Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--And How It Shattered a Nation

Andrew Ross Sorkin · 592 pages

1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It's about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late.

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline · 306 pages

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Robert A. Caro · 1,246 pages

This is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man-an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives.

A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

Timothy J. Gilfoyle · 480 pages

A Pickpocket's Tale is a fascinating true-crime story. Gilfoyle uses George Appo's unpublished memoirs to re-create the world of the nineteenth-century criminal in astonishing detail. George Appo was half Irish, half Chinese who became a pickpocket at the tender age of twelve. he was first arrested at age fourteen and sentenced to a year on a prison ship for juvenile offenders served . In and out

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

David McCullough · 622 pages

Built to join the rapidly expanding cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge was thought by many at the start to be an impossibility destined to fail if not from insurmountable technical problems then from political corruption. (It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a pr

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

Sarah Churchwell · 432 pages

" Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece, a Fitzgerald scholar follows the novelist as he begins work on The Great Gatsby. The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

Daniel Stashower · 331 pages

On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rogt."

February House

Sherill Tippins · 336 pages

February House is the irresistible story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers -- and the country's best-known burlesque performer -- in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered yearlong party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months b

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Russell Shorto · 416 pages

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.In the late 1960s, an archivist in the New York State Library made an astounding discovery: 12,000 pages of centuries-old correspondence, court cases, legal contracts, and reports from a forgotte

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century

Paula Uruburu · 400 pages

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr. · 456 pages

The rich mystery of a reclusive, eccentric heiress Huguette Clark: a true story of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance.

Joe Gould's Teeth

Jill Lepore · 235 pages

"A "New Yorker" staff writer and Harvard historian chronicles the discovery of Joe Gould's long-lost manuscript, "The Oral History of Our Time," and of the violence, betrayals, and madness that led to its concealment,"--NoveList. From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a centur

Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers' Strike of 1909

Michelle Markel

An illustrated account of immigrant Clara Lemlich's pivotal role in the influential 1909 women laborer's strike describes how she worked grueling hours to acquire an education and support her family before organizing a massive walkout to protest the unfair working conditions in New York's garment district.

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, & Harlem's Greatest Bookstore

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson · 32 pages

Relates the story of the National Memorial African Bookstore, founded in Harlem by Louis Michaux in 1939, as seen from the perspective of Louis Michaux Jr., who met famous men like Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X while helping there.

Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

Brad Ricca · 436 pages

Presents the true story of the first female U.S. District Attorney and traveling detective who found missing eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger when the entire NYPD had given up. "In 1917, on the day before Valentine's Day, eighteen-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared. When the police gave up, a mysterious woman in black vowed to find her. Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the true story of Grace Humiston, the

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Anne-Marie O'Connor

Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O'Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece -- the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S.

The League of Lady Poisoners: Illustrated True Stories of Dangerous Women

Lisa Perrin · 208 pages

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

Erik Larson · 478 pages

The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

Doris Kearns Goodwin · 759 pages

From the best-selling author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream comes a compelling chronicle of a nation and its leaders during the period when modern America was created. Presenting an aspect of American history that has never been fully told, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes a brilliant narrative account of how the United States of 1940, an isolationist cou

Killing Jesus: A History

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 293 pages

The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor details the events leading up to the murder of the most influential man in history: Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly two thousand years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God. Killing Jesus will take readers inside Jesus's life

Uniting The States

Brian Kilmeade

A co-host of “Fox & Friends” portrays contributions made by six key people around the time of the formation of our country.

March: Book One

John Lewis · 125 pages

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Lut

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

Robert Dallek · 752 pages

With the publication of his magisterial biography of John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek cemented his reputation as one of the greatest historians of our time. Now, in this epic joint biography, he offers a provocative, groundbreaking portrait of a pair of outsize leaders whose unlikely partnership dominated the world stage and changed the course of history.More than thirty years af

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

Jennet Conant · 403 pages

When Roald Dahl, a dashing young ex-RAF pilot, took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. Dahl would soon be caught up in a web of deception masterminded by Intrepid, Churchill's legendary spy chief. In an account better suited to a work of s