Dave Davies

As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaches, a new biography by journalist Peter Bergen traces Osama bin Laden's path from a shy, religious teenager to the leader of a global jihadist group dedicated to mass murder.

In their new book, Forget the Alamo, Bryan Burrough and co-writers Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford challenge common misconceptions surrounding the conflict — including the notion that Davy Crockett was a martyr who fought to the death rather than surrender.

In his new book, Mercury Rising, Jeff Shesol writes about Friendship 7, the United States' first mission to put an astronaut in orbit around the Earth and, more broadly, about how Cold War fears fueled the early days of the space program.