Most Popular Books by David Roberts

In A Newer World, David Roberts serves as a guide through John C. Frémont''s and Kit Carson''s adventures through unknown American territory to achieve manifest destiny. Between 1842 and 1854 John C. Frémont, renowned as the nineteenth century''s greatest explorer, and Kit Carson, the legendary scout and Indian fighter, boldly ventured into untamed territory to fulfill America''s "manifest destiny." Drawing on little-known primary sources, as well as his own travels through the lands Frémont and Carson explored, David Roberts recreates their expeditions, second in significance only to those of Lewis and Clark. A Newer World is a harrowing narrative of hardship and adventure and a poignant reminder of the cultural tragedy that westward expansion inflicted on the Native American.

This book recounts the eventful history of conquests of the mountain-a story of tragedy and triumph told and pictured by the two men perhaps best qualified in all the world to do so.

In a startling look at the classic Annapurna—the most famous book about mountaineering—David Roberts discloses what really happened on the legendary expedition to the Himalayan peak. In June 1950, a team of mountaineers was the first to conquer an 8,000-meter peak. Maurice Herzog, the leader of the expedition, became a national hero in France, and Annapurna, his account of the historic ascent, has long been regarded as the ultimate tale of courage and cooperation under the harshest of conditions. In True Summit, David Roberts presents a fascinating revision of this classic tale. Using newly available documents and information gleaned from a rare interview with Herzog (the only climber on the team still living), Roberts shows that the expedition was torn by dissent. As he re-creates the actual events, Roberts lays bare Herzog''s self-serving determination and bestows long-delayed credit to the most accomplished and unsung heroes. These new revelations will inspire young adventurers and change forever the way we think about this victory in the mountains and the climbers who achieved it.

All About Plants (Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files) is the second book in a nonfiction early reader series based on the Netflix show from New York Times bestselling creator of the Questioneers, Andrea Beaty, and author Theanne Griffith. What do plants eat? Why do some plants have flowers and others don’t? And what’s the tallest plant out there? Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files is the perfect nonfiction resource for all these questions and more. Based on the bestselling series and the Netflix show, this nonfiction series is perfect for the youngest scientists of tomorrow as they learn along with Ada. Designed in a scrapbook format, these books combine art from the show, illustrations, and photography to bring simple science concepts to life. Check out all the books in the Questioneers Series: The Questioneers Picture Book Series: Iggy Peck, Architect | Rosie Revere, Engineer | Ada Twist, Scientist | Sofia Valdez, Future Prez | Aaron Slater, Illustrator | Lila Greer, Teacher of the Year The Questioneers Chapter Book Series: Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters | Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants | Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion | Sofia Valdez and the Vanishing Vote | Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs | Aaron Slater and the Sneaky Snake Questioneers: The Why Files Series: Exploring Flight! | All About Plants! | The Science of Baking | Bug Bonanza! | Rockin’ Robots! Questioneers: Ada Twist, Scientist Series: Ghost Busted | Show Me the Bunny | Ada Twist, Scientist: Brainstorm Book | 5-Minute Ada Twist, Scientist Stories The Questioneers Big Project Book Series: Iggy Peck’s Big Project Book for Amazing Architects | Rosie Revere’s Big Project Book for Bold Engineers | Ada Twist’s Big Project Book for Stellar Scientists | Sofia Valdez’s Big Project Book for Awesome Activists | Aaron Slater’s Big Project Book for Astonishing Artists

A new addition to the Questioneers series, a full-color nonfiction early reader series based on the new Ada Twist, Scientist Netflix series! Why do airplanes look the way they do? Why can’t birds fly when they’re first born? And why do some paper planes fly farther than others? Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files is the perfect nonfiction resource for all these questions and more. Discover everything there is to know about flight from Ada Twist, Scientist—from information about creatures that fly, to the history of aircrafts, to modern technology that allows us to soar through the air faster than ever! Based on the bestselling series and the new Netflix show, this nonfiction series is perfect for the youngest scientists of tomorrow!

Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition. In July 1776, Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to blaze a pathway to the new Spanish missions in California, across the huge expanse of what would become the American Southwest. In October, in western Utah, ravaged by hunger and cold, the twelve-man team had to turn back. Stymied by the raging Colorado River, killing their horses for food, the men saw an exploring expedition transformed into a fight for survival. In this chronicle of adventure and history, David Roberts retraces the Spaniards’ forgotten route, using Escalante’s diary as his guide. Blending personal narrative with critical analysis, Roberts relives the glories, catastrophes, and courage of this desperate journey.

The eighth murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne.

An accessible and engaging introduction to Restoration drama, this book looks at the texts, performances, playhouses and people of seventeenth-century theatre.

This book traces the development of modern Syria focusing on the contribution of the Ba’th party and Ba’thist ideology. It examines the roots of the Ba’th in the intellectual ferment of the 1940s and charts its growing influence on Syrian politics. Special attention is devoted to the crucial Sixth Congress of the Ba’th Party in 1963 and the key ideological document, the Muntalaqat, produced by Michel Aflaq. After 1963 the military became increasingly dominant until Hafiz al-Asad came to power in 1970. Since then the Party has been less dominant internally but Syria itself has established a pivotal position in regional affairs. The book concludes by reviewing the prospects for Syria after Asad and the potential for a Ba’thist revival.

An award-winning author and veteran mountain climber takes us deep into the Southwest backcountry to uncover secrets of its ancient inhabitants. In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

"Gripping and superb. This book will steal the night from you." —Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface. Mawson was sometimes reduced to crawling, and one night he discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the flesh beneath. On February 8, when he staggered back to base, his features unrecognizably skeletal, the first teammate to reach him blurted out, "Which one are you?" This thrilling and almost unbelievable account establishes Mawson in his rightful place as one of the greatest polar explorers and expedition leaders. It is illustrated by a trove of Frank Hurley’s famous Antarctic photographs, many never before published in the United States.

The seventh edition of this two-volume narrative of English history draws on the most up-to-date primary and secondary research, encouraging students to interpret the full range of England''s social, economic, cultural, and political past from its first inhabitants to the 2020s. A History of England, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1714 focuses on the key social, economic, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and political events and themes of English history up to the early eighteenth century. Topics include the Viking and Norman conquests of the eleventh century, the creation of the monarchy, the Reformation, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The text discusses events in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as they affected developments in England. There is a new section dealing with the decline of belief in witchcraft. This book is essential introductory reading for students of the history of England and Britain.

The seventh edition of this two-volume narrative of English history draws on the most up-to-date primary and secondary research, encouraging students to interpret the full range of England''s social, economic, cultural, and political past from its first inhabitants to the 2020s. A History of England, Volume 2: 1688 to the Present focuses on the key social, economic, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and political events and themes of English history since 1688. Topics include Britain''s emergence as a great power in the eighteenth century, the American War for Independence, the Industrial Revolution, and the economic crisis of the 1970s. The text discusses events in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as they affected developments in England. The second volume features an in-depth treatment of the origins and course of the First and Second World Wars and provides an updated analysis of developments since 2012, including an account of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union; the resignations of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss as prime minister; the selection of Rishi Sunak as the nation’s first British Asian prime minister; and a discussion of the 2015, 2017, and 2019 elections. This book is essential introductory reading for students of the history of England and Britain.

The bestselling author of The Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top chronicles his three attempts to climb the world’s tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made—or attempted—the ascent. “Viesturs and Roberts have written an exhaustively researched and wonderfully compelling history of the most fascinating and dangerous of the Himalayan giants.”—David Breashers, veteran mountaineer and documentary filmmaker, director of IMAX film Everest As a high school student, Ed Viesturs read and was captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog’s famous and grisly account of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When he began his own campaign to climb the world’s fourteen highest peaks in the late 1980s, Viesturs looked forward with trepidation to undertaking Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit in 2000 and 2002 made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 ascent was the triumphant capstone of his climbing quest. In The Will to Climb Viesturs and co-author David Roberts bring the extraordinary challenges of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in the mountain’s history, and of his own failed attempts and eventual success. In the process Viesturs ponders what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions—questions, he believes, that we need to answer to lead our lives well.

Restoration London''s leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre''s responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. David Roberts''s entertaining study unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadowy figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton''s relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, Thomas Betterton gives one of England''s greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his death.

By developing a long-term supranational perspective, this ambitious, multi-faceted work provides a new understanding of ‘totalitarianism’, the troubling common element linking Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. The book’s original analysis of antecedent ideas on the subject sheds light on the common origins and practices of the regimes. Through this fresh appreciation of their initial frame of mind, Roberts demonstrates how the three political experiments yielded unprecedented collective mobilization but also a characteristic combination of radicalization, myth-making, and failure. Providing deep historical analysis, the book proves that ''totalitarianism'' best characterizes the common features in the originating aspirations, the mode of action and even the outcomes of Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. By enhancing our knowledge of what ‘totalitarianism’ was and where it came from, Roberts affords important lessons about the ongoing challenges, possibilities, and dangers of the modern political experiment.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938, Verity Browne is one of the first to be deported from Vienna as a well-known anti-Fascist. Before she leaves, she is able to arrange for a young Jew, George Dreiser, to escape to England. But where he expects to find safety, he finds danger and sudden death instead. Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where he least expects it: in the grounds of Lord Mountbatten''s country house. There his nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse. Although the police are satisfied that the man died of natural causes, Edward''s niece persuades Edward that all is not as it seems... In this classic investigation, Verity and Edward find that death comes more often than not to the innocent, and that many lives are left to the mercy of strangers. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

In 1937, 17,150-foot Mt. Lucania was the highest unclimbed peak in North America. But two men--Bradford Washburn and Bob Bates--set out to climb Lucania by flying to the base of the mountain. With the assistance of both men, Roberts, one of the finest writers on mountaineering, narrates this extraordinary journey of conquest and survival with all the richness it deserves. Illustrations & photos.

First published in 1979. This book studies the social outlook which historians today call paternalism. It was an ideology which informed social attitudes at all levels of society and expressed itself in countless ways. In this work, David Roberts provides a comprehensive examination of the revival, amplification, and transformation of the ideals of paternalism as a social remedy in the Early Victorian Period. This title will be of interest to students of history.

In 1743, four stranded Russian sailors survived the next six years in the Arctic with no provisions. Making a bow and arrows from driftwood--since there are no trees there--they survived on reindeer meat until another ship blown off course rescued them.

In analyses of Auto da Fe, Crowds and Power, and the aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti''s interrogation of human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics, theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of Canetti''s thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization."--BOOK JACKET.

“If you’ve run out of Saint-Exupéry and miss the eloquent power of his work, then you are ready to read David Roberts.” —Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why David Roberts has spent his career documenting voyages to the most extreme landscapes on earth. In Limits of the Known, he reflects on humanity’s—and his own—relationship to exploration and extreme risk. Part memoir and part history, this book tries to make sense of why so many have committed their lives to the desperate pursuit of adventure. What compelled Eric Shipton to return, five times, to the ridges of Mt. Everest, plotting the mountain’s most treacherous territory years before Hillary and Tenzing’s famous ascent? What drove Bill Stone to dive 3,000 feet underground into North America’s deepest cave? And what is the future of adventure in a world we have mapped and trodden from end to end? In the wake of his diagnosis with throat cancer, Roberts seeks answers with new urgency and “penetrating self-analysis” (Booklist).

Jean Stafford burst on the literary scene in 1944, when, at the age of twenty-nine, she published her bestselling novel, Boston Adventure. Three years later, Life magazine hailed her as the "most brilliant of the new fiction writers." Bafflingly, for the rest of her life, Stafford would struggle--and fail--to capitalize on that early promise. David Roberts'' compelling biography examines Stafford''s disastrous marriages, including her first marriage to the volatile poet Robert Lowell, which culminated for her in a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital. Beautiful and gifted, Stafford squandered her health as well as her talent, ending her life embittered and alone.

Scottish painter David Roberts visited the Middle East in the 1830s and 40s. This six-volume book contains 247 full-color plates that depict temples, ruins, people and landscapes. Roberts arrived in Alexandria in 1838 and spent 11 months traveling up the Nile River. He filled three sketchbooks with his impressions, which would win critical acclaim when published. Roberts paintings remain some of the most memorable images of the Middle East, and his work won praise from Queen Victoria, John Ruskin and others.