For seven years, Paul Hendrickson diligently studied and prayed while he pursued his dream of becoming a missionary priest. But at twenty-one, he made the decision to leave the Seminary.

Now, eighteen years later, Hendrickson shares the details of his experiences studying for priesthood while assessing the significance of the period in his life in the pages of Seminary.

More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war’s witnesses and McNamara himself.

In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamara’s story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war’s architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

Marion Post Wolcott’s magnificent images of rural America in the 1930s are among the treasure of American photography. And what sets them apart from the work of the other distinguished photographers who focused their camera on Depression-ravaged America is the profoundly touching and personal quality of her pictures: she seems to have gone beyond the harsh realities of the time to embrace and illuminate the life she saw.

Seventy-seven of her memorable photographs illustrate this resonant biography which celebrates her art and her life. It is the story of an unusually attractive, gifted, and adventurous woman who suddenly, at the age of thirty-one, decided to abandon her career and address herself to the responsibilities of family.

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made.

This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home.

In showing us Wright’s facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.

Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend. Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

In the remote mountains of central Asia, an eminent Harvard archeologist discovers something extraordinary. He sends a cryptic message to two colleagues. But then, he disappears.

Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot—once lovers, now academic rivals—are going where few humans have ever walked, looking for a relic band of creatures that have existed for over 40,000 years, that possess powers man can only imagine, and that are about to change the face of civilization forever.

New York City: a thirteen-year-old boy named Tyler lies in a hospital, his brain damaged in a tragic accident. By his bedside, his father stands helplessly, as two very different scientists take charge of the boy’s fate. One is a neurosurgeon, whose unorthodox experiments use computers to control a patient’s physical responses during surgery. The other is a researcher with experiments of his own, ones so secret he can reveal them to no one: his attempts to find the spark of human consciousness… and capture it forever.

Together, they will produce a result beyond anything they could have conceived, sending Tyler far beyond the frontiers of medical science into an astonishing netherworld of man and machine—a place no living person has gone before and from which one desperate person will try to bring him back.

Skyler isn’t sure how old he is. He and a group of others his age have spent their entire lives on a secluded island under close supervision. But now he’s made a terrifying discovery, and he’s fleeing for his life. Jude, a young Manhattan journalist, may be the only person who can help him. But when Skyler finds his way to Jude, they’re both bewildered. They look identical. Pursued by deadly assailants, their only hope of survival lies in solving the mystery behind a horrifying science experiment. This intriguing blend of cutting-edge science and fast-paced adventure presents an eerily plausible scenario.

What led Darwin to the theory of evolution? Why did he wait twenty-two years to write On the Origin of Species? Why was he incapacitated by mysterious illnesses and frightened of travel? Who was his secret rival? These are some of the questions driving Darnton’s richly dramatic narrative, which unfolds through three vivid points of view: Darwin’s own as he sails around the world aboard the Beagle; his daughter Lizzie’s as she strives to understand the guilt and fear that struck her father at the height of his fame; and that of present-day anthropologist Hugh Kellem and Darwin scholar Beth Dulicmer, whose obsession with Darwin (and with each other) drives them beyond the accepted boundaries of scholarly research. What Hugh and Beth discover–Lizzie’s diaries and letters lead them to a hidden chapter of Darwin’s autobiography–is a maze of bitter rivalries, petty deceptions, and jealously guarded secrets, at the heart of which lies the birth of the theory of evolution.

With The Darwin Conspiracy, John Darnton again delivers a stunning tapestry of history and imagination, a galvanizing novel.

Bad news is brewing in the inner sanctum of the New York Globe, the city’s long-standing newspaper of note, whose back is to the wall. Readership, advertising, and circulation are plummeting—along with the paper’s vaunted standards—and the cost cutters have their knives out. But trouble of a wholly different kind begins one rainy September morning when a powerful editor is found murdered in the newsroom, with the spike that he’d wielded to kill stories hammered into his chest. The problem for Priscilla Bollingsworth, the young, ambitious female NYPD detective assigned to the case—besides the fact that the mayor is breathing down her neck—is that there are too many suspects to choose from.

She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, and together they navigate the ink-infested waters whose denizens include the paper’s resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a rival newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. But the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over.

Armed with the firsthand knowledge he has acquired through forty years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining—if not yet murderous—newspaper industry. Black and White and Dead All Over is a satirical mystery that entertains from first to last.