The Reign of Terror against the Osage people was one of history's most ruthless and shocking crimes. As the Wild West was dying, someone was killing members of the Osage nation who had gotten rich off the oil under their land. Investigators who tried to uncover the truth were disappearing, but still J. Edgar Hoover asked a former Texas Ranger to work with the Osage to unravel the mystery. 1920s Oklahoma. The richest people per capita in the world...

J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer's life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. --From publisher's description....

"A narrative history of the unlikely Maoist rebellion that terrorized Peru long after the fall of global communism. The tale of the Shining Path may be the most gripping saga in modern Latin American history, but its full story has never been told. Described by a U.S. State Department cable as 'cold-blooded and bestial, ' this band of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries mounted a guerrilla war in the 1980s that led to more than 60,000 deaths or...

"A personal story of the author's father's involvement in HUAC that offers a rich portrait of McCarthy era America"--

" ... On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village, the family, and the past he had sworn to leave behind. A bestseller in France; challenged and vindicated in the courts; History of Violence is a short nonfiction novel in the tradition of Truman Capote's In...

"In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel. This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities...

Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination, and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: All are brought to immediate...

"The first authoritative biography of August Wilson, the most important and successful American playwright of the late 20th century, by a theater critic who knew him"-- "Ever since Ma Rainey's Black Bottom captivated Broadway audiences, August Wilson established himself as the most important American playwright of the last fifty years. His decade-by-decade cycle of ten plays about the African American experience in the twentieth century put Black...

Katherine Graham, Lauren Bacall, Gore Vidal, John Huston, and many other familiars of the writer follow his life and career, from his Southern childhood to his precipitate decline.