Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while on an art-collecting trip in the Asmat region along the coast of southwest New Guinea. His boat capsized in rough waters, and, after he and a companion had waited overnight for rescue, Rockefeller decided to swim to shore, buoyed by two empty gasoline cans. He was never seen again—at least not by any witnesses who’ve been willing to come forward.

The official cause of death was drowning at sea. But even as the search for young Rockefeller was still going on, rumors began surfacing that he had been killed and eaten by Asmat natives, among whom cannibalism was still a common and sacred practice. The aim of Savage Harvest is to settle the question of Rockefeller’s fate, just as earlier books and articles have attempted.

Since Carl Hoffman opens his narrative with a jarringly graphic description of what might have been Rockefeller’s last agonizing minutes, it will come as no surprise that he is indeed convinced that the young man was cannibalized. A contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, Hoffman forms and undergirds his thesis by visiting the same villages Rockefeller scoured for art objects, interviewing descendants and kinsmen of those rumored to have killed him and uncovering personal correspondences and official documents concerning the disappearance. He also explains how the politics of the region— waning Dutch colonialism vs. rising Indonesian nationalism—figured into the story.

Hoffman depicts Rockefeller as a young man bent on pleasing his doting father—talented, to be sure, but a bit overeager and entitled, and oblivious to the fact that the art objects he was acquiring so matter-of-factly still had deep spiritual significance to their creators. Among local tribes, the author explains, taking revenge against one’s enemies was a way of restoring balance to the universe. He speculates that Rockefeller was probably killed in response to a Dutch raid on a native village three years earlier in which the main tribal leaders were slaughtered.

Hoffman’s quest is to discover physical or eyewitness evidence that Rockefeller made it to shore and there met his end. Whether his findings achieve the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” readers are left to decide for themselves.

The damp practically floats off the pages in Astoria, the sweeping tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to settle the remote Pacific Northwest coast in 1810. Astor’s vast wealth enabled him to send two expeditions: one over land and one by ship. His plan was to set up a fur trade, the first on this particularly harsh stretch of the West Coast. Whoever could settle the area would lay claim to a vast area rich with sea otter and beaver fur, salmon and other seafood.

It’s hard to decide which party had the rougher journey. The overland party climbed snowy mountains, nearly starved and was attacked by Native Americans. The seafarers didn’t do much better, a motley crew of Americans and Scots who encountered rogue waves, endured water shortages and squabbled their way around Cape Horn to the rocky coastline where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean.

Author Peter Stark retraces the journey in spellbinding detail, making use of journals to get inside the minds of these explorers who set out just two years after Lewis and Clark successfully crossed the continent.

“We climbed mountains so high that I could hardly believe our horses would get over them,” wrote Wilson Price Hunt, whom Astor chose to lead the overland party. “We could advance only with the greatest difficulty because of the sharp rocks, and the precipices plunge to the very banks of the river.”

Almost half of the 140 travelers died before ever laying eyes on Astoria. Those who did straggle in to the muddy settlement found something other than paradise awaiting them.

“[I]magine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring,” Stark writes. “It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia—the infinite gray coastline stretches away backed by the thick, dark rainforest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs.”

Stark is a correspondent for Outside, and his outdoor-writing bona fides are put to excellent use here. Astoria brings to life a harrowing era of American exploration.

On July 21, 1999, a crane lowered experienced construction diver DJ Gillis and four other men down a 420-foot shaft to the opening of an almost 10-mile tunnel beneath Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At the end of the day, only three men would return alive.

In a compelling tale of corporate and public mismanagement, Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey tells the gripping stories of courage, deceit and devastating loss that emerged from the Deer Island debacle in Trapped Under the Sea.

After Boston Harbor was rated one of the most polluted in the nation, public officials launched a $300 million project in the early 1990s to pipe wastewater through a tunnel to the ocean. In spite of significant early progress, work on the tunnel eventually bogged down. By the time Gillis and his co-workers were hired to unplug a series of smaller pipes, the companies that built the tunnel had all but abandoned it, raising many questions. “How could this idea of sending divers to a place as remote as the moon, asking them to entrust their lives to an improvised, untested breathing system, have ever made sense to sensible people?” Swidey asks. “The answer,” he points out, “lies in the dangerous cocktail of time, money, stubbornness, and frustration near the end of the over-budget, long delayed job.”

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Swidey pulls us into the lives of the divers and the aftermath of the perfect storm of forces that led to the deaths of two of them. He chronicles the psychological trauma into which the three surviving divers spiral, emphasizing that no matter how the tunnel project was successfully completed, “no one came out of this feeling like a winner.”

In this compelling page-turner, Swidey grabs us as soon as we enter that narrow elevator shaft and never lets up as we accompany the men on their sad and frightening journey.

Dreaming of April in Paris? In How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, astute cultural observer Joan DeJean argues that Paris has been a modern, alluring city far longer than we usually imagine. Although we tend to think of 19th-century Paris as the bustling epitome of “la vie moderne,” the roots of all we know and love about Paris today actually came into being in the 17th century.

While DeJean’s depth and scope of research are impressive, this fascinating portrait is anything but a dry history. Like its subject, DeJean’s biography of Paris emanates charm and wit. She builds her argument for the 17th-century origins of modern Paris piece by piece, unraveling the stories of how the city’s architectural elements helped to shape its urban landscape to make it “the capital of the universe.”

She begins with the oldest bridge in Paris—the Pont Neuf—which served as the 17th century’s equivalent to the Eiffel Tower (which wasn’t erected until 1889). Created by Henry IV as a center for his new capital, the Pont Neuf ushered in the concept of modern street life, including a sidewalk for promenading and street vendors.

DeJean unveils fascinating details about other aspects of the emerging city, covering the Place des Vosges, the enchanted oasis of Ile Saint-Louis and the city’s great boulevards and parks. What makes DeJean’s analysis so intriguing is her capacity to weave strands of history together. She shows, for example, how the freedom women achieved by walking along the Pont Neuf and the city’s boulevards translated into other areas of social discourse. With such rich context, How Paris Became Paris is more than a history: It’s the best kind of travel guidebook.

Historian Catherine Bailey was all set to write a book about the impact of World War I on the people who lived on the Duke of Rutland’s huge estate in the Midlands of England. As part of her research, she delved into the family archives at the duke’s stately home, Belvoir Castle—and found another story that makes the fictional shenanigans at Downton Abbey look like a tea party.

Bailey noticed an oddity: There was a gap in the papers of the 9th Duke, John, covering a crucial period of his wartime military service. More digging revealed two similar gaps. John was an odd duck, by nature an obsessive collector. The missing papers could not be happenstance. Was he hiding something?

He was indeed. The Secret Rooms is Bailey’s gripping account of her quest to unravel the mystery. It’s an astonishing story that uncovers the dark side of the aristocracy at a time when dukes were still rich and powerful but were facing the decline of their fortunes. Impelled by family hatred and greed, John’s parents—Henry, the 8th Duke, and his wife, Violet—stopped at nothing to stem that decline: financial fraud, lies, subversion of the legal, military and medical systems, sexual coercion and cover-ups.

Their guilt-ridden son managed to destroy much of the evidence before his death in the castle’s “secret rooms.” But Bailey doggedly pursues the truth. She finds an expert to crack the code John used in his letters. She interviews aged servants. She mines other aristocrats’ archives, finds Violet’s unburned letters and pores over the memoir by John’s sister, the once-famous Lady Diana Manners. The ugly secrets are revealed.

The Secret Rooms is a fabulous read. Bailey ably alternates chapters between her own search and her findings about what John was trying to conceal. A family tree, a map of the estate and floor plans of Belvoir help us follow along. Only a few people emerge with reputation intact—Lady Diana, for one. John himself is ultimately a tragic figure who paid quite a price for his “noble” family’s survival at the top of the heap.

Unfair as it may be, when most Americans think of Amsterdam, we think of drugs and the red light district. Yet in Amsterdam, Russell Shorto’s deeply fascinating history of what he calls “the world’s most liberal city,” we learn that this place steeped in history, art and philosophy is so much more.

Amsterdam began as a soggy little fishing village where herring was about the best thing going. Then, in 1345, a dying man threw up a Eucharist. The host was still whole, and would not burn. Clearly this was a divine act—Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body of Christ. Thousands made pilgrimages to Amsterdam, the first time most people on the continent paid attention to it. The street through which the pilgrims streamed into town was called the Holy Way and today is called Overtoom, which Shorto describes as “a gritty, Broadway-like stretch of drab shops and rental car outlets . . . chockablock with an unholy assembly of jewelry stores and designer shoe shops.”

Therein lies the best thing about this truly nifty book: Shorto zooms back and forth from medieval times to modern life, boggling the reader’s mind with how much things change and yet stay the same.

The café where Shorto wrote much of the book? Used to be the house where Rembrandt lived with his wife before she died and he took up with the maid. That bridge he’s standing on? The site of the world’s first true stock market, where residents gathered to buy shares in the United East India Company (which, by the way, was the world’s first multinational corporation). By retelling the stories of the city’s residents—some famous, some forgotten—Shorto shows how the Dutch came to value personal liberty while sharing a sense of responsibility: That man-made system keeping the city from being flooded with seawater wasn’t going to pump itself.

“That is the story that Amsterdam tells,” writes Shorto. “Working together, we win land from the sea. Individually, we own it; individually, we prosper, so that collectively we do. Together, we maintain a society of individuals. For an American, raised on a diet of raw individualism, it remains a bit of a challenge to parse that logic.” Shorto does so, beautifully, in this examination of what society can—and perhaps should—be.

Biographer Richard Holmes (The Age of Wonder) has long been fascinated by the Romantics and science, and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air blends his two lifelong passions with a third: ballooning. In some ways his most personal book, Falling Upwards documents more than two centuries of experiments and explorations in aeronautics, anchored with a dash of autobiography.

“Show me a balloon and I’ll tell you a story,” Holmes says, and what stories! There’s John Money, who in 1785 piloted a hydrogen balloon over England to raise money for a hospital, only to be blown out to sea and miraculously rescued. There’s Thomas Harris, who in 1824 died in a balloon crash, but managed to save the life of one “Miss Stocks,” the pretty girl who was with him in the basket. There are the military reconnaissance balloons of the American Civil War, and the balloon postal service deployed by the French during the siege of 1870. Pretty Edwardian girls in balloons, brash showmen in balloons and tourists in balloons: all seekers of the “angel’s eye view” of the Earth.

In the past 200 years, balloons have evolved from the early hydrogen balloons of the inventive Montgolfier brothers, to the coal gas balloons of the Victorians, and onward to the relatively safer hot air balloons of today. But the human desire for flight has remained consistent throughout. Ballooning, Holmes tells us, concerns our desire for liberation (as in the thrilling story of the East German family who escaped to West Germany in a homemade balloon in 1978), and is emblematic of a romantic longing to fly and look at humanity from a bird’s-eye view.

How fitting then that Holmes includes—among the many engaging illustrations accompanying his text—the famous “Earthrise” photo taken by Apollo 11 from the moon in 1969. That haunting image of our blue planet emblematizes the collective desire of each of the aeronauts documented here; as Holmes puts it, “the dream of flight is to see the world differently.”

Erudite and chatty, this is a book for everyone who has ever dreamed of flying.

Award-winning journalist Wil S. Hylton has contributed stories to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone and other national periodicals. His previous assignments involved some interesting physical challenges, but his new book, Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, offered him the storyteller’s task of rigorously and accurately bringing to life the exploits of a team of modern-day sleuths hell-bent on tracking down the remains of World War II MIAs from the Pacific Ocean theater.

The story begins with an old trunk passed down to a Texan named Tommy Doyle, whose father Jimmie was reported missing in the South Pacific when the B-24 bomber on which he served was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. Doyle senior, it turns out, was but one of many Navy fliers whose whereabouts—and ultimate fate—remained unaccounted for. Enter Pat Scannon, a medical doctor but also a man of varied other talents and with a dogged curiosity about the events of WWII. In the early ’90s, Scannon and other researchers gained notoriety when they located a sunken Japanese trawler downed by Navy flier George H.W. Bush in July 1944. Scannon’s subsequent research into military records and his investigations into the fighting around the Palau barrier reef have led to the salvaging of many downed U.S. warplanes, not to mention the physical remains of MIAs whose families had grieved uncertainly for decades.

Much of this volume concerns itself with the underwater archaeology relevant to a bomber, the 453, that disappeared over Palau carrying 11 men on September 1, 1944. While Scannon is the story’s major player, there are other amazingly determined and dedicated men and women—scientists, military personnel, divers, archivists, historians, plus local island inhabitants drawing from their eyewitness memories of actual events—without whom the many clues might never have been precisely collected.

Besides the many-angled aspects of the seemingly impossible search and recovery missions, Hylton’s narrative covers the broader historical perspective via useful material concerning the military background to the war in the Pacific. He also gives poignant insights into the families of the missing men, some of whom ultimately found a certain closure that had once seemed unattainable.