Best American Gilded Age History

Welcome to the Wild North, a desolate wasteland where criminals go to hide—if they can outlast the drought and the dangers of the desert. If the land doesn't get you, the Coilhunter will.

In this carefully researched biography, Dan L. Thrapp gives extensive evidence for Sieber’s expertise, noting that the expeditions he accompanied were highly successful whereas those from which he was absent met with few triumphs. Dan Thrapp, who was a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, was a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Argentina, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom and, for a number of years, an editor for the Los Angeles Times .

In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan––Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain––vividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. John Jacob's "phlegmatic and cautious" son, William, increased the family fortune, married a blueblood and sired sons who couldn't abide one another. When it opened on Broadway in 1836, John Jacob Astor's hotel Astor House was called a "marvel of the age." However, it was nothing compared to the hotel built some 60 years later by Astor's great-grandsons, William Waldorf and John Jacob IV.

Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. Adolph was traded to a band of Quahada Comanches, with whom he lived until November 1872, when the Comanches traded their captives for those held by the U.S. Army. Drawing on his tenacious research and interviews with the captives' descendants, Zesch compiles a gripping account of the lives of these children as they lived and traveled with their Indian captors.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton--two of the most influential Founding Fathers--were also fierce rivals with two opposing political philosophies and two radically different visions for America. Thomas J. DiLorenzo is the author of "The Real Lincoln "and "How Capitalism Saved America," A professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he has written for the "Wall Street Journal," "USA Today," the "Washington Post," "Reader's Digest," "Barron's," and many other publications.

An unflinching look at the grim years of Southern reconstruction. Thomas Goodrich is a professional writer whose focus is the American West.

In this fascinating true story, Anthony Bourdain follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a poor, desperate cook, and an inadvertant killer, and, with his signature swagger, captures an era and a life. Like Lizzie Borden, Mallon has received various writers' interpretations, the last in a 1996 biography by Judith Leavitt of the same title (LJ 5/15/96) that told the tale with more health science and a less cranky style. Chapter titles tend toward the snarky and hip ("There's Something About Mary," "Typhoid sucks"), and only a New York guy would describe bacteria settling into a gall bladder "like rent-controlled pensioners." His light-handed telling concerns a possible hoax from about 1824, when a butcher and a carpenter in New York's old Centre Market purportedly discussed their plan to solve overbuilt Manhattan's dangerous bottom-heaviness by sawing it in half, turning the top part of the island around, and reattaching it at the Battery. Unwittingly responsible for an outbreak of typhoid fever in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1904, Mary, a cook, fled when authorities began to suspect that she was a carrier.