Nelson Runger

LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas MacArthur, and Emperor Mitsushito helped shape this complex country.

An analysis of the intertwined careers of the founders of the American republic documents the lives of John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

This book provides an account of the day President Lincoln was shot. Hour by hour, it chronicles the movements of the President and his assassin during the day of the tragedy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and how it shaped the nation while steering it through the Great Depression and the outset of World War II.
With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin's marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor's life as...

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us -- an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time...

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite...

One of the best historical novels ever written. Lame, stammering Claudius, once a major embarrassment to the Imperial family and now Emperor of Rome, writes an eyewitness account of the reign of the first four Caesars: the noble Augustus and his cunning wife Livia; the reptilian Tiberius; the monstrous Caligula; and finally old Claudius himself and his wife Messalina. Filled with poisonings, betrayal, and shocking excesses, I, Claudius is history...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling biography of America's founding father and second president that was the basis for the acclaimed HBO series, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.
In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American...

In The Perfect Mile, Neal Bascomb, the New York Times bestselling author of Faster, presenst the riveting, true story of the three world-class athletes who individually became the first runners to break the four-minute mile. There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be beyond the limits of human foot speed, and in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, three...