Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? Sick brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. History tells us about human life and death, but there’s too often a blank spot in those stories. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain nearly three centuries earlier. But that ship, the galleon San Jose, never reached its destination. Instead, the Spanish treasure fleet was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean.

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Timeless: A History of the Catholic Church is a fresh retelling of the history of the Church. In this easy, not-your-average history book, Steve Weidenkopf introduces you to the vivid, dynamic story of God's work in the world since Pentecost. Along the way, you will meet the weird, wonderful, and always fascinating heroes and villains of the Catholic family tree.

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.

This engrossing history of the Revolutionary War conclusively shows that those caught up in it believed they had nothing to lose by fighting without regard for the rules of so-called “civilized warfare.” The clarion call to arms “Liberty or Death” was far more than just rhetoric. At its grimmest level, it was a conflict in which military restraint was more the exception than the rule, a struggle in which combatants believed their very existence was in question.

The most highly decorated German regimental commander of World War II, Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz first won the Iron Cross in the Great War. He was serving with the 1st Panzer Division when the Polish campaign inaugurated World War II. Strachwitz's exploits as commander of a panzer battalion during the French campaign earned him further decorations before he transferred to the newly formed 16th Panzer Division. There, he participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and then Operation Barbarossa, where he earned the Knight's Cross.

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness.

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.

In 1641, England exits a plague-ridden and politically unstable summer having reached a semblance of peace: the English and Scottish armies have disbanded, legislation has passed to ensure Parliament will continue to sit, and the people are tentatively optimistic. But King Charles I is not satisfied with peace—he wants revenge. So begins England’s winter of discontent. As revolutionary sects of London begin to generate new ideas about democracy, as radical new religious groups seek power, and as Ireland explodes into revolt, Charles hatches a plan to restore his absolute rule.