The Inland Ground is Richard Rhodes's first book. It was published quietly in 1970 to critical acclaim (The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of the year) but few sales. In the two decades that followed, Rhodes published ten more books, including A Hole in the World, Farm, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for which he won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, Rhodes contends, some of his best writing is collected here, in The Inland Ground, sixteen essays that evoke...

When Mevrouw Jackie Lambert opens her New Amsterdam tavern in 1626, she jumps aboard a madcap ride through New York history. With a razor-sharp tongue and the tastiest beer on either side of the Atlantic, Jackie spurs the tiny Manhattan settlement toward a head-on collision with the tyrannical Dutchmen who rule it. Poison, blackmail, murder, all are fair game as she fends off threats to the family she yearned for growing up as an orphan. And when pegleg Peter Stuyvesant would rather destroy the town than surrender his honor, Jackie must take history into her own hands or lose everything she...