Shannon Monaghan follows a core group of Western volunteers in Ukraine, fighting together from the early battle for Kyiv through to the last stands at Severodonetsk and Bakhmut. They arrived alone, but became a family—back when nobody bothered to learn names, because they all expected to die. These men knew they'd be fighting without the NATO support they were used to. They knew the danger they faced, and how they might be criticized for fighting someone else's war. But they also knew it was the right thing to do. This is their story.

The ultrarich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos’s incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power. With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age.

Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out.

How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial. How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today. To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the daunting task of collecting the war debts from European governments still devastated by WWI and struggling to recover economically. Dealing with the US Congress and the heads of foreign governments on the world stage became one of the great adventures of his life. Mellon vs. Churchill presents Winston Churchill through a different lens, focusing on his service as Chancellor of the Exchequer when Great Britain was the largest debtor to the US.

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.

Over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. We’ve entered a cultural “blank space”—an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. Why is risk no longer rewarded, and how did playing it safe become the formula for success? Acclaimed cultural historian W. David Marx sets out to uncover the answers.

In 1996, professional wrestling was one of the most watched sports on cable television, with more than 5 million people tuning in every week. And in the late 1990s, pro-wrestling was the hottest thing in American pop culture, with companies making millions in action figures, video games, and simple black t-shirts emblazoned with three little letters: NWO. The NWO, or New World Order, became a business like no other, and was responsible for the explosive ratings and rabid fanbase.

A groundbreaking history of pirates, Enemies of All combines narrative adventure with deeply researched analysis, engrossing listeners in the rise of piracy in the later seventeenth century, the debates about piracy in contemporary law and popular media, as well as the imperial efforts to suppress piracy in the early eighteenth century.

Half American, half Japanese, expert in both worlds but at home in neither, John Rain is the best killer money can buy. You tell him who. You tell him where. He doesn’t care about why... Until he gets involved with Midori Kawamura, a beautiful jazz pianist - and the daughter of his latest kill.

Robert Snyder tells the story of COVID-19 in the words of ordinary New Yorkers, illuminating the fear and uncertainty of life in the early weeks and months, as well as the solidarity that sustained the city. New Yorkers were "alone together," separated by the protective measures of social distancing and the fundamental inequalities of life and work in New York City.

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined me and my daughter.”

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.