerable clandestine power in the dangerous game of Venetian politics. Rich in intrigue and gossip, eye opening in its historic revelations, and written with drama and compassion, Virgins of Venicebrings to life a culturally vibrant period in Venice and the hidden residents who dwelled behind its walls.

Virgins of Venice

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Simon Schama

A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits

Author of a number of celebrated works, including the bestselling The Story of the Jews and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama's latest book fuses history and art to create a tour de force of narrative sweep and illuminating insight. Using images from works-paintings, photographs, lithographs, etchings, sketches-found in London's National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain weaves together an account of their composition, framed by their particular moment of creation, and in the process unveils a collective portrait of nation and its history. "Portraits," Schama writes, "have always been made with an eye to posterity." Commissioned to paint Winston Churchill in 1954, Graham Sutherland struggled with how to capture the "savior" of Great Britain honestly and humanely. Schama calls the portrait, initially damned, the "most powerful image of a Great Briton ever executed." Annie Leibovitz's photograph of a nude John Lennon kissing Yoko Ono, taken five hours before his murder, bears "a weight of poignancy she could not possibly have anticipated." Hans Holbein's preparatory sketch for a portrait of Henry VIII depicts "an unstoppable engine of dynastic generation." Here are expressions from across the centuries of normalcy and heroism, beauty and disfigurement, aristocracy and deprivation, the familiar and the obscure-the faces of courtesans, warriors, workers, activists, playwrights, the high and mighty as well as pub-crawlers. Linking them is Schama's vibrant exploration of how their connective power emerges from the dynamic between subject and artist, work and viewer, time and place. Schama's compelling analysis and impassioned evocation of these works create an unforgettable verbal mosaic that at once reveals and transforms the images he places before us. Lavishly illustrated and written with the storytelling brio that is Schama's trademark, The Face of Britain invites us to look at a nation's visual legacies and find its reflection.

The Face of Britain

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William Manchester

The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age

William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is the preeminent popular history of civilization's rebirth after the Dark Ages.

A World Lit Only by Fire

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Maurice O. Wallace

Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking. Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Pictures and Progress

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Richard Dawkins

The Evidence for Evolution

"Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core on publication in 1859. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he would surely have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as a scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity ..."--Publisher description.

The Greatest Show on Earth

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Toby Lester

Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image

InDa Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester tells the story of the world's most iconic image, the Vitruvian Man, and sheds surprising new light on the artistry and scholarship of Leonardo da Vinci, one of history's most fascinating figures.

Deftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, Da Vinci's Ghost is a first-rate intellectual enchantment."--Charles Mann, author of 1493

Da Vinci didn't summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was inspired by the idea originally formulated by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was to imply that the human body could indeed be a blueprint for the workings of the universe. Da Vinci elevated Vitruvius' idea to exhilarating heights when he set out to do something unprecedented, if the human body truly reflected the cosmos, he reasoned, then studying its anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been attempted before--peering deep into body and soul--might grant him an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world.

Written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester's award-winning first book, the "almost unbearably thrilling" (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World, and beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, Da Vinci's Ghost follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. It captures a pivotal time in Western history when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, when art, science, and philosophy were rapidly converging, and when it seemed possible that a single human being might embody--and even understand--the nature of the universe.

Da Vinci's Ghost

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Robert Hughes

A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

A comprehensive history of Rome covers the city's evolution from the Roman empire through the early years of Christianity to the Renaissance and the modern era, addressing topics from government and architecture to its influence on culture and politics.

Rome

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Timothy Ferris

Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature

"Ferris is a master analogist who conveys his insights on the history of cosmology with a lyrical flair." --The New York Times Book Review

In The Science of Liberty, award-winning author Timothy Ferris--called "the best popular science writer in the English language today" by the Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by the Washington Post--makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy. In the grand tradition of such luminaries of the field as Bill Bryson, Richard Dawkins, and Oliver Sacks--as well as his own The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way--Ferris has written a brilliant chronicle of how science sparked the spread of liberal democracy and transformed today's world.

The Science of Liberty

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David McCullough

Americans in Paris

McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.

The Greater Journey

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Edward Wilson-Lee

Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library

"Like a Renaissance wonder cabinet, full of surprises and opening up into a lost world." --Stephen Greenblatt

"A captivating adventure...For lovers of history, Wilson-Lee offers a thrill on almost every page...Magnificent." --The New York Times Book Review

Named a Best Book of the Year by: * Financial Times * New Statesman * History Today * The Spectator *

The impeccably researched and vividly rendered account of the quest by Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son to create the greatest library in the world--"a perfectly pitched poetic drama" (Financial Times) and an amazing tour through sixteenth-century Europe.

In this innovative work of history, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the extraordinary story of Hernando Colón, a singular visionary of the printing press-age who also happened to be Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son.

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando traveled with Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus's death in 1506, the eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue--and surpass--his father's campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues, the first ever search engine for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando restlessly and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include "all books, in all languages and on all subjects," even material often dismissed as ephemeral trash: song sheets, erotica, newsletters, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522--documented in his poignant Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books--set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection.

Edward Wilson-Lee's account of Hernando's life is a testimony to the beautiful madness of booklovers, a plunge into sixteenth-century Europe's information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world today.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

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Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

Rembrandt’s Eyes

Explores the treasury of myths that have transformed the landscape of Western culture

Landscape and Memory

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Celeste Brusati

The Art and Writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten

Samuel van Hoogstraten is familiar to scholars of Dutch art as a talented pupil and early critic of Rembrandt, and as the author of a major Dutch painting treatise. In this book, Celeste Brusati looks at the art, writing, and career of this multifaceted artist. A rich appreciation of one of the most often cited but least understood figures in seventeenth-century Dutch art, this book will interest scholars and students of art history, social history, and visual culture.

Artifice and Illusion

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Jon Krakauer

A Story of Violent Faith

Traces the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons, exploring the belief systems and traditions that mark the faith's most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America.

Under the Banner of Heaven

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Helen Rappaport

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - a World on the Edge

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters, Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eye-witness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold. Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin’s Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd (the former St Petersburg) was in turmoil – felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. There, the foreign visitors who filled hotels, clubs, offices and embassies were acutely aware of the chaos breaking out on their doorsteps and beneath their windows. Among this disparate group were journalists, diplomats, businessmen, bankers, governesses, volunteer nurses and expatriate socialites. Many kept diaries and wrote letters home: from an English nurse who had already survived the sinking of the Titanic; to the black valet of the US Ambassador, far from his native Deep South; to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who had come to Petrograd to inspect the indomitable Women’s Death Battalion led by Maria Bochkareva. Helen Rappaport draws upon this rich trove of material, much of it previously unpublished, to carry us right up to the action – to see, feel and hear the Revolution as it happened to an assortment of individuals who suddenly felt themselves trapped in a "red madhouse."

Caught in the Revolution

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John Berendt

A #1 New York Times Bestseller! "Funny, insightful, illuminating . . ." —The Boston Globe Twelve years ago, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exploded into a monumental success, residing a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or nonfiction had before) and turning John Berendt into a household name. The City of Falling Angels is Berendt's first book since Midnight, and it immediately reminds one what all the fuss was about. Turning to the magic, mystery, and decadence of Venice, Berendt gradually reveals the truth behind a sensational fire that in 1996 destroyed the historic Fenice opera house. Encountering a rich cast of characters, Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to portray a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting.

The City of Falling Angels

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Dan Jones

The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors

"Dan Jones is an entertainer, but also a bona fide historian. Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read." - The Times, Book of the Year

A New York Times bestseller, this major new history of the knights Templar is "a fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger" - Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem
 
A faltering war in the middle east. A band of elite warriors determined to fight to the death to protect Christianity's holiest sites. A global financial network unaccountable to any government. A sinister plot founded on a web of lies.

Jerusalem 1119. A small group of knights seeking a purpose in the violent aftermath of the First Crusade decides to set up a new order. These are the first Knights Templar, a band of elite warriors prepared to give their lives to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over the next two hundred years, the Templars would become the most powerful religious order of the medieval world. Their legend has inspired fervent speculation ever since. 

In this groundbreaking narrative history, Dan Jones tells the true story of the Templars for the first time in a generation, drawing on extensive original sources to build a gripping account of these Christian holy warriors whose heroism and alleged depravity have been shrouded in myth. The Templars were protected by the pope and sworn to strict vows of celibacy. They fought the forces of Islam in hand-to-hand combat on the sun-baked hills where Jesus lived and died, finding their nemesis in Saladin, who vowed to drive all Christians from the lands of Islam. Experts at channeling money across borders, they established the medieval world's largest and most innovative banking network and waged private wars against anyone who threatened their interests.

Then, as they faced setbacks at the hands of the ruthless Mamluk sultan Baybars and were forced to retreat to their stronghold in Cyprus, a vindictive and cash-strapped King of France set his sights on their fortune. His administrators quietly mounted a damning case against the Templars, built on deliberate lies and false testimony. On Friday October 13, 1307, hundreds of brothers were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and the order was disbanded amid lurid accusations of sexual misconduct and heresy. They were tried by the Pope in secret proceedings and their last master was brutally tortured and burned at the stake. But were they heretics or victims of a ruthlessly repressive state? Dan Jones goes back to the sources tobring their dramatic tale, so relevant to our own times, to life in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.

The Templars

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Anna cilento

Browse by categories

E. L. James

Fifty Shades Trilogy

Martha Moody

Best Friends

Hugh Laurie

Gun Seller

Deborah Rodríguez

The Kabul Beauty School

Jean Nadeau; Julie Barlow

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

Andrew Pettegree

The Book in the Renaissance

John Julius Norwich

Paradise of Cities

Mary Laven

Virgins of Venice

Simon Schama

The Face of Britain

William Manchester

A World Lit Only by Fire

Maurice O. Wallace

Pictures and Progress

Richard Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth

Toby Lester

Da Vinci's Ghost

Robert Hughes

Rome

Timothy Ferris

The Science of Liberty

David McCullough

The Greater Journey

Edward Wilson-Lee

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

Simon Schama

Rembrandt’s Eyes

Simon Schama

Landscape and Memory

Celeste Brusati

Artifice and Illusion

Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven

Helen Rappaport

Caught in the Revolution

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Dan Jones

The Templars

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