Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 shook Britain to its core, and reverberated not just throughout the Commonwealth, but around the world. She was a woman in her eighties, and yet it seems no one could contemplate the end of a reign that had lasted so long. Most could not remember a time when she was not Queen, and the very stability of everyday life seemed to depend on her regency. The anxiety of the government and the royal family about the prospect of the Queen's death was such that the news of her illness was deliberately concealed from the public for more than a week. When it came, people from England to Jamaica wept in the streets, and this grief was surpassed only by fear for the future. "God help us" was the standard reaction from all strata of society. The Last Days of Glory is the definitive account of those last 23 days in January 1901, when Victoria traveled to Osborne House to die. The momentous reaction to the Queen's passing attached to it more significance and a greater sense of change than the turn of the century had carried just a year earlier. Through the prism of those last days Tony Rennell presents us with a series of resonant and absorbing snapshots of a fading Empire at the end of the Victorian Age, and captures a nation coping with change, balancing comfortable nostalgia with the arrival of a new order.

A potent fighting force that changed the course of the Civil War, the Army of the Cumberland was the North's second-most-powerful army, surpassed in size only by the Army of the Potomac. The Cumberland army engaged the enemy across five times more territory with one-third to one-half fewer men than the Army of the Potomac, and yet its achievements in the western theater rivaled those of the larger eastern army. In Days of Glory, Larry J. Daniel brings his analytic and descriptive skills to bear on the Cumberlanders as he explores the dynamics of discord, political infighting, and feeble leadership that stymied the army in achieving its full potential. Making extensive use of thousands of letters and diaries, Daniel creates an epic portrayal of the developing Cumberland army, from untrained volunteers to hardened soldiers united in their hatred of the Confederates.

A rollicking guided tour of one extraordinary summer, when some of the most pivotal and freakishly coincidental stories all collided and changed the way we think about modern sports The summer of 1984 was a watershed moment in the birth of modern sports when the nation watched Michael Jordan grow from college basketball player to professional athlete and star. That summer also saw ESPN's rise to media dominance as the country's premier sports network and the first modern, commercialized, profitable Olympics. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird's rivalry raged, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe reigned in tennis, and Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon made pro wrestling a business, while Donald Trump pierced the national consciousness as a pro football team owner. It was an awakening in the sports world, a moment when sports began to morph into the market-savvy, sensationalized, moneyed, controversial, and wildly popular arena we know today. In the tradition of Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927, L. Jon Wertheim captures these 90 seminal days against the backdrop of the nostalgia-soaked 1980s, to show that this was the year we collectively traded in our ratty Converses for a pair of sleek, heavily branded, ingeniously marketed Nikes. This was the year that sports went big-time.

After she met Graham Pulkingham, the spellbinding priest who had led Redeemer into a powerful renewal starting in 1964, Duin became convinced the world needed to know the story of this gifted man and his church. As she began investigating the story, many warned her there was a darker history behind Pulkingham. Now the journalist who first broke that story reveals the details of the scandal that rocked the charismatic and Christian community movements, and the Episcopal Church.--Books in Print

Groom, author of Forrest Gump and other fiction, provides a thoughtful narrative account of Confederate leader General Hood, as well as his military cohorts, troops, and nemeses, from their bizarre cat-and-mouse chase through Georgia and Tennessee to the horrors of the charge at Franklin. Excellent bandw photographs, maps. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Robin Neillands reveals the truth behind the events surrounding the little-known battles at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge and Festubert, as well as the larger disaster at Second Ypres, and the shambolic Battle of Loos.