Christopher Hurt

In the last days of World War II, German forces are sent to occupy the Italian hill town, Santa Vittoria, and claim its great treasure: one million bottles of the Santa Vittoria wine that is its lifeblood. The clownish mayor, Bombolini, matches wits with the urbane German captain, Von Prum, as the town unites -- aristocrats and peasants, old enemies and young lovers -- to deceive the Germans and save its wine. Where the wine disappears to is the secret...

Ayn Rand's 1943 masterpiece, The Fountainhead is the story of Howard Roark, an architect of enormous talent who turns down one lucrative commission after another because they would force him to modify his designs and compromise his integrity, but in spite of his refusals, or perhaps because of them, he goes on to triumph over many obstacles and establish himself as a master. Douglas Den Uyl's new study, The Fountainhead: An American Novel, is the...

Blackford Oakes hunts for a mole inside MI6 after a catastrophe in Albania Albania may be a small nation, but it's about to become the front line of the Cold War. In hopes of toppling the brutal Communist regime that controls the country, the British intelligence service has handpicked an elite group of Albanian freedom fighters to be molded into commandos by Blackford Oakes, the CIA's all-purpose warrior. With the help of MI6's most ruthless clandestine...

More than just a huge #1 best seller, this is one of the great and vitally important books of our time. Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of modern America is really an intellectual crisis. From the universities' lack of purpose to their students' lack of learning, from the jargon of liberation to the supplanting of reason...

Robert E. Lee, a Christian and a gentleman, was the most remarkable man to emerge from the Civil War and is one of the greatest tragic figures of American history. Reserved and unflappable, savvy and fearless, shrewd and tenacious, fatherly and kind are but a few of the adjectives commonly used to describe this noble hero. By using a dramatic form of narrative and relying on numerous eyewitness accounts, Burke Davis brings Lee to life. Listening to...

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard Malamud’s first novel is still one of the best ever written about baseball. His story of a superbly gifted “natural” at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era is invested with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.

First published in 1952, this novel has since become an American classic. Five decades later, Alfred Kazin’s

...

In 1931, a young American named Victor Herman accompanied his parents to the Soviet Union where his father was to set up a Ford Motor Company plant. In 1938, he was inexplicably thrown into a Soviet prison. It was forty-five years before he was able to return to America. His was a common nightmare during the Stalin years. Those who survived imprisonment and torture were either sent north to hard labor in the icy forests and mines or into exile. Victor...

“How did Arkman Noah / Provide for protozoa?” It's not often that an acclaimed historian takes a turn for light verse. But in these 1,707 couplets, quatrains, and other terse verse, John R. Alden takes on the tradition of Ogden Nash. His subject matter ranges from dinosaurs to computers, from Confucius to Darwin, from Jonah to George Bush. His wit, wisdom, and powers of observation are sure to amuse and delight.

Howard Hughes lived one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood, mysterious, bizarre, and tragic lives in American history. Here at last, in a uniquely full and brilliantly documented biography by a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative team, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth. Hughes had always been different. Raised by overprotective parents, pathologically fearful of germs, in awe of his father, unable to...