While the coronavirus disease COVID-19 changed the world in 2020, it still isn't the largest and deadliest pandemic in history. That title is held by the Plague. This disease, also known as the Black Death, spread throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century and claimed an astonishing 50 million lives by the time it officially ended. Author Roberta Edwards takes readers back to these grimy and horrific years, explaining just how this...

Imagine over three million square miles of sand dunes that are as tall as a ten-story building. That place is real--it's the Sahara Desert! Vast, yes! And home to fascinating creatures such as ostriches and fennec foxes as well as amazing plant life. Readers will also learn about the famous trade routes of the past with caravans of up to 10,000 camels, European explorers to the region (some very unlucky ones), and native populations like the Imazighen--...

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has...

James Joyce's novel Ulysses is said to be one of the most important works in Modernist literature. It details Leopold Bloom's passage through Dublin on an ordinary day: June 16, 1904. Causing controversy, obscenity trials and heated debates, Ulysses is a pioneering work that brims with puns, parodies, allusions, stream-of-consciousness writing and clever structuring. Modern Library ranked it as number one on its list of the twentieth

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Myths about the Mayflower and the Pilgrim's arrival in modern-day America debunked--

A chilling tale of espionage and terrorism by a literary master. On the surface, Adolf Verloc is a bookstore owner in London. Beneath his carefully crafted persona dwells a spy for a foreign government. When his handlers decide it is time for action, Verloc is tasked with blowing up the Royal Observatory. This modern novel is still as fresh and relevant as ever and makes an exciting and thought-provoking read.

A tour of Historic Williamsburg in Virginia, one of the first settlements in America. See the village much as it was when it was first settled. Photographs of the village and its inhabitants give you a feel of what life must have been like in colonial times.

'It was the best of times, it was the the worst of times,' we are told at the outset, but it is mostly brutality on display in this richly-woven and moving tale, set against the bloody and fearsome events of the French Revolution. Two men, one a French aristocrat, one a dissipated English barrister, both love the same woman. Their rivalry takes them through cobblestone alleys thick with filth and violence, into the company of the revolution's most...