The number one  New York Times  bestselling authors of  Vanderbilt  return with another  riveting history of  a legendary American family, the  Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune.

The story of the  Astors  is a quintessentially American story-of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society.

The family  fortune,  first made  by  a  beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,  was  then amplified by holdings in  Manhattan  real estate. Over the ensuing generations,  Astors  ruled  Gilded Age  New York society  and  inserted themselves into political and cultural life,  but also suffered the most  famous loss on the  Titanic,  one of  many shocking and unexpected twists in  the family’s story.

In this unconventional, page-turning  historical biography, featuring black-and-white and color photographs,  #1  New York Times  bestselling authors  Anderson Cooper and  Katherine  Howe  chronicle the lives of the  Astors  and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America-offering a window onto the making of America itself.

Today, she argues, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings-not least the duty to wage holy war-are incompatible with the values of a free society.  

For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation-a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity-is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness-not least by Muslim women-to think freely and to speak out.

Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” she writes. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech.

Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures,  Heretic  is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world’s number one problem.