Best Selling Books by Erik Larson

A portrait of the Edwardian era recounts two parallel stories--the case of Dr. Hawley Crippen, who murdered his wife and fled to America, and Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication--as the new technology is used to capture a killer.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz--an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis "One of [Erik Larson's] best books yet . . . perfectly timed for the moment."--Time * "A bravura performance by one of America's greatest storytellers."--NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * Time * Vogue * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * The Globe & Mail * Fortune * Bloomberg * New York Post * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * LibraryReads * PopMatters On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports--some released only recently--Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill's "Secret Circle," to whom he turns in the hardest moments. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill's eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

The #1 New York Times best-selling author of In the Garden of Beasts presents a 100th-anniversary chronicle of the sinking of the Lusitania that discusses the factors that led to the tragedy and the contributions of such figures as President Wilson, bookseller Charles Lauriat and architect Theodate Pope Riddle. Includes two maps. (military history).

This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture -- its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists -- but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another. In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." The result is a book that can -- and should -- save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate. With a new afterword. "Touches on all aspects of the gun issue in this country. Gives great voice to that feeling...that something real must be done." --San Diego Union-Tribune "One of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years." --Washington Post Book World

The best-selling author of Devil in the White City documents the efforts of first American ambassador to Hitler's Germany William E. Dodd to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels.

An account of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 relates the stories of two men who shaped the history of the event--architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and serial killer Herman Mudgett.

Provides an account of the hurricane which struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and killed ten thousand people.

When a little cat is taken captive by a pair of robbers it sets in motion not just a grand rescue operation but also the beginning of lasting friendships and adventures on the high seas. Join Fall Landon Sully as his journey to fulfill his destiny is begun when he crosses paths with the mysterious Pirate with a Heart of Gold!

The first book in a fantasy series in the realm of Xandaria. Meghan Nosral, nicknamed Mouse, survived 16 surgeries before the age of 3. Now 8-yr old Mouse must deal with a new struggle in a world completely alien to her own. How much luck can one stone bring her?

This is a compelling story about how a series of events led the author to stop letting circumstances control his life. He gained a purpose and a plan to take charge and strive to improve and be successful in every area of his life. Although this story is about the authors journey of intentional personal development, the most important thing is your journey. As you read, you will be inspired to take on your own journey of personal development to reach for your highest potential. This is a book not just to read but to use. Through evaluation exercises you will gain your own life's purpose statement that you will use to put together a specific and deliberate plan to improve in every are of your life.Whatever the outcome, I can promise you will a more successful person after reading this book.

In 1910, Edwardian England was scandalized by a murder: a mild-mannered American named Hawley Crippen had killed his wife and buried her remains (well, some of her remains) in the cellar of their North London home. He then went on the run with his young mistress, his secretary, Ethel Le Neve. A Scotland Yard inspector, already famous for his part in the Ripper investigation, discovered the murder and launched an international hunt for Crippen that climaxed in a trans-Atlantic chase between two ocean liners. The chase itself was novel, but what captured the imagination of the world's public was the role played by a new and little understood technology: the wireless, invented by Guglielmo Marconi. Thanks to Marconi's obsessive fight to perfect his invention, the world was able to learn of events occurring in the middle of the Atlantic as they unfolded - something previously unthinkable. Police, jurists, and editors of the time all agreed that if not for Marconi, Crippen would have escaped. But Marconi had struggled to gain acceptance for his invention as a practical technology (many viewed the wireless as a novelty or a supernatural device, while distrust of foreigners remained prevalent in England and America). It was the Crippen case that helped convince the world of the potential of Marconi's miracle technology, so accelerating the wireless revolution that eventually produced radio, television and cell phones. With a cast of colourful, captivating characters THUNDERSTRUCK is Larson at his commercial best, doing what he does so irresistibly well: cleverly bringing together two seemingly disparate yet inextricably linked lives to paint a fascinating, exciting portrait of a hugely significant age of cultural, social and technological change while evoking the darker side of human nature.

Some companies gather and sell personal information to assist businesses in their marketing campaigns. It this American business at its finest, or simply a horrible invasion of our privacy? This shocking book will make readers think twice before writing their next check or going to the grocery store.

"This paper considers issues relating to the segmentation or grouping of credit exposures and the potential impact upon economic capital allocation and attribution. When discussing capital allocation, we refer to the assessment of total capital at the portfolio level, while our discussion of capital attribution focuses on getting capital assigned appropriately at the bucket level. We emphasize that a loss or value function must be specified so as to quantify the gains and losses from choosing a more or less granular asset segmentation scheme. Our chosen loss function considers the trade-off between the decrease in sampling variance obtained by combining data to increase sample size and the bias resulting from characterizing unlike assets with the same default probability. The implications are illustrated with several numerical examples that consider accuracy in the estimation of both portfolio-level and asset-level capital requirements. The suggested technique can be used to quantify whether a loss in accuracy from grouping or segmentation is outweighed by the decrease in variance of estimated capital. That is, the "loss" from grouping is small when the evaluation criterion is the accuracy of estimation of the required total capital; grouping is of more concern when we are interested in getting capital attributed correctly at the bucket level"--Office of the Comptroller of the Currency web site.

This volume contains a collection of Jewish works composed during the intertestamental period linked to biblical texts through characters, themes, or genre. Some of these were known previously as part of the Pseudepigrapha, while others were not previously known. They all enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy (writing in the name of a famous biblical or religious character) and of biblical interpretation during the Second Temple period.

A book of poetry.

A look at modern marketing chronicles the pursuit of the American consumer, describing how companies use spies, hidden cameras, computers, and sonar and EEG machines to understand what shoppers want. 15,000 first printing.