History
Sept. 29, 1913: Aboard the steamship Dresden and heading to England, the inventor of a revolutionary internal combustion engine, Rudolf Diesel, is about to be the subject of worldwide headlines. He vanishes leaving behind a folded coat. From an impoverished European childhood, Diesel was now wealthy and celebrated for his game-changing creation of the diesel engine. He had also made enemies. Was his disappearance an accident, suicide, or murder? The case is reopened in this riveting history.
In 2000, Eric O’Neill’s FBI career was in eclipse. He had married a foreign national from former East Germany. She was viewed as a potential security risk. But then, he got tapped for his career’s biggest case. Robert Hanssen had been selling secrets to the Russians for nearly two decades, and the FBI needed to prove it. The FBI set a trap for Hanssen, putting him in charge of the FBI’s new cybersecurity group with Mr. O’Neill as his deputy (to watch Hanssen). Mr. O'Neill and the FBI trap a mole in this tension-filled memoir.
Collected to celebrate the 40th anniversary of “The New Criterion,” these 50 essays cover political and cultural topics particularly pertinent to our century. Writers as diverse as Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Joseph Epstein, and Heather Mac Donald shed light on our harried age and how it came to be. In his contribution, David Pryce-Jones writes that “the pen has to hold the line in the permanent war against the falsification of reality.” Here, Mr. Kimball and his fellow troopers do just that.
Who were the Assyrians? Mark Healy’s new work is the perfect introduction to this massive multi-century empire of the ancient Near East. The author introduces the reader to the numerous kings throughout the empire’s reign, the tactics deployed by the nation’s military, how the empire expanded through conquest and annexation, and several convincing arguments about how the empire collapsed. With maps, beautiful images from the ancient ruins, and explanatory graphics, it proves a fine read.
Lydia Maria Child published this familiar poem in 1844. A celebration of family tradition and gathering, it’s a Thanksgiving staple. This lovely rendition features woodcut pictures that tell the story of a horse-drawn sleigh carrying a family to grandfather’s house for the holiday feast, capturing the cozy essence of New England in November.