Archives de catégorie : History

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY d’Eric Himmel

Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY:
Artists & Naturalists, 1700–1900
by Eric Himmel
Abrams, April 2026

With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that’s not in the art history books, and a story about science that’s missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redouté, Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.

An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.

Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature’s great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word “biodiversity” existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin’s lyrical evocation of nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.”

The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.

This art first appeared in vividly illustrated books that, in a world without photography or film, offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to the extraordinary men and women who created these books. They focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in tropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, and dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.

After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet, as the natural history books in the world’s great libraries were digitized and made available to all.

Chronicling the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world, The Art of Biodiversity is a must-have for historians of science, collectors of botanical and zoological art, and anyone captivated by the enduring beauty of the living world.

“Dazzling . . . A natural history page-turner.”―KIRKUS

“The art and design of natural science is brought to the forefront in Eric Himmel’s elegantly written, illustrated, and designed The Art of Biodiversity.”―PRINT

“To turn each page is to be transported. Eric Himmel does something strange and wonderful, alchemizing image and insight into a supremely vivid guided tour of the art of nature, and the nature of art. A book as beautiful as it is fascinating.”―JASON ROBERTS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World

Over a 40-year publishing career at Abrams, Eric Himmel acquired and edited hundreds of books in the arts and sciences. He was a coauthor of The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2017). The son of photographers Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, Eric is an author and sculptor living in New York City.

WE WILL NEVER DIE de Tom Reiss

The epic, untold story of how some of the biggest names on Broadway and in Hollywood fought fascism, opened America’s eyes to the Holocaust, and forced the government to take action—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Black Count.

WE WILL NEVER DIE:
How a Defiant Band of Writers, Filmmakers, Musicians, and Movie Stars Inspired the Greatest Rescue Effort of World War II
by Tom Reiss
Crown, April 2027

In September 1941, a screenwriter sat in the bar of the “21” Club as two men with foreign accents told him a story full of twists and turns that took several rounds to grasp: secret rendezvous, encounters with the Gestapo, and midnight journeys down the Danube ferrying Jews out of Nazi territory. The men weren’t selling him material for a screenplay. They wanted him to help them save Europe’s Jews from total annihilation.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Reiss brings to life the relentless quest of Ben Hecht, the top screenwriter of Golden Age Hollywood, to shine a spotlight into the darkness. Reiss follows Hecht’s journey from the studio backlots of Los Angeles to the theaters and nightclubs of Manhattan, rallying to his cause, among others, the Marx Brothers, Kurt Weill, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the stars of Casablanca. They toured Hecht’s pageant We Will Never Die across the country in 1943, awakening Americans to the ongoing tragedy, and exposed a shadowy government conspiracy to block Holocaust rescue, forcing President Roosevelt to make a momentous decision.

Sweeping in historical scope, full of heart, passion, and boundless determination, We Will Never Die captures a nation at a crossroads—as art, fame, and political power collided in the face of unthinkable catastrophe. When America’s dream factory confronted the world’s darkest nightmare, one man harnessed the power of creative imagination to defy brutality and indifference.

Tom Reiss is the PEN Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Black Count and The Orientalist, both New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into more than thirty languages. His work explores the hidden intersections of politics, identity, and storytelling across cultures and centuries. Reiss’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City.

THE INVISIBLE HAND OF MARIA EDGEWORTH de Jeanna Smialek

The untold story of the nineteenth-century novelist who outearned Jane Austen and wove provocative theories into her fiction—changing economics forever.

THE INVISIBLE HAND OF MARIA EDGEWORTH:
How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics
by Jeanna Smialek
Knopf, October2026
(via David Black Agency)

At the end of the eighteenth century, Europe faced revolutions, famine, and war. It was out of this chaos that the field of economics was born—and while that founding has for centuries been attributed almost entirely to men, they were only part of the story.

Maria Edgeworth, known to her contemporaries as “the Great Maria,” was one of the most important authors of the Regency era, envied by Lord Byron, admired by Jane Austen, and read avidly by the British royalty. But she was more than just a novelist and a society fixture: She was also a covert economist, working just after Adam Smith and alongside her friends David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. As the earliest economists established their philosophies on production and investment, Edgeworth published dozens of stories, many with lessons on finance, society, and trade tucked into their plots. Through her fiction, Edgeworth delivered new ideas to a broader public, stretching the boundaries of what a woman of her time could achieve and captivating an empire in the process.

Here, her tale is told alongside those of the men—and women—who invented a field that would reshape our world. Lively and original, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth brings this astonishing woman and her world vividly to life and rewrites the origin story of modern economics.

“Whoever thought economics could be such a joy to read? Maria Edgeworth may have written the novels, but Jeanna Smialek’s book brings them—and their world—to life. Take a fascinating voyage with Ricardo, Malthus, and Maria, from the age of the American, French, and Industrial revolutions to the Great Irish Famine, and learn some economics along the way.” —Claudia Goldin, Nobel Prize laureate in Economics and author of Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity

“Revelatory and riveting—an original perspective on the history of economic thought that will change how you see today’s economy, and a pleasure to read from start to finish.” —Jason Furman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief at The New York Times. She has covered economic policy in one way or another since 2013, and is the author of Limitless, a book on the history and future of the Federal Reserve. She has previously written for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek. A native of Pittsburgh, Smialek has spent most of her career in New York City and Washington, D.C., and now lives in Belgium with her husband.

OPERATION SPARROW de Jason Bell

The first book to tell the full story of one of the greatest yet most unknown operations of WWII.

OPERATION SPARROW:
The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War
by Jason Bell
Hanover Square Press, Fall 2026
(via Vertical Ink Agency)

Three American special forces parachute into Nazi-allied Hungary in the dead of night, spring 1944. The three-man team is designed to look like the spear’s tip of an Allied invasion to help Hungary extract itself from Hitler’s grasp. The leader of the first Sparrow team is iron-jawed, barrel-chested Florimond Duke: all-American football player, big-time New York advertising executive, and knowing volunteer for a likely suicide mission, but he takes the risk because there is no one better suited for selling the Nazis on a lie. If their plan succeeds, they will be captured by the Germans, and Hitler will be fooled into sending reinforcements far from the coming Allied invasion at Normandy to counter a make-believe invasion instead of the real one. If it fails? German armor will destroy the coming Allied landing in France, and the war could be lost. But against enormous odds, Sparrow’s first stage is completely successful – the Nazis divert twelve divisions to counter the fake invasion. The next stage is Canada’s daring mission to keep Hitler’s forces pinned down – it is like Canada’s invasion at Dieppe, except an unmitigated success. Hitler was completely convinced by the plot, and the Canadian forces made him pay a high price for his mistake. Operation Sparrow was one of the most astoundingly risky and successful missions of WWII, yet its story has not been told, and Jason Bell’s OPERATION SPARROW will be the first book to tell the full story of one of the greatest yet most unknown operations of the war.

Jason Bell, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He has served as Fulbright Professor at Göttingen in Germany, and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada.

THE BURIED TEACHESTS d’Annika Blau

An extraordinary true story of family secrets, scandal, and survival.

THE BURIED TEACHESTS
by Annika Blau
on submission
(via The Pilkington Agency)

THE BURIED TEACHESTS follows journalist Annika Blau’s journey after she stumbles upon a secret family legacy. What follows is a remarkable investigation into a family who rose to prominence as purveyors of the famous 4711 cologne, only to be brought down by scandal, internment, and erasure.

A few years ago, Annika discovered that two teachests of mail collected by her great-grandfather had been found during a demolition and auctioned off for a small fortune by strangers. They were lauded as one of the most significant hauls of military mail in Commonwealth history, containing rare correspondence from Sydney’s WW1 prisoner of war camp. But for Annika,they revealed family secrets, silences and shame.

Using the mail as clues, Annika uncovers the riches to rags tale of the relatives who collected it. Charting a path through two world wars and the Great Depression, it’s a story about the family’s rise to Sydney’s high society and their fall to years behind bars as British “war trophies”. At the heart of the story is a mystery: why did Annika’s great-grandfather collect this historic haul only to hide it under some floorboards? Ultimately, she discovers he buried not just the teachests, but the truth of who the family were and where they came from.

At once memoir and investigation, The Buried Teachests sits alongside Wifedom by Anna Funder and The Hare with Amber Eyes as a powerful exploration of identity, loss, and the truths families bury to endure.

Annika Blau is an award-winning journalist, editor and podcaster. She is a reporter for ABC Radio National’s flagship investigative program, Background Briefing. In 2023, she wrote, produced and presented The Buried Teachests: a two-part podcast series for RN’s History Listen program.