The Delusions of Crowds

The Black Cabinet

A magnificently researched, dramatically told work of narrative nonfiction about the history, evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of what was known in the 1930s and 1940s as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet.

The Land of Flickering Lights

“We had become the land of flickering lights, in which the standard of success was not what we were doing for the next generation…

A Renegade History of America Abroad

Paradise Lust

“Paradise Lust is a pleasure. Wilensky-Lanford tackles her subject with an appealing mix of serious research and tongue-in-cheek humor. Neither too academic nor too…

Neither Snow Nor Rain

Few institutions are as loved, as loathed, and as historically important as the United States Post Office, the subject of this landmark century-spanning social, political, and economic history.

Naked at Lunch

From naked grocery shopping to the Big Nude Boat, a comic novelist turned narrative journalist lays bare the world of the nudist.

A Natural History of Human Emotions

“Historians, anthropologists, and philosophers have long investigated the gamut of human emotions; here their conjectures and influences coalesce. . . . Drawing on a…

Happiness

“From Herodotus and Aristotle through Locke and Rousseau down to Darwin, Marx and Freud. The musings on happiness of these and dozens of lesser…

The Comedians

An expansive and endlessly entertaining history of stand-up comedy, spanning more than a century from vaudeville through radio, television, the counterculture, and the comedy…