Erik Larson

If Mick Churchill thinks he can buy out half of Shelby Jackson's family-owned race team, she's got news for him. So what if Mick's the most famous soccer star on the globe—with cash, connections and charisma? Fuel line? Finish line? Shelby doubts the Brit knows the difference.Superstar Mick knew buying a NASCAR team was going to be tricky. The truth is the struggling team needs Mick's media savvy and team-building skills—even if Shelby can't admit it. Now, with Daytona just days away, Mick won't quit until he changes Shelby's mind. Any way he can.

From back cover: Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spell-binding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men - the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

One bitter cold morning a sixteen-year-old boy named Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 - touted by its manufacturer as "the gun that made the eighties roar" - stuffed in his backpack. By mid-morning he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another. Only sheer luck kept his rampage from becoming one of the worst in America's long and bloody infatuation with guns. By tracing the history of the Cobray from its design and manufacture to the final, illegal transaction that placed it in Elliot's hands, Lethal Passage provides a stunning expose that will completely reframe the debate surrounding America's gun crisis. Erik Larson immersed himself in America's gun culture. He learned to shoot and to appreciate the sheer fun of the sport, and he even acquired a federal gun-dealer's license. In following Elliot's gun, he uncovered the lax regulations and skewed interest that have perpetuated handgun violence, which has grown to account for 22,000 deaths and thousands more injuries every year. He questions the political and economic forces that allowed the Cobray - originally designed as a battlefield weapon - to be marketed to the public. And he explores the broader cultural forces that nurture our fascination with violence and make gunshot death a routine feature of American life . Compelling, balanced, and timely, Lethal Passage pinpoints one important source of the violence. The Brady Bill may help reduce firearms violence, but its recent passage is only a small step toward stemming the unimpeded flow of guns to America's new generation of killers. Erik Larson offers realistic solutions to a crisis that has now reached epic proportions.

One week after the birth of his second daughter, author Erik Larson stepped out of his front door to find a sample package of Luvs diapers, courtesy of Procter & Gamble. How does a company know the most intimate details of family life? In The Naked Consumer, Larson turns the tables on the snoops and spies: Who are these people who annually record the due dates of 900,000 women in a "Young Family Index," rent each of our names 152 times a year, and make telemarketing. Pitches to 18,000,000 of us every day? And who are the people who have transformed coupons for our favorite items into tools of espionage? Why do we Americans, who claim to revere privacy so much, allow ourselves to be filmed, taped, and analyzed by private-sector corporations seeking no loftier achievement than to sell us the same old toothpaste? Just as the advertising industry focused on motivation research in the 1950s, today corporate America relies on mass. Surveillance to sell its products. As consumer researchers systematically violate our privacy, erode our civil rights, and reinforce class stereotypes, they produce a business culture that shies away from risk and innovation and pays more attention to manipulating our needs and values. Erik Larson's penetrating study chronicles this wildly obsessive and frighteningly intrusive pursuit of the American buyer: how companies use spies, hidden cameras, even sonar and EEG. Machines to understand what makes shoppers tick - and how, in the process, they've accelerated the blanding of America.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.