Peter Smythe always thought he was more of a loser than a hero. That all changes with a high school crush, a field trip gone wrong, and a ring that he never, ever should have put on. Suddenly, Peter’s life of exceptional boredom and insignificance is transformed when he is pulled into Miria, a world on the verge of annihilation. The sister of “Cog,” the most powerful god in Miria has gone missing. Together, their combined power held back the Ice Reich—an empire of fallen gods and ice monsters—for thousands of years. Now, the Ice Reich is poised to destroy Miria. When it finishes with Miria, it will destroy everything in the Nine Realms, including Peter’s best friend, his favorite teacher, and his family if Peter and his friends aren’t up to the task. To return home, Peter must forge friendships with the most unlikely of people and master the power of his ring. As he navigates a world of gods and monsters, he and his friends must find Cog’s sister and untangle an ancient plot all before a ticking clock strikes its final hour.

Peter Smythe always thought he was more of a loser than a hero. That all changes with a high school crush, a field trip gone wrong, and a ring that he never, ever should have put on. Suddenly, Peter's life of exceptional boredom and insignificance is transformed when he is pulled into Miria, a world on the verge of annihilation. The sister of "Cog," the most powerful god in Miria has gone missing. Together, their combined power held back the Ice Reich--an empire of fallen gods and ice monsters--for thousands of years. Now, the Ice Reich is poised to destroy Miria. When it finishes with Miria, it will destroy everything in the Nine Realms, including Peter's best friend, his favorite teacher, and his family if Peter and his friends aren't up to the task.To return home, Peter must forge friendships with the most unlikely of people and master the power of his ring. As he navigates a world of gods and monsters, he and his friends must find Cog's sister and untangle an ancient plot all before a ticking clock strikes its final hour.

At the crossroads of high finance and international terrorism, a son is searching for his father’s killer. . . Robert "Bobby" Astor is a rising New York hedge fund manager on the cusp of making his biggest deal yet. But everything changes when his father, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, is killed in a brazen attack on the south lawn of the White House while en route to deliver a terrifying secret to the President. In the wake of the attack, Astor’s business begins to crumble. A cryptic clue leads him deeper into the web of lies surrounding his father's murder, and Astor stumbles onto a sophisticated foreign conspiracy that threatens to wipe out not only Astor's own fund but to destroy the entire foundation of the financial system of the United States.

The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?

New York Times Bestseller Months after foiling an international terrorist attack, Doctors Without Borders physician Jonathan Ransom is working under an assumed name in a remote corner of Africa. His wife, Emma, desperate to escape the wrath of Division, the secret American intelligence agency she betrayed, has been in hiding. Both look forward to sharing a stolen weekend in London—until a terrorist attack ruins their romantic rendezvous. In the aftermath, Emma disappears and Jonathan is apprehended by the police and threatened, unless he helps secure his wife’s capture. He embarks on a breathless chase across Europe, searching for Emma, and keeping Division at bay . . . until he realizes that all along he’s been a pawn in a high-stakes game of international intrigue far beyond his imagining. Follow the Rules: Don't miss Christopher Reich's new thriller, Rules of Betrayal, coming in hardcover in July. The first novel in the series, Rules of Deception, is available now in paperback.

Writing and Rewriting the Reich tells the complex story of women journalists as both outsiders and insiders in the German press of the National Socialist and post-war years. From 1933 onward, Nazi press authorities valued female journalists as a means to influence the public through charm and subtlety rather than intimidation or militant language. Deborah Barton reveals that despite the deep sexism inherent in the Nazi press, some women were able to capitalize on the gaps between gender rhetoric and reality to establish prominent careers in both soft and hard news. Based on data collected on over 1,500 women journalists, Writing and Rewriting the Reich describes the professional opportunities open to women during the Nazi era, their gendered contribution to Nazi press and propaganda goals, and the ways in which their Third Reich experiences proved useful in post-war divided Germany. It draws on a range of sources including editorial proceedings, press association membership records, personal correspondence, newspapers, diaries, and memoirs. It also sheds light on both unknown journalists and famous figures including Margret Boveri, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, and Ursula von Kardorff. Addressing the long-term influence of women journalists, Writing and Rewriting the Reich illuminates some of the most salient issues in the nature of Nazi propaganda, the depiction of wartime violence, and historical memory.

Friendly, visual guide gets users to the heart of Microsoft's recent Windows XP update, Service Pack 2.

"At once a travel tale, a historical meditation, a Holocaust revenge fantasy, and a bedroom farce."—D. T. Max, New York Times Book Review Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

An intimate portrait of German life during World War II, shining a light on ordinary people living in a picturesque Bavarian village under Nazi rule, from a past winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf—a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. Yet even this remote idyll could not escape the brutal iron grip of the Nazi regime. From the author of the international bestseller Travelers in the Third Reich comes A Village in the Third Reich, shining a light on the lives of ordinary people. Drawing on personal archives, letters, interviews and memoirs, it lays bare their brutality and love; courage and weakness; action, apathy and grief; hope, pain, joy, and despair. Within its pages we encounter people from all walks of life – foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats. We meet the Jews who survived – and those who didn’t; the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime; and a blind boy whose life was judged "not worth living." This is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams—but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs. These are the stories of ordinary lives at the crossroads of history.

"Grabs you on page one and doesn't let you go until the final page!" —Nelson DeMille on Crashers Daria Gibron is a woman with a deadly past and an uncertain future. A former Shin-Bet agent now in exile in the U.S. and under the protection of the F.B.I., she works primarily as an interpreter. But Daria is a thrill junkie who can't resist the occasional freelance job as an operative—a habit that has left her with a trail of corpses behind her, and a few still living, very dangerous, high-powered enemies who would stop at nothing to get revenge. En route to an impromptu meeting with an old contact from her days in the Israeli Secret Service, Daria gets an unexpected and anonymous tipoff that she's about to walk into an ambush. Unsure who is after her, or why, she slips away from her followers and soon learns that she's been set up—and set up good. Someone has linked her to a much sought-after terrorist, and now all the resources of the U.S. intelligence community are being marshaled against her. As she tries to escape the ever-tightening snare laid out for her, someone else is using the operation against her as a distraction to hijack a very dangerous, highly guarded shipment. Now the only person who can keep this shipment from falling into terrorist hands is the one person they chose to set up as a diversion. Daria Gibron is many things—trigger-happy, resourceful, focused, and extremely dangerous —but the one thing she isn't is anybody's fool. Ice Cold Kill is an espionage spy thriller from Dana Haynes.