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Books published by publisher Viking Adult

  • Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait

    Carlos Baker, James R. Mellow

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, April 1, 1996)
    An exhaustively researched, richly detailed biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the writers of the American Renaissance--including Hawthorne and Thoreau--traces their relationships, their daily lives, and the era in which they lived. National ad/promo.
  • The Night Journal

    Elizabeth Crook

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Feb. 2, 2006)
    Feeling oppressed by the romantic accounts of her famous family's history, Meg, the great-granddaughter of a southwestern frontierswoman, reluctantly accompanies her sharp-tongued grandmother to a family property that is being excavated and makes a discovery that challenges the authenticity of revered stories. 40,000 first printing.
  • The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

    Steven Pinker

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Sept. 11, 2007)
    The Pulitzer Prize finalist author of The Blank Slate presents an accessible study of the relationship between language and human nature, explaining how everything from swearing and innuendo to prepositions and baby names reveal facts about key human concepts, emotions, and relationships.
  • The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection

    Ornolfur Thorsson, Jane Smiley, Robert Kellogg

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, March 15, 2000)
    Published in conjunction with the 1,000th anniversary of Leif Eriksson's voyage to America, the Viking "Sagas" commemorate the adventures of the people who first settled Iceland, and then explored Greenland and North America. 20,000 first printing.
  • The Lamorna Wink

    Martha Grimes

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Oct. 1, 1999)
    After taking up residence in an old Cornish manor, Melrose Plant is quickly drawn into a mystery involving the disappearance of his beloved aunt, but when corpses begin surfacing all over the English countryside, Richard Jury will have to step in to sort out the mess
  • I Dreamed of Africa

    Kuki Gallmann

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, May 21, 1991)
    In an eloquent story of romance, sorrow, and Africa, Gallman reveals how her indomitable courage and unending love for Africa helped her overcome the numerous tragedies she suffered on the dark continent
  • The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History

    Joseph M. Marshall III

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Oct. 7, 2004)
    A leading Lakota historian and storyteller offers a lively portrait of Crazy Horse, the era in which he lived, and his legacy, drawing on his own culture's oral tradition and firsthand research to capture diverse aspects of Crazy Horse's life, from the visions that led him to battle to preserve the Lakota homeland to his profound leadership skills. 40,000 first printing.
  • Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time

    Amos Elon

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Nov. 1, 1996)
    Meyer Amschel Rothschild was born in the Frankfurt ghetto in the mid-eighteenth century, in a city more restrictive in its treatment of Jews than any in Europe. Elon brilliantly depicts Meyer Amschel Rothschild's position there, and life on the almost unimaginably cramped Judengasse (the single street of the ghetto), where he lived his whole life - even after becoming one of the richest men in Germany. We read how he established his small trading and banking business, and forged an uneasy relationship (though one mutually profitable in different ways) with the financially obsessed Crown Prince Wilhelm of Kassel; how he pushed at and eventually broke through the restrictions that bound him and his family to the ghetto until he found himself essentially paying for the English war effort in the Peninsula in 1810. On a richly delineated canvas the emergence and secularization of a family and Western European Jewry is depicted.Founder is more than a short biography of an obviously extraordinary man. It is a portrait of Meyer Amschel Rothschild's times, of the condition of the Jews, of the state of Germany until it was overrun by the troops of Napoleonic France, which led to the collapse of the old order. It is about the threshold of modern times, when a world of aristocrats and gentlemen was permanently changed by a shrewd, dedicated, and loyal financier and his family. We still cannot know him as well as we do his children; but at last, in this book, Meyer Amschel Rothschild himself emerges from the shadows of the Judengasse.
  • Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest

    Mark J. Plotkin

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Aug. 1, 1993)
    An ethnobotanist recounts his experiences in the rain forests tracking the shamans whose knowledge of the curative powers of plants and herbs could hold the key to the cure for AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening illnesses. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.
  • Vietnam: A History

    Stanley Karnow

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Oct. 4, 1983)
    An in-depth study of American involvement in Vietnam, from French dominion to the final withdrawal of American forces, discusses the historical background, political maneuvers, military campaigns, participants in, and consequences of American involvement.
  • The Bastard of Istanbul

    Elif Shafak

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, Jan. 18, 2007)
    A second English-language tale by the author of The Saint of Incipient Insanities finds Turkish teen Asya coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.
  • George C. Marshall, Vol. 4: Statesman, 1945-1959

    Forrest C. Pogue

    Hardcover (Viking Adult, June 5, 1987)
    Describes Marshall's accomplishments as special ambassador to China, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and looks at his influence on American postwar politics