Describes life in Paris after June 1940, when the Nazis occupied France, juxtaposing the eerie sense of normalcy felt by many Parisians with the passion of the strong resistance movement that rose around Charles de Gaulle.

"The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother's husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects...

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history;...

Relates the unique story behind a football game played on Christmas Eve, 1944, between Marine regiments training for the invasion of Okinawa, a game that featured one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled and would become known as The Mosquito Bowl.

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more...

-- Zealot   -- Zealot -- — -- —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of -- (starred review)

The incredible true story of the young women exposed to the “wonder” substance of radium and their brave struggle for justice... As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe...

In her groundbreaking New York Times bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing -- if occasionally entertaining -- poor white trash. "When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win," says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin....

The French Revolution comes to vivid life in Charles Dickens's famous novel about the best of times and the worst of times...The storming of the Bastille…the death carts with their doomed human cargo…the swift drop of the guillotine blade—this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous work A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic eloquence, he brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising...

Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.