"In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei-one of the world's most famous artists and activists-tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. Hailed as "the most important artist working today" by the Financial Times and as "an eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom" by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir...

Women have been doing amazing, daring, and dangerous things for years, but they're rarely mentioned in our history books as adventurers, daredevils, or rebels. This new compilation of brief biographies features women throughout history who have risked their lives for adventure - many of who you may not know, but all of whom you'll WANT to know, such as: Minnie Spotted Wolf, the first Native American marine; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to...

Searching for answers about her dissident father's disappearance, a Vietnamese-American art curator returns to her ancestral country, where she meets a venerable pho stall soup maker and a dynamic young tour guide whose historical and cultural insights irrevocably shape her life.

On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium — a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance. Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story — complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko's murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow,...

Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for...

"The tectonic plates that form China have left it a checkerboard of mountains and rivers and memories. From the south, the Indian plate pushes up into the Eurasian, creating the Himalayas and the vast Tibetan plateau that almost cuts the country off from the rest of the continent. Rippling outward are smaller mountain ranges that ebb and flow toward the Pacific Ocean, like deep swells heaving through the land"--

"In 1950s Morocco, set during the violent end of the French protectorate, a young Berber detective investigates a political murder and finds his own place in the new world order."--

"An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. Lim's deeply researched--and deeply personal--account casts often startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations leading to its 'return' to China in 1997, the current protests, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Throughout, it is populated by contemporary...

Mariam and Khalil are deeply enmeshed in the 2011 uprising in Tahir Square during the Egyptian revolution. As regimes crumble and the country shatters into ideological extremes, their commitment to the ideals of revolution and to each other is put to the test. From the communal highs of pitched night battles against the police in Cairo to the solitary lows of defeated exile in New York, The City Always Wins is a novel not just about Egypt's revolution...

From the Publisher: In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free. In vivid portraits of renegades and their "respectable" adversaries, Russell shows that...