In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
by Nathaniel Philbrick ’78 (Viking)

It turns out that the American Revolution was not won in 1781 by the Continental Army at the siege of Yorktown, but at sea by the French navy a few weeks earlier in the Battle of...

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg ’93 (Crown)

Resilient communities don’t just need shared values, they also need libraries, playgrounds, diners, schoolyards, and community gardens—shared spaces where actual, non-online connections can spark and flourish. Here, in an eloquent narrative that...

The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone
by Robin Green ’67 (Little Brown)

This sharp and funny memoir circles around Green’s time in the wide-open early 1970s as a writer at Rolling Stone, when she was the only woman on the masthead. But it’s also about growing up on...

Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates
by Eric Jay Dolin '83 (Liveright)

You've probably heard of Captain Kidd, but not Stede Bonnet, a Barbados plantation owner who in 1717 decided to abandon his family, build a 60-ton sloop, and go marauding. The golden age of pirates in the West ran...

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How A Mysterious Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies
by Dawn Raffel '79 (Blue Rider Press)

In 1897, Dr. Martin Couney launched an incubator exhibit—with actual premature babies in incubators—for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in London. It was a hit, and Couney soon immigrated to the United States, where he...

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto
by Alan Stern '75 & David Grinspoon '82

This is the story of New Horizons, NASA's 1,000-pound spacecraft that traveled three billion miles across the solar system for the first-ever flyby of Pluto in 2015. In an often riveting account, Stern, who led the mission, and...

Belly Up
by Rita Bullwinkel '11 (A Strange Object)

"People kept dying and I was made to sleep in their beds." This is the first line of "Burn", one of 17 stories in this witty, intriguing, and often unsettling debut collection. Here, the narrator, Joe Engle, keeps being asked to comfort recently widowed wives whose ghostly...

Asking For A Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed
by Jessica Weisberg '06 (Nation Books)

In this lively ride, Weisberg profiles 16 iconic advice-givers from across the centuries. You'll meet the men who toiled from the 1600s to the 19th century (John Dunton and Benjamin...

Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970's
by Natasha Zaretsky '96 AM, '03 PhD (Columbia)

At 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, a valve at Three Mile Island was left open and the nation's worst nuclear power disaster had begun. In this cultural study of the aftermath, Zaretsky, a history...