“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease that reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.

In 536 AD, the sun dimmed, the sky turned a ghostly gray, and global temperatures plummeted. Crops withered, famine spread like wildfire, and entire civilizations were thrown into chaos. Historians and scientists now recognize this year as one of the most catastrophic climate events in human history—a volcanic winter that reshaped the world.

The Middle East is in upheaval: a widening chasm between state and society, the failure of governing elites to address citizens' genuine grievances, massive economic mismanagement—all made worse by repeated interventions by Western powers. Why has political change been so difficult to achieve? In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges argues that the convergence of political authoritarianism, meddling by the West, and the effects of prolonged regional conflicts have produced political paralysis and economic stagnation.

The Market in Global International Society tracks the idea and practice of the market through both modern and premodern times, and its evolution as a primary institution in international relations over the past two centuries. It develops a new approach to understanding the relationship between the market and other social and political institutions of global international society.

My dearest Mr Snippet… World War II has just begun, and newly-married John, a young cadet army officer from London, has been forced to leave behind his beloved wife Rita. As each of them desperately try to hold onto their joint hopes and dreams, will fate grant them the future they dream of, or will the unpredictabilities of a relentless war conspire against them?

In Slither, Stephen S. Hall presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yet magnetic creatures. In each chapter, he explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration.

China's Quest for Military Supremacy provides a broad and accessible exploration of Chinese military power, including relations between the Chinese Communist Party and its army, the strategic worldview of Chinese leaders, military strategy and resourcing, conventional and nuclear modernization, military diplomacy and coercion, preparations for war, and the People's Liberation Army's emerging global role.

In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.

In The Golden Road, revered historian William Dalrymple corrects the record, telling the captivating story of ancient India’s ascent through a swift and breathtaking tour of the ideas and places Indians created. Treks into the sunless depths of cave monasteries illuminate the origins and spread of Buddhism. Far-flung archaeological expeditions—from the sand-blown Red Sea coast of Egypt, to Afghan mountain refuges, to verdant Cambodian jungles—reveal the impact of Indian commerce.

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.

Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find chapters detailing each of these four exciting branches of what Stamets has coined “mycorestoration,” as well as chapters on the medicinal and nutritional properties of mushrooms, inoculation methods, log and stump culture, and species selection for various environmental purposes.

Brimming with energy and lively examples, How Things Are Made maps the awe-inspiring global system of manufacturing that enables virtually every aspect of our existence. By making sense of this surprising and hidden world, we are able to make better choices for ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

Stepping back to look at our precariously interdependent global society of today—with the threat of nuclear war ever present, the world getting hotter and hotter, and the rapid creation of dangerous algorithms—one couldn’t be blamed for asking: Will we make it? Addressing this question with the seriousness it demands, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy that stretches over 300,000 years, from our beginnings as a species to early attempts at cities to Egypt, Rome, and on into our cloudy future.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.