When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

Domestic Art: Curated Interiors captures a mind-set, piques a curiosity to look at things a new, appreciate oddities and revel in uniqueness and personal work. It's a loopy but sublime drawing-room comedy with ghosts of dandies and soulful poets and style aesthetes... all lounging, sipping and chattering away in 18th-century chateaux inserted into downtown lofts, whitewashed shotgun houses filled with Twomblys and Rauschenbergs, and dark-as-a-hedgehog tiny Tudors. The selected houses in this book were pulled from the pages of PaperCity, from the years 2000 to 2008. Roughly a decade of design alchemy and clinking highballs.

Decline can be avoided. Decline can be detected. Decline can be reversed. Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course? In "How the Mighty Fall", Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course. Collins' research project - more than four years in duration - uncovered five step-wise stages of decline: Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success; Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More; Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril; Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation; and, Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death. By understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom.

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war, at times as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile, French civilians caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing endured terrible suffering. Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation but the whole of the post-war world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe. Making use of overlooked and new material from over thirty archives in half a dozen countries, "D-Day" is the most vivid and well-researched account yet of the battle of Normandy. As with Stalingrad and Berlin, Antony Beevor's gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war.

'Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival mid-western American airport greater _______ area. Flight ____. Date ______. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name. Operation Havoc. Fellow operatives already pass immigrant control, through secure doors and to embrace own other host family people. Operative Tibor, agent 23; operative Magda, agent 36; operative Ling, agent 19. All violate United States secure port of entry having success. Each now embedded among middle-income corrupt American family, all other homes, other schools, and neighbours of same city. By not after next today, strategy of web of operatives to be established.' Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland (a mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany), as an "exchange student" into the welcoming arms of his Simpsons-spinoff Midwestern host family. Host cow father (he works in the biological weapons complex outside of town), chicken neck mother, pig dog brother, and the disconcertingly self-possessed cat sister introduce Pygmy into the rituals of postmodern American life, which he views with utter contempt. Along with his fellow operatives, all indoctrinated into the mindset of the totalitarian state, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat, dumb inhabitants to their knees. Pygmy is a comedy. It is also Chuck Palahniuk's finest, most ambitious novel since Fight Club.

In the 1920s Sydney police began quietly assembling a gallery of the city’s most light-fingered, fleet-footed, silver-tongued rogues – con artists, magsmen, housebreakers, thugs, gunmen, shoplifters, drug dealers, pickpockets and hooligans. These extraordinary images resurfaced in the 1980s, long after the original paperwork had been lost and the crooks, the cops and all who remembered them had passed on. Based on years of research into police files, court records, newspapers and other sources, Crooks like us offers a glimpse into the difficult lives of these fugitive souls – what they did, who they hurt, who hurt them, where they came from and, sometimes, where they ended up. Illustrated with rich, emotionally charged police ‘Special Photographs’ from the Justice & Police Museum, Sydney, Crooks like us opens a secret door onto Sydney’s hidden histories.

Three children wake up in a basement room of a large city hotel. They have been drugged and taken from their beds in the middle of the night. Now they are here. Alone. Where are their parents? Who can they trust? The family has been betrayed to the government and Salt Cottage, their home on a clifftop above the ocean, is no longer safe. Their mother's scientific work has put them all in danger. To protect them, she must let them go. She must put her faith in an old family friend - and in her children's own resilience and courage.