A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.

National bestseller: In this brilliantly readable book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist chronicles the Reagan decade, when America fell from dominant world power to struggling debtor nation and when optimism turned to foreboding. In human terms and living case histories, Haynes Johnson captures the drama and tragedy of an era nurtured by greed and a morality that found virtue in not getting caught."It is morning again in America," Reagan's campaign commercials told us, and for too long we embraced that convenient lie. Indeed, the problems that came to plague us in that decade are with us even more today, as Johnson memorably demonstrates in--his afterword, "Notes on an Era," written especially for this new paperback reissue. This book will remain a signature work of political analysis for years to come.

A frightening but necessary assessment of the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century, edited by the world's leading antinuclear activist With the world's attention focused on climate change and terrorism, we are in danger of taking our eyes off the nuclear threat. But rising tensions between Russia and NATO, proxy wars erupting in Syria and Ukraine, a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and stockpiles of aging weapons unsecured around the globe make a nuclear attack or a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility arguably the biggest threat facing humanity. In Sleepwalking to Armageddon, pioneering antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott assembles the world's leading nuclear scientists and thought leaders to assess the political and scientific dimensions of the threat of nuclear war today. Chapters address the size and distribution of the current global nuclear arsenal, the history and politics of nuclear weapons, the culture of modern-day weapons labs, the militarization of space, and the dangers of combining artificial intelligence with nuclear weaponry, as well as a status report on enriched uranium and a shocking analysis of spending on nuclear weapons over the years. The book ends with a devastating description of what a nuclear attack on Manhattan would look like, followed by an overview of contemporary antinuclear activism. Both essential and terrifying, this book is sure to become the new bible of the antinuclear movement—to wake us from our complacency and urge us to action.

Once defined by her career and independence, stay-at-home mom Samantha Friedman realizes her life has become a routine of errands, car pools and suburban gossip. She deals with a husband who shows up for dinner but is too preoccupied for conversation, an increasingly moody daughter who won't talk at all, and wonders, Is this it? Since finding out she was adopted, seventeen-year-old Cammy Friedman has felt like an outsider. Unwilling to reach out to the parents she once adored, she shields herself behind black clothing and begins to drift into dangerous territory with questionable friends and risky behavior. Mother and daughter indulge in their own respective escapism— for Sam, clandestine coffee dates with a handsome stranger, fueled by the desire to feel something; for Cammy, a furtive search for her birth mother punctuated by sex, pills and the need to feel absolutely nothing—until a pivotal moment in an otherwise average day alters their relationships forever.

“A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable.” — Boston Globe One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I. Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict. Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

The debut novel from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion, a story of three college students’ shared fascination with poetry and death, and how one of them must face difficult truths in order to leave her obsession behind. Published when she was only twenty-three and written while she was a student at Brown, Sleepwalking marks the beginning of Meg Wolitzer’s acclaimed career. Filled with her usual wisdom, compassion and insight, Sleepwalking tells the story of the three notorious “death girls,” so called on the Swarthmore campus because they dress in black and are each absorbed in the work and suicide of a different poet: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Wolitzer’s creation Lucy Asher, a gifted writer who drowned herself at twenty-four. At night the death girls gather in a candlelit room to read their heroines’ work aloud. But an affair with Julian, an upperclassman, pushes sensitive , struggling Claire Danziger—she of the Lucy Asher obsession-–to consider to what degree her “death girl” identity is really who she is. As she grapples with her feelings for Julian, her own understanding of herself and her past begins to shift uncomfortably and even disturbingly. Finally, Claire takes drastic measures to confront the facts about herself that she has been avoiding for years.

Mia Couto's first novel, judged one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century