Books published by publisher Overlook Hardcover

When we turn on the tap or twist open a tall, cold plastic bottle, we might not give a second thought to where our drinking water comes from. But how it gets from the ground to the glass is far more complex than we might think. With concerns over pollution and new technologies like fracking, is it safe to drink tap water? Should we feel guilty buying bottled water? Is the water we drink vulnerable to terrorist attacks? With springs running dry and reservoirs emptying, where is our water going to come from in the future?In Drinking Water, Duke University professor and environmental policy expert James Salzman shows how drinking water highlights the most pressing issues of our time--from globalization and social justice to terrorism and climate change--and how humans have been wrestling with these problems for centuries. From the aqueducts of Rome to the revolutionary sewer system in nineteenth-century London to today’s state-of-the-art desalination plants, safety and scarcity of water have always been one of society’s most important functions.

After the Y2K panic had subsided and the streets of Times Square were cleared, America woke up to a new century shocked to find itself more or less the same as it was before. Following the lives of a group of sharply drawn characters in this uncannily hip and savagely satirical new novel from the acclaimed Sewanee Writers’ Series, Greg Williams takes us to the heart of the postmillennial psyche. Jonathan Scarver, CEO of Internet start-up Allminder.com, has Midas-like visions of wealth and an IPO scheduled for late spring guaranteed to skyrocket the value of his stock options to obscenity, if he can only manage to keep it a secret that the company is nearly bankrupt. His publicity director, Brad Smith, has been relying on the comfort of all-night parties to relieve the stress of work and to drown out the calling of a secret ambition. Around his life circles Nicole, a struggling actress-slash-waitress coping with a post-breakup depression. In a series of just-missed chance encounters and lost opportunities of the kind that can only happen in Manhattan, Brad and Nicole’s orbits nearly collide and are then repelled, spiraling with the city’s gravitational pull toward their destiny. A Bright Lights, Big City for the dot.com age, Boomtown exposes with dry irony and magnetic wisdom the hubris, vanity, and deceit that fueled the staggering climb and precipitous fall of that era’s ambition.

A simple New York City homicide, indistinguishable from hundreds of others in 1938: a spinster nurse is killed in her apartment; a suspect is caught and convicted. Fintan Dunne, the P.I. lured into the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the complex setup that has put an innocent man on death row, will soon find this to be a murder with tentacles that stretch far beyond the crime scene—to Nazi Germany, in fact. Following it to the end leads him into a murderous conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination. Grim clouds are roiling over Berlin; plans for a coup are forming among a cadre of Wehrmacht officers in Berlin. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Military Intelligence, is gripped by paralysis over the choice he must make: join the plotters in treason and violate every value he holds as an officer, or betray them to the Gestapo and forsake the country's last hope to avert utter destruction and centuries of shame. With no limits to Hitler's manic pursuit of territorial expansion, with crimes against his people lauded as a program of racial cleansing at the vanguard of the "scientific" eugenics movement launched in America and Britain, the "hour of the cat" looms when every German must make a choice. When Canaris recieves an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, his hour has come. Writing with masterful command of fact and fiction, Peter Quinn transports readers to a pre-war New York and Berlin brimming with atmosphere and consequence.

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, firercly independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee partiot-"the colossus of independent," as Thomas Jefferson called him-who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution who rose to become the second Preisent of the United States and saved the coutnry from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as "out of his senses"; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history. Like this masterly, Pulitzer Prise-winning biography Truman, David McCullough's John Adlams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. It is both a riveting portrait of an abundantly human man and a vivid evocation of his time, much of it drawn from an outstanding collection of Adams family letters and diaries. In particular, the more than one thousand surviving letters before John and Abigail Adams, nearly half of which have never been published, provide extraordinary access to their private lives and make it possible to know John Adams as no other major American of his founding eera. As he has with stunning effort in his previous books, McCullough tells the story from within-grom the point of view of the amazing eighteenth century and of those who, caught up in events, had no sure way of knowing how things would turn out.