JUST RELEASED!
Unholy Business
A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land
(Collins, Oct 2008)

Israel, with 30,000 archeological digs crammed with Bible- era artifacts, and fever-pitch religious extremists vying for proof of faith and history, is the setting for this gripping story from the eccentric world of Biblical archaeology and high-end relic collection. Surrounded by a cast of colorful characters—scholars, evangelicals, detectives, billionaires and dealers—a pair of scholar-cops stalk a wily millionaire who conducted what Israeli police called “the fraud of the century.” Two objects at the center of the fraud—the James Ossuary and the Joash Tablet—were only the tip of the iceberg. Museum shelves worldwide may still display fakes from his workshop.

Unholy Business takes readers into the murky world of Holy Land relic dealing from the back alleys of Jerusalem’s Old City to New York’s Fifth Avenue, and reveals Biblical archaeology as it is pulled apart by religious believers on one side and scientists on the other.

Mirage
Napoleon's Scientists and
the Unveiling of Egypt
(Harper, Nov 2007)

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peek inside Mirage

Little more than two hundred years ago, only the most reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern-day Middle East. Its history and peoples were the subject of much myth and speculation—and no region aroused greater interest than Egypt, where reports of mysterious monuments, inscrutable hieroglyphics, rare silks and spices, and rumors of lost magical knowledge tantalized dreamers and taunted the power-hungry.

It was not until 1798, when an unlikely band of scientific explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners received their first real glimpse of what lay beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

Under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Army, a small and little-known corps of Paris's brightest intellectual lights left the safety of their laboratories, studios, and classrooms to embark on a thirty-day crossing into the unknown—some never to see French shores again. Over 150 astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, doctors, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists—even a poet and a musicologist—accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. Carrying pencils instead of swords, specimen jars instead of field guns, these highly accomplished men participated in the first large-scale interaction between Europeans and Muslims of the modern era. And many lived to tell the tale.

Hazarding hunger, hardship, uncertainty, and disease, Napoleon's scientists risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. They approached the land not as colonizers, but as experts in their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and collecting their finds—from the ruins of the colossal pyramids to the smallest insects to the legendary Rosetta Stone.

Those who survived the three-year expedition compiled an exhaustive encyclopedia of Egypt, twenty-three volumes in length, which secured their place in history as the world's earliest-known archaeologists. Unraveling the mysteries that had befuddled Europeans for centuries, Napoleon's scientists were the first to document the astonishing accomplishments of a lost civilization—before the dark shadow of empire-building took Africa and the Middle East by storm.

Internationally acclaimed journalist Nina Burleigh brings readers back to a little-known landmark adventure at the dawn of the modern era—one that ultimately revealed the deepest secrets of ancient Egypt to a very curious continent.

Groks Science Radio Show
March 26, 2008
The exploration of Egypt and the Middle East remained largely unknown to European scientists until 1798. At that time, a group of scientists, engineers, and artists began exploring the region under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. On this program, Nina Burleigh discussed Napoleon, his scientists, and the exploration of Egypt.

Why didn't he explore the Bahamas... ;)

The Stranger and the Statesman
James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian
(William Morrow, October 2003)

Combining the charming eccentricity of The Professor and the Madman with the brilliant insight of Founding Brothers, here is a riveting biography of a little-known scientist and his incomparable legacy. It was one of the world’s greatest philanthropic gifts—and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829 a wealthy naturalist named James Smithson—a self exiled outsider, and the bastard son of the first Duke of Northumberland, who though obscure, associated with some of the most brilliant European scientists of his time, men who were laying the groundwork for what we now know about chemistry, electricity, and the atom—left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune “to the United States of America, to found . . .“an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”—even though he’d never visited the U.S. nor knew any Americans.

In this fascinating, illuminating history, Nina Burleigh pieces together the facets of this quirky recluse’s life-a tale of illicit sex, madness, greed, generosity, science, and politics. She reveals how Smithson’s bequest was nearly lost due to fierce clashes among battling Americans-states’ rights advocates, nationalists, federalists, anglophiles, xenophobes, and others. Yet, she details, thanks to the patient efforts of unsung heroes, namely the bristly former president John Quincy Adams, Smithson’s legacy was finally realized in 1846 and has become today one of our most important educational, cultural, and scientific establishments.

A Very Private Woman
The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer
(Hardcover: Bantam Books, 1998)
(Paperback: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1999)

In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation, as Nina Burleigh reveals in her widely praised book, the first to examine this haunting story.