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The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
Joshua Hammer · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
Miles Harvey · 405 pages
"The Island of Lost Maps is the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was the Al Capone of cartography, a man with the unlikely name of Gilbert Bland, Jr., an enigmatic antiques dealer from south Florida whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation went v
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Stephen Greenblatt · 356 pages
One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manus
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel · 372 pages
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom th
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
Nicholas A. Basbanes · 638 pages
The passion to possess books has never been more widespread than it is today; indeed, obsessive book collecting remains the only hobby to have a disease named after it. A Gentle Madness is an adventure among the afflicted. Author Nicholas Basbanes, a dedicated bibliophile himself, begins his book 2,200 years ago in Alexandria, when a commitment was made to gather all the world's knowledge benea
The Map Thief
Michael Blanding · 300 pages
Maps have long elicited a special fascination -- both as practical tools and as beautiful works of art. But to collectors the map trade can be cutthroat, with quirky and sometimes disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects. This is the story of antiquarian map dealer E. Forbes Smiley, who for years doubled as a map thief until he was finally arrested for slippin
The Aleppo Codex: The True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the International Pursuit of an Ancient Bible
Matti Friedman · 318 pages
This true-life detective story unveils the journey of a sacred text--the tenth-century annotated bible known as the Aleppo Codex--from its hiding place in a Syrian synagogue to the newly founded state of Israel.
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
Robert Darnton · 218 pages
"In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. In a lasting collection drawn from previously published and new work alike, Robert Darnton lends unique authority to the life and role of the book in society. The resulting book is a wise work of scholarship - one t
Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam
Mark Bowden · 704 pages
Library: An Unquiet History
Matthew Battles · 258 pages
On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge.Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the british L
Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel
Dan Ephron · 320 pages
"A riveting story about the murder that changed a nation: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,"--Amazon.com.
And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
Richard Engel · 241 pages
"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab new
The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking
Brendan I. Koerner · 327 pages
In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of sixties idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. The longest-distance hijacking in American history took
A Secret History of the IRA: Gerry Adams and the Thirty Year War
Ed Moloney · 608 pages
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester · 265 pages
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood & the Crime of the Century
Howard Blum · 339 pages
It was an explosion that reverberated across the country--and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the First Age of Terror
Bryan Burrough · 608 pages
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden
Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan · 603 pages
Draws on thousands of recently released official documents and new interviews to present a report on the September 11 attacks that examines why the crisis was not prevented, how the government and military responded, and who was behind it.
Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia
Ahmed Rashid · 281 pages
The terrorist attacks of September 11 have turned the world's attention to areas of the globe about which we know very little. The author turns his skills as an investigative journalist to the five Central Asian republics adjacent to Afghanistan.
The Mormon Murders
Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith · 576 pages
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
Nicholson Baker · 372 pages
"Since the 1950s, our country's libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve": They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies - copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response
Aaron J. Klein · 256 pages
The first full account, based on access to key players who have never before spoken, of the Munich Massacre and the Israeli response--a lethal, top secret, thirty-year-long antiterrorism campaign to track down the killers.1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder eleven Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, wit
On Wings of Eagles
Ken Follett · 447 pages
When two of his American employees were held hostage in a heavily guarded prison fortress in Iran, one man took matters into his own hands: American businessman H. Ross Perot. His team consisted of a group of volunteers from the executive ranks of his corporation, hand-picked and trained by a retired Green Beret officer. To free the imprisoned Americans, they would face incalculable odds on a miss
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Steve Coll · 728 pages
An account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda. For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars which sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and which pro