Jerome M. O’Connor’s "The Hidden Places of World War II" offers rare views of the most critical moments of the twentieth century. Though much has been written about World War II, this book shows that there’s more to the story that... Read More

James Hawes condenses two millennia into a zippy 256 pages in "The Shortest History of Germany". Breezy yet knowledgeable, the book provides a thorough grounding in the major historical events and religious and regional differences that... Read More

Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora series mixes historical fact with fiction and is told from the perspective of Bora, a World War II German officer and master detective. The Horseman’s Song, the sixth entry in the saga (and a prequel to the... Read More

Heady, challenging, and thought-provoking, the essays in "This Fish Is Fowl" traverse international and cultural boundaries. Author Xu Xi is of Chinese descent and originally hails from Indonesia but has spent her life and career... Read More

"Bloodflowers" is a nuanced, scholarly analysis of the brief but influential career of photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose family fled Nigeria’s 1960s civil war for London. He subsequently lived in Washington and New York until his... Read More

Gökçe Günel’s "Spaceship in the Desert" is the fascinating story of a “zero-carbon eco-city” that demonstrates the stark difference between vision and reality. Masdar City, located in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi, was marketed... Read More

Trained alongside Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić, the renowned physicist’s first wife, has been credited with being a brilliant mathematician, surpassing Einstein himself; it’s also been said that she coauthored his 1905 paper on... Read More

“[T]here was so much hurt and pain and fear and sorrow … that I needed more than one kind of song to sing,” says one of Penny Mickelbury’s characters in God’s Will and Other Lies. Here a cacophony of voices sing, spit, and... Read More