Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its...

Canadian comic actor Mike Myers writes from the heart about his native land, Canada, and what it means to be a Canadian.

In 1946 North Carolina, seamstress Maddie Sykes, a dressmaker for Bright Leaf's most influential women-- the wives of powerful tobacco executives, uncovers dangerous truths about this lucrative industry in a place where everyone depends on Big Tobacco to survive. Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who's just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina-- the tobacco capital of the South-- where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years...

This novel is told from the point of view of Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip, who begins his tale as a young boy visiting the graves of his parents when an escaped convict happens upon him and threatens him into helping him get food. This experience will have a huge impact on Pip's life, although just how huge is left to be discovered until much later in the novel. Pip soon finds himself in the service of an eccentrically, manically wounded old woman...

Spector follows up on Eagle Against the Sun, his account of the American struggle against the Japanese in World War II, with a chronicle of the aftermath of this crucial conflict. He tells the fascinating story of the deadly confrontations that broke out--or merely continued--in Asia after peace was proclaimed. Under occupation by the victorious Allies, this part of the world was plunged into new power struggles, or back into old feuds, that in some...

"A series of possible attacks on British pilots leads Jacqueline Winspear's beloved heroine Maisie Dobbs into a mystery involving First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt"-- October 1942. Ferry pilot Jo Hardy is delivering a Supermarine Spitfire to Biggin Hill Aerodrome when she realizes someone is shooting at her aircraft from the ground. Returning to the location on foot, she finds an American serviceman in a barn, bound and gagged, and turns him over to the...

For young American widow Jane Wunderly, there are worse fates than adventuring aboard a transatlantic liner with the only man who could change her mind about romance. Unfortunately, her first-class itinerary has an unexpected--and deadly--addition waiting just below deck... Atlantic Ocean, 1926: Voyaging from Southampton to New York, self-reliant Jane is determined to prove herself a worthy investigator on the stately ship--even awkwardly going undercover...

In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s. 
Shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 
Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism....

Panoramic illustrations and fascinating text reveal the story of the Great Wall and the individuals who helped build it, bringing to life key periods and turning points in the Great Wall's history.