Books published by publisher atlantic Monthly

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African-American family from Civil War to Civil Rights.Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Combining personal and national history, The Black Calhouns is a unique and vibrant portrait of six generations during dynamic times of struggle and triumph.

Killing Pablo is the story of the fifteen-month manhunt for Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, whose escape from his lavish, mansionlike jail drove a nation to the brink of chaos. In a gripping, up-close account, acclaimed journalist Mark Bowden exposes the never-before-revealed details of how U.S. military and intelligence operatives covertly led the mission to find and kill the world's most dangerous outlaw. Drawing on unprecedented access to the soldiers, field agents, and officials involved in the chase, as well as hundreds of pages of top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations, Bowden creates a narrative that reads as if it were torn from the pages of a Tom Clancy technothriller. Killing Pablo also tells the story of Escobar's rise, how he built a criminal organization that would hold an entire nation hostage -- and the stories of the intrepid men who would ultimately bring him down. There is Steve Jacoby, the leader of Centra Spike, the ultrasecret U.S. special forces team that would use cutting-edge surveillance technology to find one man among a nation of 37 million. There is Morris Busby, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, who would convince the Bush administration to approve the deployment of the shadowy Delta Force operators who would be the key to the drug lord's demise. And there is Escobar's archenemy, Col. Hugo Martinez, the leader of Colombia's federal police, who would turn down a $6 million bribe, survive countless attempts on his life, and endure a humiliating exile while waging his battle against the drug lord's criminal empire. It was Martinez's son, raised in the shadow of constant threat from Escobar's followers, who would ultimately track the fugitive to a Bogota rooftop on the fateful day in 1993 when the outlaw would finally meet his end. Action-packed and unputdownable, Killing Pablo is a tour de force of narrative journalism and a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.

Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness — so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive — continues in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit — to accepting the truth about one’s personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships.

From a Sports Illustrated senior writer, “a richly detailed history of Aliquippa football . . . A remarkable story of urban struggle and athletic prowess” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the early twentieth century, down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company built one of the largest mills in the world and a town to go with it. Aliquippa was a beacon and a melting pot, pulling in thousands of families from Europe and the Jim Crow South. The J&L mill, though dirty and dangerous, offered a chance at a better life. It produced the steel that built American cities and won World War II and even became something of a workers’ paradise. But then, in the 1980s, the steel industry cratered. The mill closed. Crime rose and crack hit big. But another industry grew in Aliquippa. The town didn’t just make steel; it made elite football players, from Mike Ditka to Ty Law to Darrelle Revis. Few places churned out talent like Aliquippa, a town not far from the birthplace of professional football in western Pennsylvania. Despite its troubles—maybe even because of them—Aliquippa became legendary for producing football greatness. A masterpiece of narrative journalism, Playing Through the Whistle tells the remarkable story of Aliquippa and through it, the larger history of American industry, sports, and life. Like football, it will make you marvel, wince, cry, and cheer. “Looks at the struggling steel town of Aliquippa, Pa., through the prism of its high school football team. The author understands the Rust Belt particulars of the region better than most political professionals.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A history cum memoir by Lena Horne’s daughter tells the story of her forebears . . . eloquently conveys . . . how politics and prejudice can shape a family.” —The New Yorker In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to Civil Rights. Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining personal and national history, The Black Calhouns is a unique and vibrant portrait of six generations during dynamic times of struggle and triumph. “The challenge of reviewing extraordinary books is that they leave one grasping for words . . . The book’s ultimate magic derives from the way the history of black America can be viewed through their story.” —The Boston Globe

This “richly detailed and expertly plotted” historical epic chronicles the dark secrets and forbidden loves of an American family across three generations (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier meets a runaway slave and returns with her to his family homestead in Vermont, launching the story of a bold, interracial union and its myriad consequences. This passionate couple and their descendants will grapple with the ongoing devastations of the war, racism, and a haunting family legacy that lies dormant until a grandson is driven to discover the secret of his ancestors. Spanning the post–Civil War era to the edge of the Great Depression, In the Fall is an expansive saga of a rapidly evolving America—from life on a farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging in the resort towns of New Hampshire, to the advent of modern times. “Remarkable for its grace, felicity and precision,” Jeffrey Lent’s debut novel is an utterly compelling vision of America, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash “Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light.” —Tim Pears “Sentence by sentence . . . Lent’s language draws you in like a clear stream in summer.” —Tim Gautreaux

When DI Tom Thorne is called in to do a routine assessment at the site of a suicide, he expects to be in and out in no time. But when he arrives at the scene of the crime, where a young woman threw herself in front of an underground train, something chills the detective, and he decides to take a closer look. When a young man turns up bludgeoned to death.

The true story of a jihadi convert seeking redemption in “a rollicking read and a rare insider’s account of Western spying in the age of al Qaeda” (The New York Times Book Review). Standing over six feet tall with flaming red hair, Morten Storm was an unlikely jihadi. But after a troubled youth in his native Denmark, Storm found peace and purpose in his conversion to Islam. His absolute devotion only grew after he attended a militant madrasa in Yemen, named his son Osama, and became close friends with American-born terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Then, after a decade of jihadi life, he not only rejected extremism—he began a quest for atonement, becoming a double agent for the CIA as well as British and Danish intelligence agencies. Agent Storm takes readers inside the fanatical jihadist mindset and into the shadows of the world’s most powerful spy agencies in an action-packed account that “reads like a screenplay for a James Bond movie written by Joel and Ethan Coen” (The Washington Post).

By June 1941, Germany’s war machine looked to be unstoppable. The Nazi blitzkrieg had taken Poland, France, and Holland with shocking speed. The Luftwaffe had bombed London, while German U-boats wrought havoc on Allied shipping on the Atlantic. And yet, as James Holland shows at the start of The Allies Strike Back, 1941-1943―the second volume in his magisterial narrative of World War II in the West―cracks were already appearing in Germany’s apparent invincibility. Shortages of food and materiel were becoming critical. And, having failed to defeat Britain, Adolf Hitler fatefully pivoted east to invade the Soviet Union―territory he felt compelled to conquer for Germany’s protection―and on June 22, 1941 precipitated the largest clash of arms the world had ever seen. Built for speed and quick conquest, German forces by that fall were bogged down in a horrible war of attrition that blunted the Nazi momentum.The Allies Strike Back offers fascinating new perspective on the critical middle years in World War II’s western theatre, as the advantage between Axis and Allied forces swung back and forth on the Atlantic and eastern front, and in north Africa and Europe. Acclaimed historian James Holland has spent years conducting original research and interviews, mining newly available archives, visiting battlefields and uncovering letters and diaries previously unread. Acknowledging that strategy and tactics have been the focus of previous histories, he gives equal space to the logistics and supply of men and materiel without which no war can be fought. Allied and Axis leaders criss-cross Holland’s narrative, but he also memorably introduces readers to heretofore unknown participants: Sgt. Ralph Schaps, who experienced the Louisiana Maneuvers that propelled him into Europe; Colonel Hermann Balck, in command of a German panzer regiment in Africa; U-boat captain Teddy Suhren, operating against Allied shipping in the Atlantic; Billy Drake, squadron commander in Britain’s Desert Air Force that helped turn the tide in North Africa; and many others.Following the acclaimed first volume of his trilogy, The Rise of Germany, and offering frank assessments of successes and failures on both sides, James Holland has crafted a masterful and gripping narrative of the events that ultimately determined the outcome of World War II.

One evening, not long after ending a stint as the pop music critic at the Montreal Gazette, Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Cello Suites." There, something unlikely happened: he fell deeply in love with the music. So began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Part biography, part music history, and part mystery, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic narratives: Bach's composition of the suites and the manuscript's subsequent disappearance in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's historic discovery of the music in Spain in the late nineteenth century, and his popularization of the suites several decades later; and Siblin's own infatuation with the suites at the dawn of the twenty-first century. His search to learn all he can about the music leads Siblin to Barcelona, where Pablo Casals, just thirteen and in possession of his first cello, roamed the back streets with his father, in search of sheet music