Strongmen are rising. Democracies are faltering. How does tyranny end? Tyrants project invincibility, but all of them fall. This is because they face critical weaknesses that can form a fatal trap. Whether it's their inner circle turning against them or resentment of elites in the military, the masses alienated by cronyism or revolutionaries plotting in exile, tyrants always have more enemies than friends. And when they fall tyrants don't quietly retire - they face exile, prison or death. What happens in the aftermath can change the fate of a nation. Meeting with coup leaders, dissidents and soldiers, political scientist Marcel Dirsus draws on extraordinary interviews to examine the workings and malfunctions of tyrants. We hear from a revolutionary (codename 'Satan') who risked Stasi capture to undermine an oppressive regime, an unapologetic former leader of a Burundian rebel group which carried out a massacre, and an American-Gambian activist who plotted to liberate his homeland on breaks during his construction job. But understanding dictators isn't enough. How Tyrants Fall is the gripping, deeply researched blueprint for how to bring them down.

Arcadia takes us back and forth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging over the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life. Focusing on the mysteries—romantic, scientific, literary—that engage the minds and hearts of characters whose passions and lives intersect across scientific planes and centuries, it is “Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and . . . emotion. It’s like a dream of levitation: you’re instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you’re about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow . . . Exhilarating” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times).

Chosen as Main Selection, History Book Club          For thousands of years, people have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Great walls have appeared on every continent, the handiwork of Persians, Romans, Chinese, Inca, Ukrainians, and dozens of other peoples. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. And yet they rarely appear in our history books.     In Walls , David Frye makes a powerful case for rewriting history. Drawing on evidence from around the world, as well as his own experiences on archaeological digs, Frye takes us on a provocative and occasionally humorous journey across windswept deserts and grassy, Northumbrian hills. As Frye guides us through a maze of exotic locales, investigating the coldest of cold cases, he gradually exposes a broader story with implications for the present as well as the past. The history of walls becomes more than a tale of bricks and stone; it becomes the story of who we are and how we came to be.

Best Book of the Year Real Simple - AARP - USA Today From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth--breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one--is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country's leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

A gripping, provocative, and sensual debut novel about an art historian who journeys to a Greek island to acquire a found sculpture for an American museum and quickly becomes immersed in a cultural tug-of-war and a complicated love affair. 1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history. Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island’s lushness—its heat and light, its textures and tastes—take hold of Elizabeth. And when she’s introduced to her translator’s inscrutable wife—a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form—she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude’s acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth’s and the statue’s fate are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she’s played in the art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind. The Nude is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural appropriation, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.

The strange and wonderful tale of man’s experiences on Mars, filled with intense images and astonishing visions. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection. The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up. But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them – and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame. Contents: Rocket Summer Ylla The Summer Night The Earth Men The Taxpayer The Third Expedition -And the Moon Be Still As Bright The Settlers The Green Morning The Locusts Night Meeting The Shore Interim The Musicians Way in the Middle of the Air The Naming of Names Usher II The Old Ones The Martian The Luggage Store The Off Season The Watchers The Silent Towns The Long Years There Will Come Soft Rains The Million Year Picnic

This is a true account of life in Alcatraz prison written by William G. Baker 1259AZ, a former prisoner of Alcatraz. This is how we lived, what we thought and said and did, the good and the bad. This is the true story of Alcatraz.

From the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia: discover Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough debut and explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior. The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light. Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

“The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft,” The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser is a fascinating account of a brazen and amazing criminal act—a book that could help police and investigators solve the mystery of the 1990 break-in and burglary at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “A tantalizing whodunit” (Boston Globe) and a “riveting, wonderfully vivid account [that] takes you into the underworld of obsessed art detectives, con men, and thieves” (Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting), The Gardner Heist is true crime history at its most spellbinding.

“One of the most beguiling criminal memoirs ever written. . . . A rare gem of a book.”  — T. J. English, New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne How did the son of a decorated policeman grow up to be one of Boston’s most notorious criminals? How did he survive a decades-long feud with the FBI? How did he escape one jail sentence with a fake gun carved out of soap? How did he trade the return of a famous Rembrandt for early release from another sentence?  The Art of the Heist  is a roller-coaster ride of a life, the memoir of America’s most infamous art thief Myles Connor. Once a promising young rock musician, the son of a respected policeman, Myles Connor became one of Boston’s most well-known criminals—a legendary art thief with irresistible charm and a genius IQ whose approach to his chosen profession mixed brilliant tactical planning with stunning bravado, brazen disguises, audaciously elaborate con jobs, and even the broad-daylight grab-and-dash. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art . . . no museum was off-limits. The fact that he was in jail at the time of the largest art theft in American history—the still-unsolved robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum—has not stopped the FBI from considering him a prime suspect. The Art of the Heist is Connor’s story—part confession, part thrill ride, and impossible to put down.

This is a true account of life in Alcatraz prison written by William G. Baker 1259AZ, a former prisoner of Alcatraz. This is how we lived, what we thought and said and did, the good and the bad. This is the true story of Alcatraz.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just earned for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules, and now there are rumors of rebellion in the districts. Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

Falling in love was the easy part. What comes next is the test . . . Johnny Kavanagh has been living a different life since his injury sidelined him. He's never known life without his beloved number 13 jersey, and he feels lost. Luckily for him, there is a mysterious girl who is now taking up most of his thoughts. Shannon Lynch has always been good at keeping secrets. She has realized that evil men aren't only in stories. They are very real. After her traumatizing trip to Dublin, she is trying to find a way to protect her little brothers above all else. She is beginning to revert to her old self, hiding away so that she can try to contain the few scraps of her future she has left. There's only one boy who can pull her out of the shadows into which she is retreating. The boy who owns her heart. But what she doesn't know is that secrets are about to be revealed that could change lives forever. Will Johnny and Shannon's love survive?