Tracking History

Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat action on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir is his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front's appalling carnage. Depicting a running tank engagement lasting 72 hours, Faust describes how his Tiger unit fought pitched battles in the snows of Western Russia against the full might of the Red Army.

“[Erdrich] captures the passions, fears, myths, and doom of a living people, and she does so with an ease that leaves the reader breathless.”—The New Yorker From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich comes an arresting, lyrical novel set in North Dakota at a time...

WHAT IF THE THIRD REICH NEVER REALLY ENDED? Operation Ghost Reich: From Bavaria to Buenos Aires rips open sealed archives, Vatican rat-lines, and Mossad dossiers to reveal the labyrinth that let Hitler's most ruthless lieutenants vanish, only to re-emerge as "respectable" neighbors, engineers, and even Cold War assets. THE CHASE BEGINS ON A FOG-SOAKED BAVARIAN PLATFORM May 1945: forged Red Cross papers, rosaries hiding SS gold, and a ghost train headed south mark the moment thousands of war criminals step off history's stage and into suburbia. Their escape ignites a five-part global pursuit...

In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate on the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Louise Erdrich...

The Inside Track was the last book that Dr. Bell released. This book focuses on the history of science, the minds behind the technology, and how it has evolved due to international politics. The turns that science, technology, medicine, and psychiatry continue to take when influenced by lobbyists, private companies, government departments with hidden agendas, and wealthy elite individuals.

The Bastard Instrument chronicles the history of the electric bass and the musicians who played it, from the instrument’s invention through its widespread acceptance at the end of the 1960s. Although their contributions have often gone unsung, electric bassists helped shape the sound of a wide range of genres, including jazz, rhythm & blues, rock, country, soul, funk, and more.

From the author of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemics Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera--one of history's most disruptive and deadly...

A "beautifully written travelogue" that draws on the latest scholarly research as well as a lifetime of exploration to light on the extraordinary Anasazi culture of the American Southwest (Entertainment Weekly). The greatest "unsolved mystery" of the American Southwest is the fate of the Anasazi...

In the autumn of 1967, five heavily armed men ventured into the dense, fog-choked forests of Northern California. They thought they were hunting a legend. They were wrong. The peaceful giant they sought wasn't a discovery—it was a decoy. When the tracking expedition is ambushed in the remote wilderness, the hunters quickly realize they have stepped into a highly evolved trap. Stalked by an intelligent, hyper-violent apex predator that uses the famous myth as camouflage, the group is systematically torn apart. To survive the suffocating silence of the ancient redwoods, they must fight ...

On June 3, 1769, the planet Venus briefly passed across the face of the sun in a cosmic alignment that occurs twice per century. Anticipation of the rare celestial event sparked a worldwide competition among aspiring global superpowers, each sending their own scientific expeditions to far-flung destinations to time the planet’s trek.

Listening stations camouflaged as boatsheds in secluded coastline locations, spying missions probing far into Russian territory, strictly guarded radar installations, aircraft and seagoing vessels that collect information covertly. All of this has been part of a secret intelligence collaboration between the USA and Norway that also includes wiretapping on the Russian border and the covert tapping of civilian satellites. Espionage has ensnared individuals in a high stakes game being played out between the great powers, which both during and after the Cold War has turned secluded villages and...

How fast can humans really run—and how did we learn to measure it fairly? Breaking Barriers traces the history of sprinting through the records that defined it. From the shift from yards to meters, to the rise of indoor track, to the adoption of fully automatic timing, this book explores how sprint records came to represent more than speed alone. Rather than focusing on fame or spectacle, this history examines the systems behind performance: how distance, timing, surfaces, and rules shaped what could be recognized as “fast,” and why some records endured while others disappeared. ...

It was the biggest event in the history of women's sports. And for the Americans, it came down to five kicks. After regulation play and two overtimes in the final game of the 1999 women's World Cup soccer match, the score was 0-0. Penalty kicks would decide the world champion. The Chinese and the Americans would each pick five players. One kick per player. With the score tied 4-4, the Americans had one more chance to win it all.

The Rap Beef Chronicles: From Diss Tracks to Tragedies is a gripping journey through one of hip-hop's most defining and controversial forces: the rap beef.From the raw, improvisational cyphers of 1980s New York block parties—where legends like Busy Bee Starski and Kool Moe Dee traded bars and sparked the first true lyrical rivalries—to the explosive East Coast–West Coast war that claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., this book traces how competition evolved from proving mic supremacy into something far more dangerous and culturally seismic.Explore the personal ...

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together.

They said girls couldn’t run. They were wrong. For generations, women fought for the right to compete, to be measured, and to be taken seriously in the world of sports. Faster, Higher, Stronger: A History of Women’s Track and Field tells that unforgettable story with energy, heart, and clarity designed especially for readers ages 10–14. From ancient footraces to the groundbreaking 1928 Olympics, from the first banned marathon runners to today’s global superstars, this book reveals how women and girls transformed track and field into one of the most exciting and inclusive sports in ...

A dazzling archaeological journey that illuminates the unsung role of music and sound in shaping human civilization What if you could hear the history of the world through a bronze bell buried deep in the ground? Or an old terracotta pot? Or a long strip of a boar’s tusk? In Sound Tracks...

During the years they spent together, few people outside of Bob Dylan's immediate family were closer than Victor Maymudes, who was Dylan's tour manager, personal friend, and traveling companion from the 1960s through the late 1990s. Another Side of Bob Dylan recounts landmark events during that time, including Dylan's infamous motorcycle crash; his meeting the Beatles on their first U.S. tour; his marriage to Sara Lownds, as well as his romances with Joan Baez and others....

Congress is the first branch of government in the American system, write Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, but now it is a broken branch, damaged by partisan bickering and internal rancor. The Broken Branch offers both a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of Congressional decline and a much-needed blueprint for change, from two experts who understand politics and revere our institutions, but believe that Congress has become deeply dysfunctional.

Beneath the empire’s polished rails, something ancient stirs—and it’s hungry for more than steam. Disgraced inspector Alaric Voss thought exile had ended his days chasing ghosts. But when a train vanishes without a trace on the Trans-Etherian Line, he’s summoned to the frontier town of Ketter’s Gate. There, he finds a town gripped by fear, an engineer with fire in her veins, and whispers of a conspiracy buried deep in the steel bones of the empire. Riona Flint, brilliant and wary, is searching for her missing father—the chief architect of the railway—and the secrets he left ...