"It's 1949. When war veteran Aloysius Archer is released from Carderock Prison, he is sent to Poca City on parole with a short list of dos and a much longer list of donts: do report regularly to his parole officer, don't go to bars, certainly don't drink alcohol, do get a job -- and don't ever associate with loose women. The small town quickly proves more complicated and dangerous than Archer's years serving in the war or his time in jail. Within...

In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record, a series of "superstorms," battered the West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam. As the water filled the dam, worried federal officials desperately scrambled to avoid a dramatic dam failure. In the midst of this crisis, a trio of river guides secretly launched a small, hand-built wooden boat, a dory named the Emerald Mile,...

"Bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir tells the tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife, a nineteen-year-old beauty with a hidden past, in this fifth novel in the sweeping Six Tudor Queens series. In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII, desperate to be rid of his queen, Anna of Kleve, first sets eyes on the enchanting Katheryn Howard. Although the king is now an ailing forty-nine-year-old measuring fifty-four inches around his waist,...

In 1655 sixteen-year-old Tania is the daughter of a retired musketeer, but she is afflicted with extreme vertigo and subject to frequent falls; when her father is murdered she finds that he has arranged for her to attend Madame de Treville's newly formedAcadaemie des Mariaees in Paris, which, it turns out, is less a school for would-be wives, than a fencing academy for girls--and so Tania begins her training to be a new kind of musketeer, and to get...

"A riveting tale of her family's experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy." — Los Angeles Times

Drawn from her own memory, her parents' written reflections, and interviews

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Biography of Mahatma Gandi, India's man of peace, which follows his life from his simple beginnings as a lawyer in South Africa to his struggle to free India from colonial rule.

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants
 
When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of...

Describes how the American Army crew of a B-24 bomber, shot down over Japanese-occupied Borneo in November 1944, were rescued by native Dayak tribesmen, one-time headhunters who returned to their long-renounced ritual in order to protect the airmen.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

The early life of Queen Victoria, from her ascension to the throne at the tender age of 18 to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert.