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End-of-the-Year Contest 2015

Congratulations to the winners of our 2015 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 33 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2015, while 11 others won a selection of three of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2015's Bets On selections.

Spring Preview 2015

The arrival of spring signals the end of our Spring Preview contests. Many thanks to all who entered --- and a big congratulations to all our winners! You can see the winners here, and below are the books coming out this spring that we believe you’ll be talking about over the next few months.

Week of August 8, 2016

Paperback releases for the week of August 8th include THE HEART GOES LAST by Margaret Atwood, a vivid, urgent vision of development and decay, freedom and surveillance, struggle and hope --- and the timeless workings of the human heart; COMETH THE HOUR, the sixth and penultimate book in Jeffrey Archer's Clifton Chronicles series; FINALE, a work of fiction from Thomas Mallon that captures the crusading ideologies, blunders and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Ronald Reagan years; SHOWDOWN, a biography by Wil Haygood that details the life and career of Thurgood Marshall, one of the most transformative legal minds of the past hundred years; and GOLDENEYE, in which Matthew Parker explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Ian Fleming’s iconic post-war hero, James Bond.

August 2016

August's roundup of History titles includes AMERICAN HEIRESS, Jeffrey Toobin's definitive account of the kidnapping, crimes and trial of Patty Hearst, which defined an insane era in American history; A SQUARE MEAL by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, an in-depth exploration of the greatest food crisis the nation has ever faced --- the Great Depression --- and how it transformed America’s culinary culture; THE BOOK, in which Keith Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today; and Brian McGinty's THE REST I WILL KILL, a surprising work of narrative history and detection that illuminates one of the most daring --- and long-forgotten --- heroes of the Civil War: William Tillman, an African-American sailor who was born a free man.

March 2015

March’s roundup of History titles includes DEAD WAKE, Erik Larson’s enthralling account of the sinking of the Lusitania that also brings to life a cast of evocative characters --- from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson; THE DEATH OF CAESAR, the exciting, dramatic story of one of history’s most famous events --- the death of Julius Caesar --- which is now placed in full context of Rome’s civil wars by Barry Strauss; THE GREAT DIVIDE, in which acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming examines how the differing temperaments and leadership styles of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson shaped two opposing views of the presidency --- and the nation; and A GREAT AND TERRIBLE KING, the first major biography of King Edward I, whose reign was one of the most dramatic and important of the entire Middle Ages, leading to war and conquest on an unprecedented scale.

Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born --- Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker

March 2015

I have a thing for the James Bond franchise that goes beyond gadgets and Bond Girls. As an Anglophile, it even goes beyond the fact that Bond is a British icon. Instead, I love to look at James Bond and Ian Fleming in their relation to the British psyche of the 1950s and 1960s, a reflection of a nation with a changing identity as the colonies that once made up so much of its identity started to peel away one by one, amidst the physical and mental rebuilding after the destruction of World War II.