The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Nazi Germany and the Jews)
by Saul Friedlander
HarperCollins

$39.95
20% off: $31.96

Saul FriedlanderÂ’s important new volume, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, presents a thorough historical study of the events beyond the usual analysis of German policies. The result of more than thirty yearÂ’s research and investigation, he presents the reactions of the surrounding world-authorities, populations, churches, and social elites. This comprehensive volume is sure to become the seminal text on one of the most tragic episodes in world history.

The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and "Les Miserables"
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Princeton University Press

$24.95
20% off: $19.96

Tolstoy called Les Miserables “the greatest of all novels,” yet today this masterpiece is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In this work, Mario Vargas Llosa helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo’s masterpiece, while also presenting a vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world.

Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry
by Ian Stewart
Perseus Books Group

$26.95
20% off: $21.56

Ian Stewart narrates the history of the study of symmetry. Taking the reader on a tour of mathematical history, he introduces us to all sorts of characters and the relationships of numbers. What the New Scientist said about his previous book Flatterland applies equally to his new book: it “communicates fundamental concepts of modern mathematics and physics to the general reader most effectively.”

Writing in an Age of Silence
by Sara Paretsky
Verso

$22.95
20% off: $18.36

In this powerful new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life, and caused her to work against the repression of free speech and thought in the U.S. today. In tracing the writer’s difficult journey from silence to speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and goes on to brilliantly evoke Chicago—the city with which she has become indelibly associated—from her arrival during the civil-rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective V. I. Warshawski.

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
by Francine Prose
Harper Perennial

$13.95
20% off: $11.16

Prose takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters—Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Joyce, Woolf, and Chekhov—and discovers why these writers endure. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer instructs readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

Reflections on the Just
by Paul Ricoeur
University Of Chicago Press

$25.00
20% off: $20.00

At the time of his death in 2005, Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. Towards the end of his life, he began to focus on ethical questions, the result of which was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The Just was published in 2000 to great acclaim, and now this translation of the second volume Reflections on the Just makes available to readers the whole of RicoeurÂ’s meditations on the concept. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, this volume is an essential work for understanding the development of RicoeurÂ’s thought in his final years.

The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould
by Stephen Jay Gould
W. W. Norton

$35.00
20% off: $28.00

This volume collects twenty-four pieces of the most entertaining and enlightening writings by the beloved paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, including some unpublished speeches and articles. These works spotlight GouldÂ’s elegance and depth that made him one of the most widely read science writers of our time.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
by Alisa Smith
Harmony

$24.00
20% off: $19.20

The typical ingredient in a North American meal travels 2,000 miles before it hits the dinner plate, a fact the authors of this book found alarming. Vowing to get off the “SUV Diet” Smith and MacKinnon decided to spend one year eating only foods locally grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their home in Vancouver. It’s a challenge to them, but wonderfully edifying and entertaining for the reader. Buyer Megan Sullivan found this book both eye-opening and a pleasure to read.

Reading Life: Books for the Ages
by Sven Birkerts
Graywolf Press

$16.00
20% off: $12.80

Susan Sontag called him “one of America’s most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter.” In this new compelling collection of essays, Birkerts examines what it means to return to resonant works of fiction. In twelve intimate essays he reflects upon his first readings, and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, and the transformational power of fiction.

The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
by Ali A. Allawi
Yale University Press

$28.00
20% off: $22.40

Involved for more than thirty years in the politics of Iraq, Allawi has been a long-time opposition leader against the Baathist regime and has held a number of important ministerial government positions—including Minister of Finance and Minister of Defense—in Iraq's post-Saddam government. In this new book, Allawi draws on this unique personal experience, his extensive relationships with members of Iraq's major political groups, and his deep understanding of the history and society of his country. The Occupation of Iraq examines what the United States did and didn’t know at the time of the invasion, as well as the reasons for the confused and contradictory policies that were enacted.

Osman's Dream the History of the Ottoman Empire: The History of the Ottoman Empire
by Caroline Finkel
Perseus Books Group

$18.95
20% off: $15.16

One of the most influential and largest empires in world history, the Ottoman Empire extended to three continents and survived for more than six centuries. Its history, however, is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes on the battlefields of World War I. In this first definitive account written for the general reader, Caroline Finkel lucidly tells the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins to its destruction centuries later. “Caroline Finkel effortlessly conveys the high drama of Ottoman history.” -Orhan Pamuk

Neuroscience and Philosophy: Language, Mind, and Brain
by Maxwell Bennett
Columbia University Press

$24.50
20% off: $19.60

Three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist engage in a lively, often contentious debate about cognitive neuroscience and philosophy and the relationships among brain, mind, and person. It is left to the reader to decide which conception is appropriate. This debate is crucial for our understanding of neuroscientific research.

The Meaning of Life
by Terry Eagleton
Oxford University Press, USA

$19.95
20% off: $15.96

Leading critic Eagleton guides us through a discussion of the ultimate question, examining how centuries of thinkers and writers have responded to the question of meaning, from Marx to Schopenhauer to Beckett. Eagleton argues that the meaning of life is not a metaphysical question, but an ethical one. In this serious discussion, he brings a light but thorough touch, making it a brilliant read.

Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005
by James T. Campbell
Penguin (Non-Classics)

$17.00
20% off: $13.60

Covering the little-examined history of African Americans traveling to Africa, James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of journeys. He includes the experiences of extraordinary figures such as W.E.B. Dubois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, and offers a unique perspective on African Americans’ constantly changing relationship with their ancestral homeland as well as the truly complex relationship with the United States. “Campbell provides an artful reconstruction of the often bittersweet experience of return and reunion.” -New York Times Book Review

Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
by Pamela Druckerman
Penguin Press HC, The

$24.95
20% off: $19.96

Druckerman decided to investigate extramarital affairs all around the world to discover how different cultures deal with adultery. She interviewed people all over the world from retirees in South Florida to polygamist Muslims in Indonesia. She spoke to marriage counselors, psychologists, sexologists, and most of all to cheaters. This strange and surprising journey reveals a still puritanical America.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Penguin (Non-Classics)

$16.00
20% off: $12.80

Named by the New York Times one of the “Top 10 Best Books of 2006”, Mayflower gives us a fresh and exhilarating account of our most sacred national myth. From the Mayflower’s arduous Atlantic crossing to the eruption of King Philip’s War between colonists and natives decades later, Philbrick reveals a fifty-year epic, both tragic and heroic. “Gripping…a fascinating story, and one Philbrick tells very well.” -Boston Globe

The Jamestown Project
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Belknap Press

$29.95
20% off: $23.96

As we mark the 400th anniversary of the settling of Jamestown, Kupperman gives us a supremely clear understanding of the settlement’s first decade, a period during which individuals learned how to make a colony work. Reconfiguring the national myth of the colony’s failure, Kupperman shows how Jamestown became the model for all successful English colonies— including Plymouth.

From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America
by Chris Finan
Beacon Press

$25.95
20% off: $20.76

Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Freedom of Expression and the chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship, is in a unique position to write the first comprehensive history of the evolution of free speech in the U.S. From the YMCAÂ’s 1892 Suppression of Vice campaign, through the Scopes trial and Edward R. MorrowÂ’s challenge to Joseph McCarthy, to our post-Patriot Act world, FinanÂ’s story is essential reading.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve

$24.99
20% off: $19.99

Always controversial, Hitchens here argues, through close reading of the major religious texts, that religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. God Is Not Great will no doubt be the next installment in the current debate begun by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.

Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream
by John Edwards
New Press

$25.95
20% off: $20.76

As Edwards says, “The day after Katrina hit, new government statistics showed that 37 million Americans live in poverty, up for the fourth year in a row.” This book focuses on one of the great moral issues of our time, presenting blueprints for ending poverty in America, with contributions from prominent social scientists, journalists, neighborhood organizers and business leaders including William Julius Wilson, Jack Kemp, Glen Loury and Katherine S. Newman.

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
by Noam Chomsky
Owl Books

$15.00
20% off: $12.00

In the follow-up to Hegemony or Survival, Chomsky shows how the United States itself shares features with other failed states. “It is possible that, if the United States goes the way of nineteenth-century Britain, Chomsky’s interpretation will be the standard among historians a hundred years from now.” -The New Yorker. The paperback edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
by Atul Gawande
Metropolitan Books

$24.00
20% off: $19.20

The McArthur Fellow and surgeon at Brigham and WomenÂ’s Hospital examines how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession. He writes with grace and style, at once unflinching, honest and compassionate, of how doctors progress from good to great with rare insight into the elements of success, applicable to every area of human endeavor.