Civilization

A groundbreaking narrative that explores the ways in which biology and history have shaped our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

Yuval Noah Harari returns with an original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation....

Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age....

The epic history of the crossroads of the world - the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization....

A New York Times-bestselling historian charts how and why societies from ancient Greece to the modern era chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time....

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion....

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages....

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic, geographic, or anthropogenic as it is narrative....

The author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization....

A fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....

The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning....

In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities flourished....

Ed Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates....

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more....

Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices....

Cody Cassidy provides a detailed guide to surviving history’s most challenging threats, from outrunning dinosaurs to making it off the Titanic alive....

At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history....

Providing an insider's look into the decades of research behind Zecharia Sitchin's complete works as well as an in-depth overview of his theories, this collection includes carefully selected chapters from the Earth Chronicles series....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

The British Empire is unique in world history. How did this small island come to rule a full quarter of the globe? No other nation has matched this achievement.

Alexander the Great and Cleopatra may be two of the most famous figures from the ancient world, but the Egyptian era bookended by their lives—the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC)—is little known. In The Last Dynasty, Toby Wilkinson unravels the incredible story of this turbulent era.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.

Go beyond the popular stories of Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Inca, and the Maya, and uncover the rich diversity of people that are often overlooked. From the world's first peace treaty to daring expeditions across the Pacific, learn about twenty ancient and historic cultures from around the world that have had monumental impacts on our modern world.

"The only thing new in the world," said Harry S. Truman, "is the history you don't know." In this fresh and fascinating collection of historical vignettes, Martin W. Sandler (author of Resolute and Atlantic Ocean) restores to memory important events, people, and developments that have been lost to time. These tales are far from trivia; they illuminate little-known American and foreign achievements, ingenuity, heroics, blunders, and tragedies that changed the course of history and resonate today.