On May 3, 1945, the Royal Air Force attacked a fleet of ships carrying ten thousand survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The war was nearly over, and the survivors had endured one of history's most hellish ordeals, only to die at the hand of their allies. The bodies, in the striped...  more

On May 3, 1945, the Royal Air Force attacked a fleet of ships carrying ten thousand survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The war was nearly over, and the survivors had endured one of history's most hellish ordeals, only to die at the hand of their allies. The bodies, in the striped black-and-white uniforms of camp prisoners, were soon washing ashore on the beach by the town of Timmendorf, near the Baltic port of Neustadt. Benjamin Jacobs, then twenty-five, survived by escaping the hold and clinging to wreckage. He was one of only 350 survivors, and one of the last of those. Days before, Jacobs had boarded the Cap Arcona, along with thousands of other prisoners. A commandeered luxury liner, the Cap Arcona was a dilapidated wreck. Nearby, the freighter Theilbeck, in similar condition, was also attacked. There is reason to believe the Germans were intending to sink it themselves. Though they claimed the prisoners were headed to Sweden, the ships may have been nonfunctional. The RAF believed the ships contained escaping SS officers. Tragically, British intelligence may have known who was on the ships, which may explain why the RAF has sealed the records until 2045. This story appears in no history books-not in Germany, England, or the United States. No one tells it. So Benjamin Jacobs must.

A true story about a 15 year old in 1975 that robbed a bank as a solution to his multiple addictions. Things go sour before the robbery begins. The manager is shot, and the juvenile is tried as an adult. Sentenced to life in prison before the time of youthful offender camps, the author gives a...  more

A true story about a 15 year old in 1975 that robbed a bank as a solution to his multiple addictions. Things go sour before the robbery begins. The manager is shot, and the juvenile is tried as an adult. Sentenced to life in prison before the time of youthful offender camps, the author gives a vivid description of how he not only survived but flourished by using his wits, luck, and creative remedies. Growing up in an environment riddled with murders rapes and escapes he manages to put prison life into a perspective anyone can relate to from the convicts point of view.

At a time of increased interest and renewed shock over the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Acres of Skin sheds light on yet another dark episode of American medical history. In this disturbing expose, Allen M. Hornblum tells the story of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. For more than two...  more

At a time of increased interest and renewed shock over the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Acres of Skin sheds light on yet another dark episode of American medical history. In this disturbing expose, Allen M. Hornblum tells the story of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. For more than two decades, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, inmates were used, in exchange for a few dollars, as guinea pigs in a host of medical experiments. Based on in-depth interviews with dozens of prisoners as well as the doctors and prison officials who performed or enforced these experimental tests, Hornblum paints a disturbing portrait of abuse, moral indifference, and greed. Cantral to this account are the millions of dollars many of America's leading drug and consumer goods companies made available for the all too eager doctors seeking fame and fortune through their medical experiments. In addition to testing innocuous commerical products such as detergents, shampoos and diet drinks, the experiments at Holmesburg evolved into a far more dangerous corrupted human laboratory. Hundreds of prisoners were subjected to painful skin hardening experiments, fingernail extraction studies, chemical warfare agents, and frighteningly high does of dioxin and radioactive isotopes. Many of the test subjects became ill, required hospitalization and are scarred for life. However, as prisoners were viewed by corporate America and US government as valuable "raw materials" for product development. In often graphic detail, Acres of Skin exposes what really happened behind the locked doors of this American prison where men were treated like laboratory animals.

The Affair of the Poisons, as it became known, was an extraordinary episode that took place in France during the reign of Louis XIV. When poisoning and black magic became widespread, arrests followed. Suspects included those among the highest ranks of society. Many were tortured and numerous...  more

The Affair of the Poisons, as it became known, was an extraordinary episode that took place in France during the reign of Louis XIV. When poisoning and black magic became widespread, arrests followed. Suspects included those among the highest ranks of society. Many were tortured and numerous executions resulted.The 1676 torture and execution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers marked the start of the scandal which rocked the foundations of French society and sent shock waves through all of Europe. Convicted of conspiring with her adulterous lover to poison her father and brothers in order to secure the family fortune, the marquise was the first member of the noble class to fall.In the French court of the period, where sexual affairs were numerous, ladies were not shy of seeking help from the murkier elements of the Parisian underworld, and fortune-tellers supplemented their dubious trade by selling poison.It was not long before the authorities were led to believe that Louis XIV himself was at risk. With the police chief of Paris police alerted, every hint of danger was investigated. Rumors abounded and it was not long before the King ordered the setting up of a special commission to investigate the poisonings and bring offenders to justice. No one, the King decreed, no matter how grand, would be spared having to account for their conduct.The royal court was soon thrown into disarray. The Mistress of the Robes and a distinguished general were among the early suspects. But they paled into insignificance when the King's mistress was incriminated. If, as was said, she had engaged in vile Satanic rituals and had sought to poison a rival for the King's affections, what was Louis XIV to do?Anne Somerset has gone back to original sources, letters and earlier accounts of the affair. By the end of her account, she reaches firm conclusions on various crucial matters. The Affair of the Poisons is an enthralling account of a sometimes bizarre period in French history.

The 15 years Gregory spent guarding The Rock are distilled into blunt prose and telling anecdotes in his matter-of-fact memoir (though Gregory died in 1996, his widow, Velma, shepherded his manuscript to publication). In 1947, Gregory, a Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) officer, was transferred...  more

The 15 years Gregory spent guarding The Rock are distilled into blunt prose and telling anecdotes in his matter-of-fact memoir (though Gregory died in 1996, his widow, Velma, shepherded his manuscript to publication). In 1947, Gregory, a Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) officer, was transferred to Alcatraz, the precursor of today's "super maximum" prisons. In cool, detailed recollections, Gregory, a trusted officer under four wardens, focuses on the nitty-gritty of Alcatraz management. His ex-marine toughness (he was nearly killed at Iwo Jima) helped him deal fairly if severely with inmates, even as unrest, fueled by drugs and legal challenges, swept through the prison in the 1950s. Gregory's narrative recalls a time when men wore fedoras and spoke in clipped sentences, and his evocation of Alcatraz has the austerity of classic prison films: "I got my usual headlock on the convict, pulled him out and steered him into the Hole." He has an eye for important details, from the blackjacks (small lead clubs) carried by guards that were banned elsewhere to the subtleties of prison race relations in the pre-civil rights era. He's unsympathetic to the inmates' crooked ways, and yet he struggles to believe that they're redeemable men. Factual and disciplined, this is a valuable bit of history, and FBP archivist Roberts's helpful introduction tackles the myths about Alcatraz, and how the FBP's "media blackout" policy regarding its famous inmates, such as "Machine Gun" Kelly, helped fuel them. Illus. (July) Forecast: Unlike Ted Conover's Newjack, this isn't for the literary; but hard-core true-crime and prison buffs will find it offers a rare look inside The Rock. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Alma Rose's tragic story, from her birth and youth in the exalted musical circles of Vienna (her father was leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, her uncle was Gustav Mahler) to her death at Auschwitz, first came to public attention through the 1980 film Playing for Time. As leader of the only...  more

Alma Rose's tragic story, from her birth and youth in the exalted musical circles of Vienna (her father was leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, her uncle was Gustav Mahler) to her death at Auschwitz, first came to public attention through the 1980 film Playing for Time. As leader of the only women's orchestra in the Nazi camps, by force of her will and spirit, she molded a terrified group of young musicians into an ensemble that became their sole hope of survival. And although Alma herself died of a sudden illness shortly before the liberation of the camps, she saved the lives of some four dozen members of the orchestra. In telling her full story for the first time, Richard Newman and Karen Kirtley honor her and the valiant prisoner-musicians for whom music meant life.

The author has created a narrative thread which connects, supports, and amplifies the original letters written between 1861 and 1866 to Amanda Davis, a young woman from Friendship, Maine. Most of the letters were written to her from her cousins in the nearby village of Warren or from...  more

The author has created a narrative thread which connects, supports, and amplifies the original letters written between 1861 and 1866 to Amanda Davis, a young woman from Friendship, Maine. Most of the letters were written to her from her cousins in the nearby village of Warren or from neighbors and relatives who were enlisted in the Union Army. These letters are so fresh that through them readers can easily enter the 1860s world of small-town Maine and see how deeply people were affected by the war. Spontaneous and unselfconscious, these letters reflect the correspondents' strong personalities as well as local thinking, sayings, and humor. Although some letters come from army camps and hospitals, the bulk of them describe life at home. Over seventy illustrations and six maps, along with recipes, advertisements and excerpts from the local newspaper and national magazines, enhance the text. Anyone interested in the Civil War, Maine history, or nineteenth century women's history will want to add this book to their library. 2003, 5½ x 8½, paper, illus., maps, bibl., index, 242 pp.

Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives, more people than those perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. In...  more

Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives, more people than those perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. In a new edition, with a new preface discussing the recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic, America's Forgotten Pandemic remains both prescient and relevant. Alfred W. Crosby is a Professor Emeritus in American Studies, History and Geography at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for over 20 years. His previous books include Throwing Fire (Cambrige, 2002), the Measure of Reality (Cambridge, 1997) and Ecological Imperialism (cambridge, 1986). Ecological Imperialism was the winner of the 1986 Phi Beta Kappa book prize. The Measure of Reality was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the 100 most important books of 1997.

A Jewish family's desperate struggle to escape Nazi Germany, and how it illuminates the world's tragic abandonment of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. In this masterpiece of Holocaust literature, David Clay Large tells the wrenching story of Max Schohl, a German Jew who, in...  more

A Jewish family's desperate struggle to escape Nazi Germany, and how it illuminates the world's tragic abandonment of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. In this masterpiece of Holocaust literature, David Clay Large tells the wrenching story of Max Schohl, a German Jew who, in the midst of the Second World War, could not find a government that would allow his family to immigrate, despite wealth, education, and business and family connections. After repeated but fruitless efforts to gain entry first to the United States and then to Britain, Chile, and Brazil, Max died in Auschwitz and his wife and daughters were sent to hard labor in Wiesbaden. Much has been written about the West's unwillingness to attempt the rescue of tens of thousands of European Jews from the hands of the Nazis; now David Clay Large gives a human face to this tragedy of bureaucratic inertia and ill will. The youngest daughter of the Schohl family, today a seventy-four-year-old widow living in Charleston, South Carolina, has opened her family's records to Large: a unique collection of family letters and other documents chronicling the experiences of the Schohls and those who tried to bring them to England and America. From these papers Large has fashioned a gripping and intimate narrative of one family's efforts to escape the Holocaust in Europe and the inadequate response from abroad.

Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups that combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and abrasive style of punk rock. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever...  more

Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups that combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and abrasive style of punk rock. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever critical history of this fascinating and enigmatic genre, charting its trajectory from Throbbing Gristle's founding of the record label Industrial Music in 1976, to its peak in popularity with the success of Nine Inch Nails in the mid-1990s, through its decline to the present day. Exploring twenty exemplary works and drawing on extensive interviews with musicians, record label owners, DJs, and concert promoters, Reed offers a vivid history that encompasses not only the bands but the structures that supported them and the scenes they created. Early bands such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire used shocking, transgressive imagery and destabilizing noise to produce a genuinely radical form of music bent on recontextualizing the signs and methods of cultural authority. Rooted in Futurism and Dadaism, and influenced by William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Kraftwerk, and others, such groups sought to undermine reigning conceptions of language, gender identity, beauty, the ego, and logic itself in order to liberate listeners from the trappings of modernity. But Reed shows that as industrial music took on more and more elements of popular music over the course of the 1980s, it gradually abandoned its original mission. By the mid-1990s, it was seen as simply another style of pop music, and had ironically adopted the very conventions it had once sought to destroy. The definitive treatment of the genre, Assimilate is essential reading for fans of industrial music, scholars and students of popular music, and anyone interested in avant-garde subcultures.

"A taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve." -- Kirkus Reviews

The book Leni Riefenstahl denied ever writing! Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films (Behind the Scenes of the National Party Convention Film), a book of text plus numerous photographs, was published in March, 1935, to coincide with the Berlin premiere of Leni Riefenstahl...  more

The book Leni Riefenstahl denied ever writing! Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films (Behind the Scenes of the National Party Convention Film), a book of text plus numerous photographs, was published in March, 1935, to coincide with the Berlin premiere of Leni Riefenstahl s Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl, after 1945, distanced herself from the book, claiming she had never seen it until after publication. Here is an exact reproduction of the original, word-for-word, image-for-image, perfectly replicating the original layout of a book which most persons have never seen. Now for the first time in English, with a scholarly foreword by Professor David Culbert, who did the translation. Hundreds of photographs, including iconic images from the most famous propaganda film ever made. USA, 2010, 7.75 x 10 inches, softcover, 111 pages, 136 B&W photos.

IN 1936, Adolf Hitler welcomed the world to Berlin to attend the Olympic Games. It promised to be not only a magnificent sporting event but also a grand showcase for the rebuilt Germany. No effort was spared to present the Third Reich as the newest global power. But beneath the glittering...  more

IN 1936, Adolf Hitler welcomed the world to Berlin to attend the Olympic Games. It promised to be not only a magnificent sporting event but also a grand showcase for the rebuilt Germany. No effort was spared to present the Third Reich as the newest global power. But beneath the glittering surface, the Games of the Eleventh Olympiad of the Modern Era came to act as a crucible for the dark political forces that were gathering, foreshadowing the bloody conflict to come. The 1936 Olympics were nothing less than the most political sporting event of the last century—an epic clash between proponents of barbarism and those of civilization, both of whom tried to use the Games to promote their own values. Berlin Games is the complete history of those fateful two weeks in August. It is a story of the athletes and their accomplishments, an eye-opening account of the Nazi machine's brazen attempt to use the Games as a model of Aryan superiority and fascist efficiency, and a devastating indictment of the manipulative power games of politicians, diplomats, and Olympic officials that would ultimately have profound consequences for the entire world.

Winner of the 2001 The Lincoln Group of New York's Award of Achievement A History Book Club Selection The assassination of Abraham Lincoln is usually told as a tale of a lone deranged actor who struck from a twisted lust for revenge. This is not only too simple an explanation; Blood on the...  more

Winner of the 2001 The Lincoln Group of New York's Award of Achievement A History Book Club Selection The assassination of Abraham Lincoln is usually told as a tale of a lone deranged actor who struck from a twisted lust for revenge. This is not only too simple an explanation; Blood on the Moon reveals that it is completely wrong. John Wilkes Booth was neither mad nor alone in his act of murder. He received the help of many, not the least of whom was Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the Charles County physician who has been portrayed as the innocent victim of a vengeful government. Booth was also aided by the Confederate leadership in Richmond. As he made his plans to strike at Lincoln, Booth was in contact with key members of the Confederate underground, and after the assassination these same forces used all of their resources to attempt his escape. Noted Lincoln authority Edward Steers Jr. introduces the cast of characters in this ill-fated drama, he explores why they were so willing to help pull the trigger, and corrects the many misconceptions surrounding this defining moment that changed American history. After completing an acclaimed career as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Edward Steers Jr. has turned his research skills to the Lincoln assassination. He is the author of several books about the president, including The Trial. He lives in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. 

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. After the attack...  more

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. After the attack on her family, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at eighteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman?s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois?including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society?to her later years as a wealthy banker?s wife in Texas.Oatman?s story has since become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film, radio plays, and even an episode of Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan. Its themes, from the perils of religious utopianism to the permeable border between civilization and savagery, are deeply rooted in the American psyche. Oatman?s blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion. It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: she never wanted to go home.  (20080717)

From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace, a groundbreaking biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, the man who stood up to Hitler. A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the...  more

From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace, a groundbreaking biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, the man who stood up to Hitler. A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism. After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double-agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and was hanged in Flossenberg concentration camp at age 39. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the 20th century. Bonhoeffer presents a profoundly orthodox Christian theologian whose faith led him to boldly confront the greatest evil of the 20th century, and uncovers never-before-revealed facts, including the story of his passionate romance.

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and...  more

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome.The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by Lieutenant General Mark Clark, one of the war’s most complex and controversial commanders, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. And with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory at last began to seem inevitable.Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, this is narrative history of the first rank. With The Day of Battle, Atkinson has once again given us the definitive account of one of history’s most compelling military campaigns.

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked...  more

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld.    The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.  He was the “People’s Doctor,” known for his many acts of kindness and generosity, not least in providing free medical care for the poor.  Petiot, however, would soon be charged with twenty-seven murders, though authorities suspected the total was considerably higher, perhaps even as many as 150. Who was being slaughtered, and why?  Was Petiot a sexual sadist, as the press suggested, killing for thrills?  Was he allied with the Gestapo, or, on the contrary, the French Resistance?  Or did he work for no one other than himself?  Trying to solve the many mysteries of the case, Massu would unravel a plot of unspeakable deviousness.   When Petiot was finally arrested, the French police hoped for answers.  But the trial soon became a circus.  Attempting to try all twenty-seven cases at once, the prosecution stumbled in its marathon cross-examinations, and Petiot, enjoying the spotlight, responded with astonishing ease.  His attorney, René Floriot, a rising star in the world of criminal defense, also effectively, if aggressively, countered the charges.  Soon, despite a team of prosecuting attorneys, dozens of witnesses, and over one ton of evidence, Petiot’s brilliance and wit threatened to win the day. Drawing extensively on many new sources, including the massive, classified French police file on Dr. Petiot, Death in the City of Light is a brilliant evocation of Nazi-Occupied Paris and a harrowing exploration of murder, betrayal, and evil of staggering proportions.

A sensitive and candid inside account of the struggles of the Dionne quintuplets, from "million-dollar babies" to impoverished adults, and their ultimate triumph in the battle for compensation after years of exploitation.In February 1998, a press conference was held by three tired 63-year-old...  more

A sensitive and candid inside account of the struggles of the Dionne quintuplets, from "million-dollar babies" to impoverished adults, and their ultimate triumph in the battle for compensation after years of exploitation.In February 1998, a press conference was held by three tired 63-year-old women, who held up a sign that read JUSTICE NOT CHARITY.  Eight days later, the Ontario government -- who had ignored the three surviving Dionne quintuplets' pleas for three years -- bowed to public opinion and awarded $4 million to the sisters and to their two nieces, Marie's daughters.The miracle babies -- to this day the world's only surviving identical quintuplets -- were raised in a compound separated from their family and put on display for thousands of tourists.  "Quintland" became a cash cow for the Ontario tourism industry, and many people benefited from the bizarre, micro-managed lifestyle the children were forced to live.  As teens they were returned to their family, who were like strangers to the girls.  As young adults they turned to convents or to marriage and motherhood, desperate to establish lives of their own.  Physical ailments continued to plague them, however, with two sisters dying tragically young:  Emilie at age 20, and Marie at age 35. In addition to the personal struggles the three sisters candidly relate, The Dionnes recounts the stories of their friends, families, lawyers, supporters, and legions of admirers. It was journalist Ellie Tesher's heartfelt coverage of the sisters' plight that led to a public outcry, ultimately forcing Ontario's Harris government to come up with the money they had pledged not to give. Much more than a rags to riches story, The Dionnes is a tale of humanity and courage, of family feuding and family solidarity, and of the long and painful road to justice.

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?  In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity,...  more

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?  In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries. Of all the extraordinary and obscure plants that have been fermented and distilled, a few are dangerous, some are downright bizarre, and one is as ancient as dinosaurs--but each represents a unique cultural contribution to our global drinking traditions and our history. This fascinating concoction of biology, chemistry, history, etymology, and mixology--with more than fifty drink recipes and growing tips for gardeners--will make you the most popular guest at any cocktail party.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth...  more

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?   Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.   Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.   The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived...  more

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, the author illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.   In 1860, the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South’s large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.   Levine captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners’ war; and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.   Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something big. Jazz, racy fashions, new attitudes about art and sex -- all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined...  more

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something big. Jazz, racy fashions, new attitudes about art and sex -- all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined this age -- Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka -- would presage the sexual revolution by nearly half a century and would shape the role of women for generations to come. In Flappers, the acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell renders these women with all the color that marked their lives and their era. Both sensuous and sympathetic, her admiring biography lays bare the private lives of her heroines, filling in the bold contours. These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but all ended up passing through Paris, the mecca of the avant-garde. Beneath the flamboyance and excess of the 1920s lay age-old prejudices about gender, race, and sexuality. These flappers weren't just dancing and carousing; they were fighting for recognition and dignity in a male-dominated world. They were more than mere lovers or muses to the modernist masters -- in their pursuit of fame and intense experience, we see a generation of women taking bold steps toward something burgeoning, undefined, maybe dangerous: a New Woman.

In this book, Corey Taylor undertakes something never before attempted in the history of rock superstardom: he takes you with him as he journeys undercover through various ghostbusting groups who do their best to gather information and evidence about the existence of spirits. Some are more...  more

In this book, Corey Taylor undertakes something never before attempted in the history of rock superstardom: he takes you with him as he journeys undercover through various ghostbusting groups who do their best to gather information and evidence about the existence of spirits. Some are more credible than others, and, frankly, some are completely insane, but all are observed with appropriate seriousness as Taylor attempts to better understand some of the spooky things that have happened to him in his life, especially that night at the Cold House. But that?s not all, folks. Taylor once again gives you a behind-the-scenes tour of his crazy life and the many beyond-the-grave events he?s encountered. (You?ll be shocked how often Slipknot has been invaded by the supernatural.) Taylor also touches on his religious background and how it led him to believe in much more than the Man in the Sky.

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war...  more

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Miranda Carter uses the cousins? correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men?damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George?and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria -- grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third -- whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect. For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

After he moved to Britain from Germany in the 1930s Sebastian Haffner became so shocked about the situation in his native country that he wrote this book in an effort to help people understand the danger Hitler presented to the world. Incredibly accessible, it is packed with acute analysis of...  more

After he moved to Britain from Germany in the 1930s Sebastian Haffner became so shocked about the situation in his native country that he wrote this book in an effort to help people understand the danger Hitler presented to the world. Incredibly accessible, it is packed with acute analysis of both Hitler and the German people?from the Nazi leaders all the way down to those who opposed them?and is a must-read for anyone interested in the literature of World War II.

Traces the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, describes her difficult relationship with her mother, and reveals her contributions to the "Little House" series of books.

In the winter of 1664-65, a bitter cold descended on London in the days before Christmas. Above the city, an unusually bright comet traced an arc in the sky, exciting much comment and portending "horrible windes and tempests." And in the remote, squalid precinct of St. Giles-in-the-Fields...  more

In the winter of 1664-65, a bitter cold descended on London in the days before Christmas. Above the city, an unusually bright comet traced an arc in the sky, exciting much comment and portending "horrible windes and tempests." And in the remote, squalid precinct of St. Giles-in-the-Fields outside the city wall, Goodwoman Phillips was pronounced dead of the plague. Her house was locked up and the phrase "Lord Have Mercy On Us" was painted on the door in red. By the following Christmas, the pathogen that had felled Goodwoman Phillips would go on to kill nearly 100,000 people living in and around London -- almost a third of those who did not flee. This epidemic had a devastating effect on the city's economy and social fabric, as well as on those who lived through it. Yet somehow the city continued to function and the activities of daily life went on.In The Great Plague, historian A. Lloyd Moote and microbiologist Dorothy C. Moote provide an engrossing and deeply informed account of this cataclysmic plague year. At once sweeping and intimate, their narrative takes readers from the palaces of the city's wealthiest citizens to the slums that housed the vast majority of London's inhabitants to the surrounding countryside with those who fled. The Mootes reveal that, even at the height of the plague, the city did not descend into chaos. Doctors, apothecaries, surgeons, and clergy remained in the city to care for the sick; parish and city officials confronted the crisis with all the legal tools at their disposal; and commerce continued even as businesses shut down.To portray life and death in and around London, the authors focus on the experiences of nine individuals -- among them an apothecary serving a poor suburb, the rector of the city's wealthiest parish, a successful silk merchant who was also a city alderman, a country gentleman, and famous diarist Samuel Pepys. Through letters and diaries, the Mootes offer fresh interpretations of key issues in the history of the Great Plague: how different communities understood and experienced the disease; how medical, religious, and government bodies reacted; how well the social order held together; the economic and moral dilemmas people faced when debating whether to flee the city; and the nature of the material, social, and spiritual resources sustaining those who remained.Underscoring the human dimensions of the epidemic, Lloyd and Dorothy Moote dramatically recast the history of the Great Plague and offer a masterful portrait of a city and its inhabitants besieged by -- and defiantly resisting -- unimaginable horror.

In this revealing social history, one remarkable White House dinner shines a powerful light on race, politics, and the lives and legacies of Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with...  more

In this revealing social history, one remarkable White House dinner shines a powerful light on race, politics, and the lives and legacies of Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a black man?and former slave?sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated and threatened to topple two of America?s greatest men. In this smart, accessible narrative, one seemingly ordinary dinner becomes a window onto post?Civil War American history and politics, and onto the lives of two dynamic men whose experiences and philosophies connect in unexpected ways. Author Deborah Davis introduces dozens of additional fascinating figures who have previously occupied the margins and footnotes of history, creating a lively book that serves as a provocative and enlightening window into American cultural history.

The magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson's acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II It is the twentieth century's unrivaled epic: at a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first...  more

The magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson's acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II It is the twentieth century's unrivaled epic: at a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his bestselling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted how the American-led coalition fought through North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now, in The Guns at Last Light, he tells the most dramatic story of allâۥthe titanic battle for Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the final campaign of the European war, and Atkinson's riveting account of that bold gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows. The brutal fight in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the disaster that was Operation Market Garden, the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and finally the thrust to the heart of the Third Reich -- ۥall these historic events and more come alive with a wealth of new material and a mesmerizing cast of characters. Atkinson tells the tale from the perspective of participants at every level, from presidents and generals to war-weary lieutenants and terrified teenage riflemen. When Germany at last surrenders, we understand anew both the devastating cost of this global conflagration and the enormous effort required to win the Allied victory. With the stirring final volume of this monumental trilogy, Atkinson's accomplishment is manifest. He has produced the definitive chronicle of the war that unshackled a continent and preserved freedom in the West. 

"As the Indiana Jones films showed, Nazis, new age mumbo-jumbo and exotic locations are a formula that works. Christopher Hale's gripping and well-researched tale of an SS-sponsored scientific mission to Tibet in 1938-39 has the whole shebang: mad occult beliefs, mountains, strange charactors...  more

"As the Indiana Jones films showed, Nazis, new age mumbo-jumbo and exotic locations are a formula that works. Christopher Hale's gripping and well-researched tale of an SS-sponsored scientific mission to Tibet in 1938-39 has the whole shebang: mad occult beliefs, mountains, strange charactors called Bruno or Ernst and stomach-churning concentration camp experiments to round things off." —The Sunday Times (London) A scientific expedition or a sinister mission? Why would the leader of the Nazi’s dreaded SS, the second-most-powerful man in the Third Reich, send a zoologist, an anthropologist, and several other scientists to Tibet on the eve of war? Himmler’s Crusade tells the bizarre and chilling story one of history’s most perverse, eccentric, and frightening scientific expeditions. Drawing on private journals, new interviews, and original research in German archives as well as in Tibet, author Christopher Hale recreates the events of this sinister expedition, asks penetrating questions about the relationship between science and politics, a nd sheds new light on the occult theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis. Combining the highest standards of narrative history with the high adventure and exotic locales of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Himmler’s Crusade reveals that Himmler had ordered these men to examine Tibetan nobles for signs of Aryan physiology, undermine the British relationship with the ruling class, and sow the seeds of rebellion among the populace. Most strangely, the scientists–all SS officers–were to find scientific proof of a grotesque historical fantasy that was at the center of Himmler’s beliefs about race. Set against the exquisite backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, this fast-paced and engaging narrative provides new and troubling insight into one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, politics, and war.

Forty years after his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny set a standard for scholarship of the Nazi era, Lord Alan Bullock gives readers a breathtakingly accomplished dual biography that places Adolf Hitler's origins, personality, career, and legacy alongside those of Joseph Stalin--his implacable...  more

Forty years after his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny set a standard for scholarship of the Nazi era, Lord Alan Bullock gives readers a breathtakingly accomplished dual biography that places Adolf Hitler's origins, personality, career, and legacy alongside those of Joseph Stalin--his implacable antagonist and moral mirror image.

Drawing on an unprecedented variety of sources, Mark Mazower reveals how the Nazis designed, maintained, and ultimately lost their European empire and offers a chilling vision of the world Hitler would have made had he won the war. Germany’s forces achieved, in just a few years, the astounding...  more

Drawing on an unprecedented variety of sources, Mark Mazower reveals how the Nazis designed, maintained, and ultimately lost their European empire and offers a chilling vision of the world Hitler would have made had he won the war. Germany’s forces achieved, in just a few years, the astounding domination of a landmass and population larger than that of the United States. Control of this vast territory was meant to provide the basis for Germany’s rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reich’s Wild West, transformed by massacre and colonial settlement. Western Europe was to provide the economic resources that would knit an authoritarian and racially cleansed continent together. But the brutality and short-sightedness of Nazi politics lost what German arms had won and brought their equally rapid downfall. Time and again, the speed of the Germans’ victories caught them unprepared for the economic or psychological intricacies of running such a far-flung dominion. Politically impoverished, they had no idea how to rule the millions of people they suddenly controlled, except by bludgeon. Mazower forces us to set aside the timeworn notion that the Nazis’ worldview was their own invention. Their desire for land and their racist attitudes toward Slavs and other nationalities emerged from ideas that had driven their Prussian forebears into Poland and beyond. They also drew inspiration on imperial expansion from the Americans and especially the British, whose empire they idolized. Their signal innovation was to exploit Europe’s peoples and resources much as the British or French had done in India and Africa. Crushed and disheartened, many of the peoples they conquered collaborated with them to a degree that we have largely forgotten. Ultimately, the Third Reich would be beaten as much by its own hand as by the enemy. Throughout this book are fascinating, chilling glimpses of the world that might have been. Russians, Poles, and other ethnic groups would have been slaughtered or enslaved. Germans would have been settled upon now empty lands as far east as the Black Sea—the new “Greater Germany.” Europe’s treasuries would have been sacked, its great cities impoverished and recast as dormitories for forced laborers when they were not deliberately demolished. As dire as all this sounds, it was merely the planned extension of what actually happened in Europe under Nazi rule as recounted in this authoritative, absorbing book.

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and...  more

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich. Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe.

The Berlin Olympic Games have their 70th anniversary in 2006. Hitler's Olympics creates a vivid account of the disputes, personalities and events of what was one of the largest propaganda exercises in history. The success of black American Owens allowed the Nazis to claim that their policies...  more

The Berlin Olympic Games have their 70th anniversary in 2006. Hitler's Olympics creates a vivid account of the disputes, personalities and events of what was one of the largest propaganda exercises in history. The success of black American Owens allowed the Nazis to claim that their policies were not racist--and it was the Americans who were accused of anti-semitism.

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) eighteen months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted...  more

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) eighteen months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war. For years he played a dangerous double game, desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo. The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, became suspicious of the Abwehr and by 1944, when Abwehr personnel were involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler, he had the evidence to arrest Canaris himself. Canaris was executed a few weeks before the end of the war.

In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location...  more

In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location of many mass gravesites with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust. Compiling new archival material and many eye-witness accounts, Desbois has put together the first definitive account of one of history's bloodiest chapters.Published with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Analyzing the previously unexplored religious views of the Nazi elite, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it. In contrast, Steigmann-Gall demonstrates that many in the Nazi movement believed the...  more

Analyzing the previously unexplored religious views of the Nazi elite, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it. In contrast, Steigmann-Gall demonstrates that many in the Nazi movement believed the contours of their ideology were based on a Christian understanding of Germany's ills and their cure. He also explores the struggle the "positive Christians" waged with the party's paganists and demonstrates that this was not just a conflict over religion, but over the very meaning of Nazi ideology itself. Richard Steigmann-Gall is assistant professor of history at Kent Sate University. He earned his BA and MA at the University of Michigan, and PhD at the University of Toronto. He has earned fellowships and awards from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Israel, and the Max-Planck Institut fur Geschichte in Göttingen. His research interests include modern Germany, Fascism, and religion and society in Europe, and he has published articles in Central European History, German History, Social History, and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.

Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of World War II, The Hôtel on Place Vendôme is the captivating history of Paris?s world-famous Hôtel Ritz?a breathtaking tale of glamour, opulence, and celebrity; dangerous liaisons, espionage, and resistance?from Tilar J. Manzeo, the New York...  more

Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of World War II, The Hôtel on Place Vendôme is the captivating history of Paris?s world-famous Hôtel Ritz?a breathtaking tale of glamour, opulence, and celebrity; dangerous liaisons, espionage, and resistance?from Tilar J. Manzeo, the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot and The Secret of Chanel No. 5When France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the legendary Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme?an icon of Paris frequented by film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risqué flappers, playboys, and princes?was the only luxury hotel of its kind allowed in the occupied city by order of Adolf Hitler.Tilar J. Mazzeo traces the history of this cultural landmark from its opening in fin de siècle Paris. At its center, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is an extraordinary chronicle of life at the Ritz during wartime, when the Hôtel was simultaneously headquarters to the highest-ranking German officers, such as Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, and home to exclusive patrons, including Coco Chanel. Mazzeo takes us into the grand palace?s suites, bars, dining rooms, and wine cellars, revealing a hotbed of illicit affairs and deadly intrigue, as well as stunning acts of defiance and treachery.Rich in detail, illustrated with black-and-white photos, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is a remarkable look at this extraordinary crucible where the future of post-war France?and all of post-war Europe?was transformed. 

For a generation of teenage girls, Sassy magazine was nothing short of revolutionary—so much so that its audience, which stretched from tweens to twentysomething women, remains obsessed with it to this day and back issues are sold for hefty sums on the Internet. For its brief but brilliant...  more

For a generation of teenage girls, Sassy magazine was nothing short of revolutionary—so much so that its audience, which stretched from tweens to twentysomething women, remains obsessed with it to this day and back issues are sold for hefty sums on the Internet. For its brief but brilliant run from 1988 to 1994, Sassy was the arbiter of all that was hip and cool, inspiring a dogged devotion from its readers while almost single-handedly bringing the idea of girl culture to the mainstream. In the process, Sassy changed the face of teen magazines in the United States, paved the way for the unedited voice of blogs, and influenced the current crop of smart women’s zines, such as Bust and Bitch, that currently hold sway.How Sassy Changed My Life will present for the first time the inside story of the magazine’s rise and fall while celebrating its unique vision and lasting impact. Through interviews with the staff, columnists, and favorite personalities we are brought behind the scenes from its launch to its final issue and witness its unique fusion of feminism and femininity, its frank commentary on taboo topics like teen sex and suicide, its battles with advertisers and the religious right, and the ascension of its writers from anonymous staffers to celebrities in their own right.

For fans of Susannah Cahalan?s Brain on Fire, the courageous memoir of a woman robbed of all her memories by a traumatic brain injury?and her more than twenty-five-year struggle to reclaim her life.At twenty-two years old, Su Meck was married with two children in 1988 when a ceiling fan in her...  more

For fans of Susannah Cahalan?s Brain on Fire, the courageous memoir of a woman robbed of all her memories by a traumatic brain injury?and her more than twenty-five-year struggle to reclaim her life.At twenty-two years old, Su Meck was married with two children in 1988 when a ceiling fan in her home fell and struck her in the head. She survived the injury, but when she regained consciousness in the hospital, she didn?t know her own name. She didn?t recognize a single family member or friend, she couldn?t read or write or brush her teeth or use a fork?and she possessed not even a scrap of memory from her life up to that point. The fiercely independent and outspoken young woman she had been vanished completely. Most patients who suffer amnesia as the result of a head injury eventually regain their memories, but Su never did. After just three weeks in the hospital, she was sent back into a world about which she knew nothing: How do you run a household when you can?t find the grocery store? How do you raise children when you have no memory of being parented yourself? How do you maintain a relationship with your husband when you?ve forgotten everything you once knew about love and sex? Nearly twenty years would pass before a series of personally devastating events shattered the ?normal? life she had worked so hard to build siince the accident, and Su realized that she would have to grow up all over again and finally take control of the strange second life she had awoken to. Su?s indelible voice shines through on every page as she describes the true cost to herself and her family of traumatic brain injury (TBI), and the incredible stamina, resolve, and courage it took for her to build a new life in the face of so much loss. Piercing, passionate, heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting, Think Again is the true story of a woman determined to live life on her own terms.

The ultimate fan’s guide to the Coen Brothers’ cult classic, with an introduction by the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges. If you will it, Dude, it is no dream. First released in 1998, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski flopped at the box office. But over the past nine years the...  more

The ultimate fan’s guide to the Coen Brothers’ cult classic, with an introduction by the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges. If you will it, Dude, it is no dream. First released in 1998, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski flopped at the box office. But over the past nine years the movie has developed a massive and passionate cult following, led by the creation of Lebowski Fest, a traveling festival of all things Lebowski. Held in a bowling alley, it features bowling, costume and trivia contests, live music, a screening of the movie, White Russians, and what-have-you. Attendance has grown exponentially and the Fest has been featured in virtually every national media outlet, from NPR to the New York Times. The Associated Press called it “kind of a ‘Star Trek’ convention, but without all the geeks.” The Wall Street Journal simply intoned: “One hell of a party!” Now, at last, comes the book that the legion of Lebowski fans (aka Achievers) has been waiting for. I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski is a treasure trove of trivia and commentary, hilarious throughout and illustrated with photos from the film, including dozens taken on the set by Jeff Bridges. It includes interviews with virtually every major and minor cast member, as well as the real-life individuals who served as inspiration for the characters in the movie. The book features a handy guide to speaking Achiever (example: in English you would say that a woman is “feminine, or ladylike”; an Achiever would call her “strongly vaginal”), tips on how to Dude-ify your car, office, and living space, Lebowski Fest highlights and so much more.

This remarkable, never-before-told account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarfs, bears witness to the best and worst of humanity and to the terrible irony of the Ovitzes' fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them endure the Holocaust. Through dogged research and...  more

This remarkable, never-before-told account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarfs, bears witness to the best and worst of humanity and to the terrible irony of the Ovitzes' fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them endure the Holocaust. Through dogged research and interviews with Perla, the youngest Ovitz daughter and last surviving sibling, and other relatives, authors Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were popular entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944. Descending from the transport train into the hell of the concentration camp, the Ovitz family -- known widely as the Lilliput Troupe -- was separated from other Jewish victims. When Dr. Josef Mengele was then notified of their arrival, he assigned them to sequestered quarters. His horrific "research" on twins and other genetically unique individuals already under way, Mengele had special plans for the Ovitzes. The authors chronicle Mengele's loathsome experiments upon the family members, the disturbing fondness he developed for these small people, and their interminable will to make it out alive. Dozens of telling photographs are included in this horrifying yet remarkable tale of survival.

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart...  more

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitness, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored. "A fine book, a signal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."--Chicago Sun-Times "Abzug has done an excellent job...Not a book to dwell on...but not one that should be overlooked either."--The New York Times "Well and memorably done."--Kirkus Reviews

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.   One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented...  more

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.   One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.     Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was just one dramatic episode in a long struggle by a stalwart band of Jewish resistance fighters to liberate Poland from the Nazis, the full story of which has never before been told in book form. With Isaac?s Army, Matthew Brzezinski delivers the first-ever...  more

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was just one dramatic episode in a long struggle by a stalwart band of Jewish resistance fighters to liberate Poland from the Nazis, the full story of which has never before been told in book form. With Isaac?s Army, Matthew Brzezinski delivers the first-ever comprehensive narrative account of that struggle, following a group of dedicated young Jews?some barely out of their teens?who banded together to form one of the most daring underground movements of World War II.   Based on first-person accounts from diaries, interviews, and surviving relatives, Isaac?s Army chronicles the extraordinary triumphs and devastating setbacks that befell the Jewish underground from its earliest acts of defiance in 1939 to the exodus to Palestine in 1946. This is the remarkable true story of the Jewish resistance from the perspective of those who led it: Isaac Zuckerman, the confident and charismatic twenty-four-year-old founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization; Simha Ratheiser, Isaac?s fifteen-year-old bodyguard, whose boyish good looks and seeming immunity to danger made him an ideal courier; and Zivia Lubetkin, the warrior queen of the underground who, upon hearing the first intimations of the Holocaust, declared: ?We are going to defend ourselves.? Joined by allies on the left and right, they survived Gestapo torture chambers, smuggled arms, ran covert printing presses, opened illegal schools, robbed banks, executed collaborators, and fought in the two largest rebellions of the war.   Hunted by the Germans and bedeviled by the ?Greasers??roving bands of blackmailers who routinely turned in resistance fighters for profit?the movement was chronically short on firepower but long on ingenuity. Its members hatched plots in dank basements, never more than a door knock away from summary execution, and slogged through fetid sewers to escape the burning Ghetto to the forests surrounding the city. And after the initial uprising was ruthlessly put down by the SS, they gambled everything on a bold plan for a citywide revolt?of both Jews and Gentiles?that could end only in victory or total destruction. The money they raised helped thousands hide when the Ghetto was liquidated. The documents they forged offered lifelines to families desperate to escape the horror of the Holocaust. And when the war was over, they helped found the state of Israel.   A story of secret alliances, internal rivalries, and undying commitment to a cause, Isaac?s Army is history at its most heart-wrenching. Driven by an unforgettable cast of characters, it?s a true-life tale with the pulse of a great novel, and a celebration of the indomitable spirit of resistance.

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds. According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast...  more

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds. According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich. (20060817)

Drawing on the voices of atomic-bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology, Charles Pellegrino describes the events and aftermath of two days in August when nuclear devices detonated over Japan changed life on Earth foreverLast Train from Hiroshima offers readers a stunning ?you...  more

Drawing on the voices of atomic-bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology, Charles Pellegrino describes the events and aftermath of two days in August when nuclear devices detonated over Japan changed life on Earth foreverLast Train from Hiroshima offers readers a stunning ?you are there? time capsule, gracefully wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino?s scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb?s survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written. At the narrative?s core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand?the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air. Thirty people are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki?where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the cataclysm at ground zero both times. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell in which Yamaguchi had been standing, placing him and a few others in a shock coccoon that offered protection, while the entire building disappeared around them.Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within an illustrated narrative that challenges the ?official report,? showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?and why.

Growing up, Pat Brown had two dreams: to play baseball and to attend college. She was told she couldn’t play baseball because she was a girl and couldn’t attend college because she had no money, but in spite of the obstacles, she achieved both of these dreams, playing for the...  more

Growing up, Pat Brown had two dreams: to play baseball and to attend college. She was told she couldn’t play baseball because she was a girl and couldn’t attend college because she had no money, but in spite of the obstacles, she achieved both of these dreams, playing for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1950 and 1951 and going on to attend college. She is among the few women professional baseball players to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. "As the only former AAGPBL player to have written about the League," Brown says, "I feel like I have finally pitched my no hit game." This is a memoir of playing baseball on the sandlot, discovering and playing in the AAGPBL, and playing basketball in college. Brown shares her thoughts on the League’s history, including what Philip K. Wrigley sought to do by creating the AAGPBL, what happened after Wrigley left to give more attention to the Chicago Cubs, and why the League ended. She also considers the future for women’s professional baseball. Interviews with such former AAGPBL players as Helen Hannah Campbell, Patricia "Pat" Courtney, Madeline "Maddy" English, Lenora "Smokey" Mandella, Jacqueline "Jackie" Matson, Jane Moffet, Mary "Sis" Moore, and Janet "Pee Wee" Wiley are included.

In Las Vegas, there's a family-owned business called the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, run by three generations of the Harrison family: Rick; his son, Big Hoss; and Rick's dad, the Old Man. Now License to Pawn takes readers behind the scenes of the hit History show Pawn Stars and shares...  more

In Las Vegas, there's a family-owned business called the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, run by three generations of the Harrison family: Rick; his son, Big Hoss; and Rick's dad, the Old Man. Now License to Pawn takes readers behind the scenes of the hit History show Pawn Stars and shares the fascinating life story of its star, Rick Harrison, and the equally intriguing story behind the shop, the customers, and the items for sale. Rick hasn't had it easy. He was a math whiz at an early age, but developed a similarly uncanny ability to find ever-deepening trouble that nearly ruined his life. With the birth of his son, he sobered up, reconnected with his dad, and they started their booming business together. License to Pawn also offers an entertaining walk through the pawn shop's history. It's a captivating look into how the Gold & Silver works, with incredible stories about the crazy customers and the one-of-a-kind items that the shop sells. Rick isn't only a businessman; he's also a historian and keen observer of human nature. For instance, did you know that pimps wear lots of jewelry for a reason? It's because if they're arrested, jewelry doesn't get confiscated like cash does, and ready money will be available for bail. Or that WWII bomber jackets and Zippo lighters can sell for a freakishly high price in Japan? Have you ever heard that the makers of Ormolu clocks, which Rick sells for as much as $15,000 apiece, frequently died before forty thanks to the mercury in the paint? Rick also reveals the items he loves so much he'll never sell. The shop has three Olympic bronze medals, a Patriots Super Bowl ring, a Samurai sword from 1490, and an original Iwo Jima battle plan. Each object has an incredible story behind it, of course. Rick shares them all, and so much more--there's an irresistible treasure trove of history behind both the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop and the life of Rick Harrison.

During World War Two the Special Operation Executive's French Section sent more than 400 agents into Occupied France -- at least 100 never returned and were reported 'Missing Believed Dead' after the war. Twelve of these were women who died in German concentration camps -- some were...  more

During World War Two the Special Operation Executive's French Section sent more than 400 agents into Occupied France -- at least 100 never returned and were reported 'Missing Believed Dead' after the war. Twelve of these were women who died in German concentration camps -- some were tortured, some were shot, and some died in the gas chambers. Vera Atkins had helped prepare these women for their missions, and when the war was over she went out to Germany to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines. But while the woman who carried out this extraordinary mission appeared quintessentially English, she was nothing of the sort. Vera Atkins, who never married, covered her life in mystery so that even her closest family knew almost nothing of her past. In A LIFE IN SECRETS Sarah Helm has stripped away Vera's many veils and -- with unprecedented access to official and private papers -- vividly reconstructed an extraordinary life.

Many books have chronicled the experience of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II when over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were taken from their homes along the West Coast and imprisoned in concentration camps. When they were...  more

Many books have chronicled the experience of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II when over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were taken from their homes along the West Coast and imprisoned in concentration camps. When they were finally allowed to leave, a new challenge faced them how do you resume a life so interrupted? For most, going home meant learning to live in a hostile racist environment. Some returned to find they had lost their homes and had little choice but to bide their time in transitional housing, including community halls, churches, housing projects, and tent camps.Their employment options were also limited; they worked as domestics, dishwashers, and field laborers to help support their families. The effects of these experiences reverberate to this day, and Making Home from War reaches into the past, melds together what was once hidden, and tells the often neglected or hushed story of what happened after the war. With honesty and an eye for detail, Making Home from War is the long-awaited sequel to the award-winning From Our Side of the Fence. Written by thirteen Japanese American elders who gathered regularly at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, Making Home from War is a collection of stories about their exodus from concentration camps into a world that in a few short years had drastically changed. In order to survive, they found the resilience they needed in the form of community, and gathered reserves of strength from family and friends. Through a spectrum of conflicting and rich emotions, Making Home from War demonstrates the depth of human resolve and faith during a time of devastating upheaval.

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek?s eloquent, persuasive book?based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson?s papers?opens up a...  more

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek?s eloquent, persuasive book?based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson?s papers?opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson?s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. So far historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery, who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek?s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debtridden plantation thanks to what he calls the ?silent profits? gained from his slaves?and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he?d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson?s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children?in his ledgers they are recast as money?while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call ?a vile commerce.? Many people of Jefferson?s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

This text presents a history of the killing fields on the Eastern front of World War II. It is based on new material available from Russian and other Eastern European archives from Baltic countries like Latvia. The SS Einsatzgruppen were a few thousand members of the special German police force...  more

This text presents a history of the killing fields on the Eastern front of World War II. It is based on new material available from Russian and other Eastern European archives from Baltic countries like Latvia. The SS Einsatzgruppen were a few thousand members of the special German police force - the real rough guys, not the elite Waffen SS stags. They were the men who moved in just behind the German army in conquered territory and did the dirty work of "stabilizing" the population, a euphemism for the most ruthless killing spree of the century. The furiosity of the violence in the East, the pure sadism of it, is astonishing. This book documents the planning and execution of the programme in tragic detail, filling a gap in the history of the Third Reich and explaining motives that have seemed obscure if not incomprehensible.

Ministry is a memoir both ugly and captivating, revealing Al Jourgensen as a man who lived a hard life his own way without making compromises. He survived prolonged drug addiction—twenty-two years of chronic heroin, cocaine, and alcohol abuse, to be more precise—before cleaning up,...  more

Ministry is a memoir both ugly and captivating, revealing Al Jourgensen as a man who lived a hard life his own way without making compromises. He survived prolonged drug addiction—twenty-two years of chronic heroin, cocaine, and alcohol abuse, to be more precise—before cleaning up, straightening out, and finding new reasons to live. During his career, Jourgensen has engaged in all of the rock ’n’ roll clichés regarding decadence and debauchery and invented new forms of previously unachieved nihilism. Despite this and his addictions, he created seven seminal albums, including the bonafide, hugely influential classic The Land of Rape and Honey, 1989’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, and 1992’s blockbuster Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed. Ministry imparts the epic life of Al Jourgensen, a survivor who tempted fate, beat the odds, persevered, and put the pieces back together after unraveling completely.

Irena Sendler s a retired Polish Roman Catholic social worker. During World War II she was an activist of Polish Underground and Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw, where she helped to save about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them false documents and hiding...  more

Irena Sendler s a retired Polish Roman Catholic social worker. During World War II she was an activist of Polish Underground and Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw, where she helped to save about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them false documents and hiding places in individual and group children houses out of the Ghetto.

A vibrant social history set against the backdrop of the Antebellum south and the Civil War that recreates the lives and friendship of two exceptional women: First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her mulatto dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly. “I consider you my best living friend,” Mary...  more

A vibrant social history set against the backdrop of the Antebellum south and the Civil War that recreates the lives and friendship of two exceptional women: First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her mulatto dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly. “I consider you my best living friend,” Mary Lincoln wrote to Elizabeth Keckly in 1867, and indeed theirs was a close, if tumultuous, relationship. Born into slavery, mulatto Elizabeth Keckly was Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, confidante, and mainstay during the difficult years that the Lincolns occupied the White House and the early years of Mary’s widowhood. But she was a fascinating woman in her own right, independent and already well-established as the dressmaker to the Washington elite when she was first hired by Mary Lincoln upon her arrival in the nation’s capital. Lizzy had bought her freedom in 1855 and come to Washington determined to make a life for herself as a free black, and she soon had Washington correspondents reporting that “stately carriages stand before her door, whose haughty owners sit before Lizzy docile as lambs while she tells them what to wear.” Mary Lincoln had hired Lizzy in part because she was considered a “high society” seamstress and Mary, an outsider in Washington’s social circles, was desperate for social cachet. With her husband struggling to keep the nation together, Mary turned increasingly to her seamstress for companionship, support, and advice—and over the course of those trying years, Lizzy Keckly became her confidante and closest friend.With Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, pioneering historian Jennifer Fleischner allows us to glimpse the intimate dynamics of this unusual friendship for the first time, and traces the pivotal events that enabled these two women—one born to be a mistress, the other to be a slave—to forge such an unlikely bond at a time when relations between blacks and whites were tearing the nation apart. Beginning with their respective childhoods in the slaveholding states of Virginia and Kentucky, their story takes us through the years of tragic Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the early Reconstruction period. An author in her own right, Keckly wrote one of the most detailed biographies of Mary Lincoln ever published, and though it led to a bitter feud between the friends, it is one of the many rich resources that have enhanced Fleischner’s trove of original findings.A remarkable, riveting work of scholarship that reveals the legacy of slavery and sheds new light on the Lincoln White House, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly brings to life a mesmerizing, intimate aspect of Civil War history, and underscores the inseparability of black and white in our nation’s heritage.From the Hardcover edition.

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she?s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs?in New York and San Francisco...  more

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she?s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs?in New York and San Francisco and Boston and Washington, D.C. Still, in her adopted hometown, there?s no one to call at the last minute for girl talk over brunch or a reality-TV marathon over a bottle of wine. Taking matters into her own hands, Bertsche develops a plan: She?ll go on fifty-two friend-dates, one per week for a year, in hopes of meeting her new Best Friend Forever. In her thought-provoking, uproarious memoir, Bertsche blends the story of her girl-dates (whom she meets everywhere from improv class to friend rental websites) with the latest social research to examine how difficult?and hilariously awkward?it is to make new friends as an adult. In a time when women will happily announce they need a man but are embarrassed to admit they need a BFF, Bertsche uncovers the reality that no matter how great your love life is, you?ve gotta have friends.

Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who save them all.  Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are...  more

Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who save them all.  Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people... until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic—each party completely unknown to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander.   Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives—all under one roof—My Mother’s Secret is a testament to the kindness, courage, and generosity of ordinary people who chose to be extraordinary.

Paperback edition

First-person accounts of Nazi Germany published in conjunction with the History Channel/BBC's Peabody Award-winning documentary. Available for the first time in paperback, The Nazis: A Warning from History contains previously unpublished archival material and photographs documenting the reality...  more

First-person accounts of Nazi Germany published in conjunction with the History Channel/BBC's Peabody Award-winning documentary. Available for the first time in paperback, The Nazis: A Warning from History contains previously unpublished archival material and photographs documenting the reality of daily life under Nazi rule and the evolution of the ruthless slaughter of the Jews in Germany. BBC producer Laurence Rees has also collected the testimonies of more than fifty eyewitnesses, many of who were committed Nazis only now free to tell their story after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Described by Publishers Weekly as "a chilling crash course on the Nazis' chaotic rule," these materials cast a harsh new light on the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Neighbors--Jan Gross's stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors--was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion...  more

Neighbors--Jan Gross's stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors--was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This book captures some of the most important voices in the ensuing debate, including those of residents of Jedwabne itself as well as those of journalists, intellectuals, politicians, Catholic clergy, and historians both within and well beyond Poland's borders.Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic introduce the debate, focusing particularly on how Neighbors rubbed against difficult old and new issues of Polish social memory and national identity. The editors then present a variety of Polish voices grappling with the role of the massacre and of Polish-Jewish relations in Polish history. They include samples of the various strategies used by Polish intellectuals and political elites as they have attempted to deal with their country's dark past, to overcome the legacy of the Holocaust, and to respond to Gross's book.The Neighbors Respond makes the debate over Neighbors available to an English-speaking audience--and is an excellent tool for bringing the discussion into the classroom. It constitutes an engrossing contribution to modern Jewish history, to our understanding of Polish modern history and identity, and to our bank of Holocaust memory.

Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the groundbreaking lead singer of '70s teenage all-girl rock band the Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls—Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West...  more

Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the groundbreaking lead singer of '70s teenage all-girl rock band the Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls—Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums—who could play rock like no one else. Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, they catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums, headlining shows with opening acts like the Ramones, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie. Currie lit up the stage with the provocative teen-rebellion songs "Cherry Bomb," "Queens of Noise," and "Born to Be Bad," riding a wave of hit songs and platinum albums, all while touring around the world. On the face of it, Currie's is a riveting story of girl empowerment and fame. But it is also an intensely personal account of her struggles with drugs, sexual abuse, and violence. She and her bandmates, runaways all, were thrown into a decadent, high-pressure music scene where on the road, unsupervised for months at a time, they had to grow up fast and experience things that no teenage girls should. Neon Angel exposes the side of the music industry fans never get to see, and chronicles the group's rise to fame and their ultimate demise. Shocking and inspiring, funny and touching, Neon Angel stunningly re-creates a bygone era of rock and roll, all the while providing an inside look at growing up hard under the relentless glare of the public eye, and chronicling one tough woman's fight to reclaim her life.

The explosive, dark secrets behind America's post-WWII science programs... In the chaos following WWII, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis'...  more

The explosive, dark secrets behind America's post-WWII science programs... In the chaos following WWII, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation code-named Paperclip to allow them to work in the U.S. without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including papers made available to her by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and lost dossiers discovered at the National Archives and Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century.

Running so hard you think you?ll choke on your next breath. Lungs burning like they?re drenched in battery acid. Peripheral vision blurred by the same adrenaline that drowns out the cheers coming from the full stadium. And of course, the reporters. The men scribbling furiously on their notepads...  more

Running so hard you think you?ll choke on your next breath. Lungs burning like they?re drenched in battery acid. Peripheral vision blurred by the same adrenaline that drowns out the cheers coming from the full stadium. And of course, the reporters. The men scribbling furiously on their notepads so they can publish every stumble, sprain, and sniffle. This was the world of the female athletes in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the first games in which women were allowed to compete in track and field on a trial basis. Nicknamed “The Peerless Four,? the Canadian track team included some of the strongest, most diversely talented women on the scene. Narrated by the team?s chaperone—a former runner herself—the women embark on their journey with the same golden goals as every other Olympian, male or female. But as the Olympic tension begins to rise with unexpected injuries and disqualifications, each woman discovers new fears and priorities, all while the weight of women?s future in the Olympics rests on their performance. The Peerless Four is more than a sports novel, more than a record of women?s rights. It?s a meditation on sacrifice, loyalty, perseverance, and the courage to live a true underdog tale.

James Hunt and Niki Lauda defined an era in Formula 1 in the 70s. Their battle for the 1976 World Championship is still regarded as one of the most exciting and dramatic in the sport's history. This is the story of that season and much more. With Lauda?s return from life-threatening injuries...  more

James Hunt and Niki Lauda defined an era in Formula 1 in the 70s. Their battle for the 1976 World Championship is still regarded as one of the most exciting and dramatic in the sport's history. This is the story of that season and much more. With Lauda?s return from life-threatening injuries the stuff of legend and Hunt?s last gasp title success bringing a whole new generation of followers previously immune to the sport, the Playboy and the Rat brings that story to life once more. After that remarkable season, their careers, and their lives, went in almost polar opposite directions, with Lauda becoming the respected elder statesman of the sport. Hunt died at an unseemly age after a life that typified the image of a racing driver.

?Enthralling.??Frans de Waal, The New York Times Book ReviewSurvival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying...  more

?Enthralling.??Frans de Waal, The New York Times Book ReviewSurvival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be. Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts to explain kindness, The Price of Altruism tells for the first time the moving story of the eccentric American genius George Price (1922?1975), as he strives to answer evolution's greatest riddle. An original and penetrating picture of twentieth century thought, it is also a deeply personal journey. From the heights of the Manhattan Project to the inspired equation that explains altruism to the depths of homelessness and despair, Price's life embodies the paradoxes of Darwin?s enigma. His tragic suicide in a squatter?s flat, among the vagabonds to whom he gave all his possessions, provides the ultimate contemplation on the possibility of genuine benevolence. 24 black-and-white illustrations

In May 1941, Father Jean Bernard was arrested for denouncing the Nazis and deported from his native Luxembourg to Dachau's "Priest Block," a barracks that housed more than 3,000 clergymen of various denominations (the vast majority Roman Catholic priests). Priestblock 25487 tells the...  more

In May 1941, Father Jean Bernard was arrested for denouncing the Nazis and deported from his native Luxembourg to Dachau's "Priest Block," a barracks that housed more than 3,000 clergymen of various denominations (the vast majority Roman Catholic priests). Priestblock 25487 tells the gripping true story of his survival amid inhuman brutality, degradation, and torture. This important book, originally published in Germany in 1963, was adapted by director Volker Schlöndorff into the film The Ninth Day in 2004. Introduction by Robert Royal. Preface by Seán Cardinal O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston. Praise for Priestblock 25487 ''Stunning... Casts light into dark and previously neglected corners of the horror that was the Third Reich.'' —Richard John Neuhaus, Editor in Chief First Things ''Father Jean Bernard's portrait of survival in a German concentration camp is simple, forceful and vivid and therefore impossible to put down or forget. It ranks with the great 20th Century personal testimonies against totalitarian violence... Priestblock 25487 is a diary of Catholic discipleship under extreme conditions that will deeply move all persons of conscience.'' —Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver ''Gripping! This crisp story of the 3,000-plus Christian clergy at Dachau in 1941 forces me to turn pages quickly, in horror... In its understated power, this brief book is unforgettable.'' —Michael Novak, author of Washington's God (with Jana Novak) ''Many hundreds of books have been written and published about German concentration and extermination camps during World War II, including at least two or three dozens written or dictated by their actual survivors. Of these, Father Jean Bernard's Priestblock 25487 is among the very best, because of the exceptional intelligence and honesty of its author. Dachau, where he was imprisoned, was not the worst of all those camps, and Father Bernard was, surprisingly, released after two years of imprisonment: but perhaps because of these very circumstances his diary is extraordinarily telling, convincing, and graphic. Every scholar and student of that dreadful chapter of twentieth-century history ought to read—and ponder—its contents.'' —John Lukacs, author of The Hitler of History; and Five Days in London: May 1940''Father Bernard has left readers with a gripping testimony of the brutal treatment the Catholic clergy received at the hands of the Nazis in Dachau. Despite the grim subject matter, the strong Christian faith held by these men is inspiring.'' —William A. Donohue, President, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights ''Deeply moving... The suffering of these priests for the sake of the loving God is one of the modern age's glorious mysteries.''—Father George Rutler, author of A Crisis of Saints''It is dramatic. It is brutally honest. I loved the book and could not put it down.''—Teresa Tomeo, Ave Maria Radio''Priestblock 25487 is an important work—a gripping firsthand account of the persecution of anti-Nazi Catholic clergy. I highly recommend this excellent book.'' —Sr. Margherita Marchione, author of Yours Is A Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew more congested, the streets became clogged with plodding, horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 crippled the entire northeast, a solution had to be found. Two brothers from one of the nation's great...  more

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew more congested, the streets became clogged with plodding, horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 crippled the entire northeast, a solution had to be found. Two brothers from one of the nation's great families-Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York-pursued the dream of his city digging America's first subway, and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, life-changing innovations, class warfare, bitter political tensions, and the question of America's place in the world. The Race Underground is peopled with the famous, like Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison, and the not-so-famous, from brilliant engineers to the countless "sandhogs" who shoveled, hoisted and blasted their way into the earth's crust, sometimes losing their lives in the construction of the tunnels. Doug Most chronicles the science of the subway, looks at the centuries of fears people overcame about traveling underground and tells a story as exciting as any ever ripped from the pages of U.S. history. The Race Underground is a great American saga of two rival American cities, their rich, powerful and sometimes corrupt interests, and an invention that changed the lives of millions. Read by Caitlin Davies. 6 audio discs (approximately 7 hr., 15 min.)

It has long been known that Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, and many other war criminals found refuge in Argentina. Now, for the first time, a courageous Argentine journalist shows exactly how it was done. This riveting book is the first to map the precise details of the smuggling...  more

It has long been known that Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, and many other war criminals found refuge in Argentina. Now, for the first time, a courageous Argentine journalist shows exactly how it was done. This riveting book is the first to map the precise details of the smuggling of Nazis into Argentina, an operation organized with the enthusiastic support of Peron’s presidential palace. Using previously unseen archival sources, The Real Odessa covers a wide geography — Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy — and proves the complicity of the Vatican and the Argentine Catholic Church in one of the great postwar scandals. This is a factual, historical version of the events fictionalized in Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling novel The Odessa File.

In this unforgettable book, distinguished author Anne Nelson shares one of the most shocking and inspiring - and least chronicled - stories of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime. The Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, was the Gestapo's name for an intrepid band of German artists,...  more

In this unforgettable book, distinguished author Anne Nelson shares one of the most shocking and inspiring - and least chronicled - stories of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime. The Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, was the Gestapo's name for an intrepid band of German artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats (almost half of them women) who battled treacherous odds to unveil the brutal secrets of their fascist employers and oppressors. Based on years of research, featuring new information, and culled from exclusive interviews, Red Orchestra documents this riveting story through the eyes of Greta Kuckhoff, a German working mother. Fighting for an education in 1920s Berlin but frustrated by her country?s economic instability and academic sexism, Kuckhoff ventured to America, where she immersed herself in jazz, Walt Disney movies, and the first stirrings of the New Deal. When she returned to her homeland, she watched with anguish as it descended into a totalitarian society that relegated her friends to exile and detention, an environment in which political extremism evoked an extreme response. Greta and others in her circle were appalled by Nazi anti-Semitism and took action on many fronts to support their Jewish friends and neighbors. As the war raged and Nazi abuses grew in ferocity and reach, resistance was the only possible avenue for Greta and her compatriots. These included Arvid Harnack - the German friend she met in Wisconsin - who collected anti-Nazi intelligence while working for their Economic Ministry; Arvid's wife, Mildred, who emigrated to her husband's native country to become the only American woman executed by Hitler; Harro Schulze-Boysen, the glamorous Luftwaffe intelligence officer who smuggled anti-Nazi information to allies abroad; his wife, Libertas, a social butterfly who coaxed favors from an unsuspecting Göring; John Sieg, a railroad worker from Detroit who publicized Nazi atrocities from a Communist underground printing press; and Greta Kuckhoff's husband, Adam, a theatrical colleague of Brecht's who found employment in Goebbels's propaganda unit in order to undermine the regime. For many members of the Red Orchestra, these audacious acts of courage resulted in their tragic and untimely end. These unsung individuals are portrayed here with startling and sympathetic power. As suspenseful as a thriller, Red Orchestra is a brilliant account of ordinary yet bold citizens who were willing to sacrifice everything to topple the Third Reich.

During and following WWII, a special multinational group of more than 350 men and women served behind enemy lines and joined frontline military units to ensure the preservation, protection, liberation and restitution of the world's greatest artistic and cultural treasures. This "band of...  more

During and following WWII, a special multinational group of more than 350 men and women served behind enemy lines and joined frontline military units to ensure the preservation, protection, liberation and restitution of the world's greatest artistic and cultural treasures. This "band of unsung heroes," formally referred to as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section, or commonly referred to as the "Monuments Men," worked tirelessly to track down, identify and catalogue millions of priceless works of art and irreplaceable cultural artifacts, including masterpieces by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, that had been stolen by Hitler and the Nazis. The story of the Monuments Men, including their heroics and exploits in rescuing and safeguarding many of the world's greatest artworks for the benefit of mankind, has never before been fully revealed until now, with the publication of Rescuing Da Vinci, an exhaustively researched historical account written by Robert M. Edsel. Mr. Edsel can best be described as a successful athlete and business entrepreneur turned modern day "Indiana Jones." Mr. Edsel has dedicated the last five years of his life to painstaking and far-reaching research to unravel the secrets of the Monuments Men and, in so doing, to make the world aware of their unprecedented contributions, both during and after WWII, and to ensure that these unsung heroes receive appropriate recognition from the United States government, as well as the broad public. The detailed documentation, inventories and photographs developed and catalogued by the Monuments Men during and following World War II, have made possible, and continue to make possible, the restitution of stolen artworks of to rightful owners and their descendents. Long after WWII, many Monuments Men went on to become renowned directors and curators of preeminent international cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among many others, as well as professors at esteemed universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York University, Williams College and Columbia University. Others became founders, presidents, and members of associations such as the New York City Ballet, the American Museum Association, the American Association of Museum Directors, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Society of Architectural Historians, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as respected architects, archivists, artists and musicians.

A writer and researcher behind the bestselling Schott?s Almanac brings us a delightfully macabre collection of morbid curiosities: tales of what happened to famous people after they died.From Alexander the Great (whose corpse founded a dynasty) to RenÉ Descartes (whose skull was separated from...  more

A writer and researcher behind the bestselling Schott?s Almanac brings us a delightfully macabre collection of morbid curiosities: tales of what happened to famous people after they died.From Alexander the Great (whose corpse founded a dynasty) to RenÉ Descartes (whose skull was separated from his body) and Dorothy Parker (whose ashes were hidden in a filing cabinet for more than a decade), some of the most influential and interesting people in history have journeyed on posthumous adventures none of them could have predicted. Rest in Pieces catalogs stories from the age of antiquity to today, tracing the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death and connecting the lives of the famous deceased to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses. Jim Thorpe?s body renamed a city in Pennsylvania. Einstein?s brain took a road trip across America. And Osama bin Laden?s corpse was lost among the waves?until a California treasure hunter claimed to find it. More than a rich and satisfying source of inappropriate cocktail chatter, Rest in Pieces uses its novel perspective to reveal the lives of the world's most interesting people, and to help us understand the Grim Reaper a little better.

They were the Princess Dianas of their day—perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. The four captivating Russian Grand Duchesses—Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanov—were much admired for their happy dispositions, their...  more

They were the Princess Dianas of their day—perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. The four captivating Russian Grand Duchesses—Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanov—were much admired for their happy dispositions, their looks, the clothes they wore and their privileged lifestyle. Over the years, the story of the four Romanov sisters and their tragic end in a basement at Ekaterinburg in 1918 has clouded our view of them, leading to a mass of sentimental and idealized hagiography. With this treasure trove of diaries and letters from the grand duchesses to their friends and family, we learn that they were intelligent, sensitive and perceptive witnesses to the dark turmoil within their immediate family and the ominous approach of the Russian Revolution, the nightmare that would sweep their world away, and them along with it. The Romanov Sisters sets out to capture the joy as well as the insecurities and poignancy of those young lives against the backdrop of the dying days of late Imperial Russia, World War I and the Russian Revolution. Rappaort aims to present a new and challenging take on the story, drawing extensively on previously unseen or unpublished letters, diaries and archival sources, as well as private collections. It is a book that will surprise people, even aficionados

Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England, had been humiliated by defeat in World War I and, like much of the German aristocracy, feared the social unrest wrought by the ineffectual Weimar Republic. Jonathan Petropoulos shows how the princes,...  more

Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England, had been humiliated by defeat in World War I and, like much of the German aristocracy, feared the social unrest wrought by the ineffectual Weimar Republic. Jonathan Petropoulos shows how the princes, lured by prominent positions in the Nazi regime and highly susceptible to nationalist appeals, became enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Prince Philipp, son-in-law to the King of Italy, became the highest-ranking prince in the Nazi state and developed a close personal relationship with Hitler and Hermann Goering. Prince Christoph was a prominent SS officer and head of the most important intelligence agency in the Third Reich. In return, the princes made the Nazis socially acceptable to wealthy, high-society patrons. Prince Philipp even introduced Goering to Mussolini at a critical stage in the Nazi Party's development and later served as a liaison between Hitler and the Italian dictator. Permitted access to Hessen family private papers and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Petropoulos follows the story of the House of Hesse through to its tragic denouement--the princes' betrayal and persecution by an increasingly paranoid Hitler and prosecution and denazification by the Allies.

A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the...  more

A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania between the wars and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. Ashamed to return home after her expulsion, she looked for work in Bucharest and discovered a talent for dressmaking. That talent--and her blond hair, blue eyes, and overall Gentile appearance--allowed her entry into the highest reaches of Romanian society, albeit as a dressmaker. Bernstein recounts the growing shadow of the native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, a rising tide of anti-Semitic laws, and finally, the open persecution of Romania's Jews. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp deep in Germany. Nineteen out of every twenty women transported there died. The author, her sister Esther, and two other friends banded together and, largely due to Sara's extraordinary street smarts and intuition, managed to survive. Although Bernstein was not a professional writer, she tells this story with style and power. Her daughter Marlene contributes a moving epilogue to close out Sara's life. One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs. -- Kirkus Reviews

The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century?s most iconic moments.  It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced,...  more

The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century?s most iconic moments.  It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours.  These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten.  Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation.  In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over.  Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed.  Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved.  Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe.  Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places ? particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France ? they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities.  Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s.  Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

Nonna Bannister carried a secret almost to her Tennessee grave: the diaries she kept as a young girl experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust while learning compassion and love for her fellow human beings. Nonna's writings tell the remarkable tale of how a Russian girl, born into a family that...  more

Nonna Bannister carried a secret almost to her Tennessee grave: the diaries she kept as a young girl experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust while learning compassion and love for her fellow human beings. Nonna's writings tell the remarkable tale of how a Russian girl, born into a family that had known wealth and privileges, was exposed to the concentration camps and learned the value of human life and the importance of forgiveness.

Dance Pickett knows better than most the suffering contained within the walls of Andersonville Prison. Posted on sentry duty, he?d like to help the condemned and dying prisoners of war but knows that any mercy he extends will be seen as treason. Southern belle Violet Stiles could never have...  more

Dance Pickett knows better than most the suffering contained within the walls of Andersonville Prison. Posted on sentry duty, he?d like to help the condemned and dying prisoners of war but knows that any mercy he extends will be seen as treason. Southern belle Violet Stiles could never have imagined the atrocities that lay just ten miles from her home. Surely the good folk of Americus would never knowingly condone such barbarism. When Violet?s goodwill campaign stirs up accusations of Union sympathies and endangers her family, she realizes she must tread carefully. Confederate corporal Emery Jones never expected to find camaraderie with the Union prisoner he escorted to Andersonville. But the soldier?s wit and poignant longing for his wife and children strike a chord in Emery. How can this man, so like himself, be an enemy? Emery vows that this unlikely friendship will survive beyond the war?little knowing what that promise will cost him. As these three young Rebels cross paths and share their tales, a plot forms that, if successful, could hang them for treason. Will they have the strength to stand against and fight for their fellow man? Wrestling with God?s harsh truth, they must decide for themselves, once and for all, Who is my neighbor?

Love letters from Bergen-Belsen and Westerbork camps - a real life testimony from the Holocaust

On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed, embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to...  more

On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed, embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president's corpse. In a lively and dramatic narrative, Thomas J. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. He takes us through the planning and execution of the crime and the outcome of the investigation. He describes the reactions of Mary Todd Lincoln and Robert Todd Lincoln to the theft --- and the peculiar silence of a nation. He follows the unlikely tale of what happened to Lincoln's remains after the attempted robbery, and details the plan devised by the Lincoln Guard of Honor to prevent a similar abominable recurrence. Along the way, Craughwell offers entertaining sidelights on the rise of counterfeiting in America and the establishment of the Secret Service to combat it; the prevalence of grave robberies; the art of nineteenth-century embalming; and the emergence among Irish immigrants of an ambitious middle class --- and a criminal underclass. This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens who honored their native son by keeping a valuable, burdensome secret for decades offers a riveting glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America, and underscores truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the extraordinary story of how he survived the Holocaust Sam Pivnik is the ultimate survivor from a world that no longer exists. On fourteen occasions he should have been killed, but luck, his physical strength, and his determination not...  more

Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the extraordinary story of how he survived the Holocaust Sam Pivnik is the ultimate survivor from a world that no longer exists. On fourteen occasions he should have been killed, but luck, his physical strength, and his determination not to die all played a part in Sam Pivnik living to tell his extraordinary story.In 1939, on his thirteenth birthday, Pivnik's life changed forever when the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived the two ghettoes set up in his home town of Bedzin and six months on Auschwitz?s notorious Rampe Kommando where prisoners were either taken away for entry to the camp or gassing. After this harrowing experience he was sent to work at the brutal Fürstengrube mining camp. He could have died on the ?Death March? that took him west as the Third Reich collapsed and he was one of only a handful of people who swam to safety when the Royal Air Force sank the prison ship Cap Arcona in 1945, mistakenly believing it to be carrying fleeing members of the SS.He eventually made his way to London where he found people too preoccupied with their own wartime experiences on the Home Front to be interested in what had happened to him.Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the story of his life, a true tale of survival against the most extraordinary odds.

In The Book "Final Truth" author Wilton Earle collaborated with serial killer Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins to lead readers through the horrific labyrinth of a serial killer's mind. In this his newest work, Earle introduces readers to Terilynn Wager who killed nine victims before her fifteenth...  more

In The Book "Final Truth" author Wilton Earle collaborated with serial killer Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins to lead readers through the horrific labyrinth of a serial killer's mind. In this his newest work, Earle introduces readers to Terilynn Wager who killed nine victims before her fifteenth birthday. But unlike Gaskins who was the functionally illiterate product of the American South'e tobacco roads, Teriynn is the beautiful intelligent daughter of an affluent and privileged family. Under applicable juvenile offender laws, the records of Terilynn's crimes were sealed by the courts. She was released from prison on her eighteenth birthday. Now Terilynn is living in the western U.S. She is free to tell her story. And she has chosen to tell it in this book.

While much information exists on the dramatic fate of concentration camp victims, little is available about the Jewish men, women, and children who managed to escape before Hitler implemented mass executions and the death camps. The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy is an extraordinary work featuring...  more

While much information exists on the dramatic fate of concentration camp victims, little is available about the Jewish men, women, and children who managed to escape before Hitler implemented mass executions and the death camps. The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy is an extraordinary work featuring the stories of 190 escapees, lived through their own eyes and compellingly recollected in their own words. Dorit Bader Whiteman, a clinical psychologist and a refugee herself, depicts the experiences of these escapees: the persecution by citizens and officials; the abrupt confiscation of personal possessions; the raids and arrests; the quest to save the children; the dangers and fortuities in escape and resettlement; and the lasting emotional consequences of these experiences. By the end of the 1930s, European Jews fled to countries worldwide in search of a haven, among them England, Sweden, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States. One of the most moving accounts is that of the Kindertransport of 10,000 Jewish children in 1939 from Nazi-occupied countries to Great Britain in trains so crowded that the smaller children had to be placed in luggage racks above the seats. Dr. Whiteman illustrates the spectrum of foster homes, ranging from the compassionate to the injurious, in which the Kinder, separated from their parents, were placed. It is equally poignant to read of the adult refugees who struggled to resettle in a new land unable to speak the language, without appropriate skills or education, without money or contacts, and filled with uncertainty over the fate of family and friends. The author provides important psychological insights into how these experiences have left the escapees to this very day with strength and with pain. The Uprooted, a landmark testament to the courage and resilience of this unstudied population, will be compelling reading for the lay person, as well as social scientists and historians, and for the survivors.

In 1943, with the world convulsed by war and a Fascist defeat in Europe far from certain, a few visionaries?civilians and soldiers alike?saw past questions of life and death to realize that victory wasn?t the only thing at stake. So was the priceless cultural heritage of thousands of years.In...  more

In 1943, with the world convulsed by war and a Fascist defeat in Europe far from certain, a few visionaries?civilians and soldiers alike?saw past questions of life and death to realize that victory wasn?t the only thing at stake. So was the priceless cultural heritage of thousands of years.In the midst of the conflict, the Allied Forces appointed the monuments officers?a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists?to ensure that the great masterworks of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. The journalist Ilaria Dagnini Brey focuses her spellbinding account on the monuments officers of Italy, quickly dubbed ?the Venus Fixers? by bemused troops.Working on the front lines in conditions of great deprivation and danger, these unlikely soldiers stripped the great galleries of their incomparable holdings and sent them into safety by any means they could; when trucks could not be requisitioned or ?borrowed,? a Tiepolo altarpiece might make its midnight journey across the countryside balanced in the front basket of a bicycle. They blocked a Nazi convoy of two hundred stolen paintings?including Danae, Titian?s voluptuous masterpiece, an intended birthday present for Hermann Göring.They worked with skeptical army strategists to make sure air raids didn?t take out the heart of an ancient city, and patched up Renaissance palazzi and ancient churches whose lead roofs were sometimes melted away by the savagery of the attacks, exposing their frescoed interiors to the harsh Tuscan winters and blistering summers. Sometimes they failed. But to an astonishing degree, they succeeded, and anyone who marvels at Italy?s artistic riches today is witnessing their handiwork.In the course of her research, Brey gained unprecedented access to private archives and primary sources, and the result is a book at once thorough and grandly entertaining?a revelatory take on a little-known chapter of World War II history. The Venus Fixers is an adventure story with the gorgeous tints of a Botticelli landscape as its backdrop.

After more than two decades of painstaking research, this book unveils the darkest innermost secrets and history of a secret Nazi occult order. The veil surrounding this most secret and legendary was impenetrable until now, and the reality is even stranger than the wildest dreams or blackest...  more

After more than two decades of painstaking research, this book unveils the darkest innermost secrets and history of a secret Nazi occult order. The veil surrounding this most secret and legendary was impenetrable until now, and the reality is even stranger than the wildest dreams or blackest nightmares. The Vril Society counted among their minions the black adepts Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. More than any other secret society or occult order, the Vril Society influenced the history of the world. The godmen of the Vril Society sought to rule a world where enslaved subhumans would toil beneath the purple flames of the black sun and serve the arcane purposes of a master race. From the stupendous Atlantis technologies to the most secret occult rituals, theirs was the universe to conquer and subjugate.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly?but if you?re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle...  more

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly?but if you?re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.That?s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we?ve been given, but it?s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread?and then exploited?the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos?ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease?horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful?and more interesting?when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust still present some of the most disturbing questions in modern history: why did Hitler's party appeal to millions of Germans, and how entrenched was anti-Semitism among the population? How could anyone claim, after the war, that the genocide of...  more

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust still present some of the most disturbing questions in modern history: why did Hitler's party appeal to millions of Germans, and how entrenched was anti-Semitism among the population? How could anyone claim, after the war, that the genocide of Europe's Jews was a secret? Did ordinary non-Jewish Germans live in fear of the Nazi state? In this unprecedented firsthand analysis of daily life as experienced in the Third Reich, What We Knew offers definitive answers to these most important questions. Combining the expertise of Eric A. Johnson, an American historian, and Karl-Heinz Reuband, a German sociologist, What We Knew is the most startling oral history yet of everyday life in the Third Reich, drawing on gripping interviews as well as a unique survey of four thousand people, both German Jews and non-Jewish Germans. What We Knew shows firsthand the disparity between German Jews like Elise and Hermann Gottfried, to whom all Germans seemed like "detectives in civilian clothing," and non-Jews like Hubert Lutz, who spent ten years in the Hitler Youth, and "never heard anybody suggest that you spy on your parents or that you spy on anybody else." Johnson and Reuband's research confirms that much of the German population-at least one-third-were aware of the mass murder of European Jews as it was going on. They were similarly aware of the murder of the mentally ill and handicapped, and the widespread torture employed by Hitler's Gestapo. And surprisingly, the research confirms that Hitler and National Socialism were so immensely popular among most Germans that intimidation and terror were rarely needed to enforce loyalty. Eric Johnson's earlier book, Nazi Terror, was praised by to the Associated Press as "a benchmark work in Third Reich studies" and by The New York Times Books Review for its "levelheadedness and common sense, backed by painstaking research." Continuing this tradition of erudition, What We Knew redefines our perception about life under the Third Reich and changes the way we think about the Holocaust.

A Son's tribute to the courage of his father and to all the heroes of World War II In his riveting debut, Where the Birds Never Sing, Jack Sacco tells the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II. As seen through the eyes of his...  more

A Son's tribute to the courage of his father and to all the heroes of World War II In his riveting debut, Where the Birds Never Sing, Jack Sacco tells the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II. As seen through the eyes of his father, Joe Sacco -- a farm boy from Alabama who was flung into the chaos of Normandy and survived the terrors of the Bulge -- this is the heroic story of the young men who changed the course of history. As part of the 92nd Signal Battalion and Patton's famed Third Army, Joe and his buddies found themselves at the forefront of the Allied push through France and Germany. After more than a year of fighting, but still only twenty years old, Joe was a hardened veteran. However, nothing could have prepared him and his unit for the horrors behind the walls of Germany's infamous Dachau concentration camp. They were among the first 250 American troops into the camp, and it was there that they finally grasped the significance of the Allied mission. Surrounded by death and destruction, they not only found the courage and the will to fight, they discovered the meaning of friendship and came to understand the value and fragility of life. Told from the perspective of an ordinary soldier, Where the Birds Never Sing contains firsthand accounts and never-before-published photographs documenting one man's transformation from farm boy to soldier to liberator.

A national bestseller with more than 370,000 copies in print, this is "the first book that anyone who wants to learn about Hitler or the war in Europe must read... a marvel of fact."--Newsweek

September 1940. Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki deliberately walked into a Nazi German street round-up in Warsaw and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859. He had volunteered for a secret undercover mission: smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp, and build a resistance...  more

September 1940. Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki deliberately walked into a Nazi German street round-up in Warsaw and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859. He had volunteered for a secret undercover mission: smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp, and build a resistance organization among prisoners. Pilecki?s clandestine intelligence, received by the Allies in 1941, was among earliest. He escaped in 1943 after accomplishing his mission. Dramatic eyewitness report, written in 1945 for Pilecki?s Polish Army superiors, published in English for first time.

In 1967, after a baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment. On the advice of a renowned expert in gender identity and sexual reassignment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the boy was surgically altered to live as a girl. This landmark case, initially reported...  more

In 1967, after a baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment. On the advice of a renowned expert in gender identity and sexual reassignment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the boy was surgically altered to live as a girl. This landmark case, initially reported to be a complete success, seemed all the more remarkable since the child had been born an identical twin: his uninjured brother, raised as a boy, provided to the experiment the perfect matched control. The so-called twins case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine and the social sciences; cited repeatedly over the past thirty years as living proof that our sense of being male or female is not inborn but primarily the result of how we are raised. A touchstone for the feminist movement, the case also set the precedent for sex reassignment as standard treatment for thousands of newborns with similarly injured, or irregular, genitals. But the case was a failure from the outset. From the start the famous twin had, in fact, struggled against his imposed girlhood. Since age fourteen, when finally informed of his medical history, he made the decision to live as a male. John Colapinto tells this extraordinary story for the first time in As Nature Made Him. Writing with uncommon intelligence, insight, and compassion, he also sets the historical and medical context for the case, exposing the thirty-year-long scientific feud between Dr. John Money and his fellow sex researcher, Dr. Milton Diamond--a rivalry over the nature/nurture debate whose very bitterness finally brought the truth to light. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, As Nature Made Him is first and foremost a human drama of one man's-and one family's--amazing survival in the face of terrible odds. The human intimacy of the story is all the greater for the subject's courageous decision to step out from behind the pseudonym that has shrouded his identity for the past thirty years.

The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill...  more

The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born.

When hardcore industrial rocker and Ministry supremo Al Jourgensen recruited Chris Connelly as a singer for the Revolting Cocks, the young Scottish lad could hardly have imagined the mayhem that was about to ensue. As an integral part of Jourgensen's Mad Max-like mutant family of musicians,...  more

When hardcore industrial rocker and Ministry supremo Al Jourgensen recruited Chris Connelly as a singer for the Revolting Cocks, the young Scottish lad could hardly have imagined the mayhem that was about to ensue. As an integral part of Jourgensen's Mad Max-like mutant family of musicians, Connelly joined a drug-crazed travelling circus. Live shows were transformed into an ear-splitting redneck disco from hell, under the influence of a mind-boggling cocktail of every conceivable narcotic, with sleazy strippers and even reports of live cattle on stage. As well as Jourgensen and all the Wax Trax! crew, the book features cameo appearances by Ogre of Skinny Puppy, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Killing Joke, Jah Wobble, and Cabaret Voltaire. Despite the unrelenting chaos, both Ministry and the Revolting Cocks have been immensely successful; Connelly appeared on two US gold albums (The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste) and worked as songwriter on the million-plus selling platinum album Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs. Connelly's superbly written, funny, irreverent, and sometimes downright scary memoir is one of the finest portrayals of a man trapped in the eye of a post-punk industrial storm this side of Armageddon. Chris Connelly was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and now lives in Chicago where he has pursued a successful solo career.

In curiously parallel lives, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were both orphaned at an early age. Both were brilliant students who attended college— one at Princeton, the other at Columbia—and studied law. Both were young staff officers under General George Washington, and both became war...  more

In curiously parallel lives, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were both orphaned at an early age. Both were brilliant students who attended college— one at Princeton, the other at Columbia—and studied law. Both were young staff officers under General George Washington, and both became war heroes. Politics beckoned them, and each served in the newly formed government of the fledgling nation. Why, then, did these two face each other at dawn in a duel that ended with death for one and opprobrium for the other? Judith St. George’s lively biography, told in alternating chapters, brings to life two complex men who played major roles in the formation of the United States.

Even Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, struggles with the question:  Why didn?t the Jews fight back?  And finally, in view of the circumstances--even now, who would believe what was happening?--he concludes that the question is ?not why all the Jews did...  more

Even Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, struggles with the question:  Why didn?t the Jews fight back?  And finally, in view of the circumstances--even now, who would believe what was happening?--he concludes that the question is ?not why all the Jews did NOT fight, but how do many of them DID.  Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength--spiritual and physical--to resist??  In fact, over 10,000 German Jews?34 percent of the refugee population between the ages of eighteen and forty?fought in the allied armies of World War II.    This book honors those European-born Jewish combat veterans of World War II--refugees from the Nazi regime in Germany and Austria who faced their persecutors by joining the Allied Forces in a fight against the country of their birth.  These twenty-seven interviews take readers into the unique and harrowing experience of German and Austrian Jews who served as Allied soldiers in North Africa and Europe--brave men and one woman whose service restored a sense of dignity and allowed them to rise above their former victimization at the hands of Nazi oppressors.  All burned with anger at the Germans who had subjected them, often as young children, to cruelty in everyday life in their hometowns, and to ridicule in the national media.  As soldiers who knew the language and psychology of the enemy better than any of their comrades, they struck back with new-found pride against the rampant injustice that had annihilated their families, destroyed their prospects, and subjected many of them to the worst forms of physical abuse, both random and terrifying.  In The Enemy I Knew they tell their stories, and the world is richer for their heroic acts, and for their testimony.

When Hitler's war ended in 1945, the war over Hitler--who he really was, what gave birth to his unique evil--had just begun. Hitler did not escape the bunker in Berlin but, half a century later, he has managed to escape explanation in ways both frightening and profound. Explaining Hitler is...  more

When Hitler's war ended in 1945, the war over Hitler--who he really was, what gave birth to his unique evil--had just begun. Hitler did not escape the bunker in Berlin but, half a century later, he has managed to escape explanation in ways both frightening and profound. Explaining Hitler is an extraordinary quest, an expedition into the war zone of Hitler theories. This is a passionate, enthralling book that illuminates what Hitler explainers tell us about Hitler, about the explainers, and about ourselves.

In 2002, a researcher for The Harvard Crimson came across a restricted archive labeled "Secret Court Files, 1920." The mystery he uncovered involved a tragic scandal in which Harvard University secretly put a dozen students on trial for homosexuality and then systematically and persistently...  more

In 2002, a researcher for The Harvard Crimson came across a restricted archive labeled "Secret Court Files, 1920." The mystery he uncovered involved a tragic scandal in which Harvard University secretly put a dozen students on trial for homosexuality and then systematically and persistently tried to ruin their lives.In May of 1920,Cyril Wilcox, a freshman suspended from Harvard, was found sprawled dead on his bed, his room filled with gas--a suicide. The note he left behind revealed his secret life as part of a circle of (cut "young") homosexual students.The resulting witch hunt and the lives it cost remains one of the most shameful episodes in the history of America's premiere university. Supported by legendary Harvard President Lawrence Lowell, Harvard conducted its investigation in secrecy. Several students committed suicide;others had their lives destroyed by an ongoing effort on the part of Harvard to destroy their reputations. Harvard's Secret Court is a deeply moving indictment of the human toll of intolerance and the horrors of injustice that can result when a powerful institution loses its balance.

The most powerful account of Hitler's domination of the German people through fanaticism, divisiveness, and luck. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with...  more

The most powerful account of Hitler's domination of the German people through fanaticism, divisiveness, and luck. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in this century. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I. With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the settings that made Hitler's rise possible: the virulent anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense casualties, the toxic nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the 1920s, the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right and the Left, the hysteria that accompanied Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and then mounted in brutal attacks by his storm troopers on Jews and others condemned as enemies of the Aryan race. In an account drawing on many previously untapped sources, Hitler metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a "drummer" sounding an insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of an infamous failed putsch and, ultimately, to the leadership of a ragtag alliance of right-wing parties fused into a movement that enthralled the German people. This volume, the first of two, ends with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer fringes of society, and with the march of the German army into the Rhineland, Hitler's initial move toward the abyss of war.

The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time. The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume masterpiece "as close to definitive as anything we are likely to see," and that promise is fulfilled in this stunning second volume. As Nemesis...  more

The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time. The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume masterpiece "as close to definitive as anything we are likely to see," and that promise is fulfilled in this stunning second volume. As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head. 48 pages of b/w photographs.

Dancer, actress, mountaineer, and director Leni Riefenstahl’s uncompromising will and audacious talent for self-promotion appeared unmatched—until 1932, when she introduced herself to her future protector and patron: Adolf Hitler. Known internationally for two of the films she made...  more

Dancer, actress, mountaineer, and director Leni Riefenstahl’s uncompromising will and audacious talent for self-promotion appeared unmatched—until 1932, when she introduced herself to her future protector and patron: Adolf Hitler. Known internationally for two of the films she made for him, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s demanding and obsessive style introduced unusual angles, new approaches to tracking shots, and highly symbolic montages. Despite her lifelong claim to be an apolitical artist, Riefenstahl’s monumental and nationalistic vision of Germany’s traditions and landscape served to idealize the cause of one of the world’s most violent and racist regimes.Riefenstahl ardently cast herself as a passionate young director who caved to the pressure to serve an all-powerful Führer, so focused on reinventing the cinema that she didn’t recognize the goals of the Third Reich until too late. Jürgen Trimborn’s revelatory biography celebrates this charismatic and adventurous woman who lived to 101, while also taking on the myths surrounding her. With refreshing distance and detailed research, Trimborn presents the story of a stubborn and intimidating filmmaker who refused to be held accountable for her role in the Holocaust but continued to inspire countless photographers and filmmakers with her artistry.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.One of the century's most remarkable and controversial women, Leni Riefenstahl is an artist of the first order. Dancer, actor, and photographer, she is best known as the director of Triumph of the Will, a film of a Nazi Party rally and Olympia, the...  more

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.One of the century's most remarkable and controversial women, Leni Riefenstahl is an artist of the first order. Dancer, actor, and photographer, she is best known as the director of Triumph of the Will, a film of a Nazi Party rally and Olympia, the classic account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is for these works of cinematic propaganda that Riefenstahl is revered and reviled. In this autobiography, she discusses her motivations, her history, her important friendships, and, most of all, her art. Along with insights into directing and camera work, Riefenstahl offers an emotional, powerful story of a woman who refuses to be defined by any terms other than her own.

The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders...  more

The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty from truth and humanity. Two of Riefenstahl’s films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will, are universally regarded as the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, in this masterful new biography, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind this gifted woman’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified. The facts and her actions, many unknown until now, bear chilling witness: her passionate enthusiasm for Hitler from her first reading of Mein Kampf; her involvements with Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, who advanced her career, and with Hitler, who personally helped finance it; her role as silent eyewitness to wartime atrocities against Jews; and her use of slave labor in the form of concentration camp Gypsies destined for Auschwitz. We see her after the war trying to sell footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a sham “discovery” of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a career comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living relatives, and—to the end—unable to express remorse for the millions murdered by the Nazi regime made mythic by her work.Relying on new sources—including interviews with her colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herself—Bach gives us an exceptional work of historical investigation that untangles the past and is also an objective but unsparing appraisal of a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal ambition.

Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker delivers a haunting and humanizing account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, in a compelling tale of unsolved murder and Internet prostitution. One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after...  more

Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker delivers a haunting and humanizing account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, in a compelling tale of unsolved murder and Internet prostitution. One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life, went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist prostitute who had been fleeing a scene -- of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County Police, too, seemed to have paid little attention -- until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan's. There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppage, Long Island, just a month after Shannan's disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite and in their twenties, they all came from out of town to work as escorts, and they all advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage. In a triumph of reporting -- and in a riveting narrative -- Robert Kolker presents the first detailed look at the shadow world of escorts in the Internet age, where making a living is easier than ever and the dangers remain all too real. He has talked exhaustively with the friends and family of each woman to reveal the three-dimensional truths about their lives, the struggling towns they came from, and the dreams they chased. And he has gained unique access to the Oak Beach neighborhood that has found itself the focus of national media scrutiny -- where the police have flailed, the body count has risen, and the neighbors have begun pointing fingers at one another. There, in a remote community, out of sight of the beaches and marinas scattered along the South Shore barrier islands, the women's stories come together in death and dark mystery. Lost Girls is a portrait not just of five women, but of unsolved murder in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ... the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' --Graham Greene When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a strange kind of...  more

'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ... the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' --Graham Greene When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a strange kind of battlefield. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes, and bombs brought sleepless nights, fear and loss. But for a group of writers, the war became an incomparably vivid source of inspiration, the blazing streets scenes of exhilaration in which fear could transmute into love. In this powerful chronicle of literary life under the Blitz, Lara Feigel vividly conjures the lives of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and the novelist Henry Green. Starting with a sparklingly detailed recreation of a single night of September 1940, the narrative traces the tempestuous experiences of these five figures through five years in London and Ireland, followed by postwar Vienna and Berlin. Volunteering to drive ambulances, patrol the streets and fight fires, the protagonists all exhibited a unified spirit of a nation under siege, but as individuals their emotions were more volatile. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and torrid affairs undertaken. Literary historian and journalist Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves the letters, diaries, journalism and fiction of her writers with official records to chart the history of a burning world, experienced through the eyes of extraordinary individuals.

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial...  more

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield that ultimately led to his demise.   In this riveting short history—the first in his American Portraits series—H. W. Brands traces Fisk’s extraordinary downfall, bringing to life New York’s Gilded Age and some of its legendary players, including Boss William Tweed, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the railroad tycoon Jay Gould.

The true story of Operation Odessa and the international manhunt for Hitler's escaped henchmen. This is a compelling story of the way one man in our callous times truly assumed the role of his brothers' keeper, in spite of obstructions from Nazi supporters, unsympathetic governments, time, and...  more

The true story of Operation Odessa and the international manhunt for Hitler's escaped henchmen. This is a compelling story of the way one man in our callous times truly assumed the role of his brothers' keeper, in spite of obstructions from Nazi supporters, unsympathetic governments, time, and fading memories....An inspiring book-the stirring life of a man who pursues justice in the heyday of expediency.

Throughout the ages, the lights of the aurora borealis were believed to be messengers of gods, signs of apocalypse, or souls of the dead; even the most sophisticated scientists misapprehended their cause. Now Lucy Jago tells the story of the science--and the romance--behind the Northern Lights...  more

Throughout the ages, the lights of the aurora borealis were believed to be messengers of gods, signs of apocalypse, or souls of the dead; even the most sophisticated scientists misapprehended their cause. Now Lucy Jago tells the story of the science--and the romance--behind the Northern Lights as she traces the grand adventure of the life of the visionary Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland.At the age of thirty-one, Birkeland set out on a lifelong, increasingly compulsive quest to discover the origins of the aurora borealis. He traveled across some of the most forbidding landscapes on Earth, from the ice mountains of Norway to the deserts of Africa, against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. Along the way, Birkeland made some remarkable discoveries and inventions, such as the idea of hearing aids for deaf patients; of making caviar from cod roe; and of using the force of cathode rays to propel rockets. No country's armed forces ever adopted his electromagnetic cannon, but the technology has since been adapted and extended to make "railguns" (electromagnetic mass accelerators) for the American Strategic Defense Initiative--the so-called "Star Wars" Defense. Ultimately, Kristian Birkeland's obsession with the workings of the cosmos cost him his health, his happiness, and his sanity--perhaps even his life. He spent his final days in exile in Egypt, and died in 1917 in Japan, under suspicious circumstances, his groundbreaking theories unheralded; he was cheated of the Nobel Prize by a rival. But now Birkeland?s ideas are considered to have been prophetic, and they have furthered our understanding not only of the Northern Lights but also of electromagnetism, comets, and the sun.Exhaustively researched and thrillingly told, the previously unknown story of Kristian Birkeland is an enthralling--and enlightening--saga.

The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. Shocking as it is, this book -- -a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners -- gives evidence to suggest the...  more

The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. Shocking as it is, this book -- -a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners -- gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor -- cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty -- interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler.

On October 19, 1781, Great Britain's best army surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown. But the future of the 13 former colonies was far from clear. A 13,000 man British army still occupied New York City, and another 13,000 regulars and armed loyalists were scattered from Canada...  more

On October 19, 1781, Great Britain's best army surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown. But the future of the 13 former colonies was far from clear. A 13,000 man British army still occupied New York City, and another 13,000 regulars and armed loyalists were scattered from Canada to Savannah, Georgia. Meanwhile, Congress had declined to a mere 24 members, and the national treasury was empty. The American army had not been paid for years and was on the brink of mutiny. In Europe, America's only ally, France, teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and was soon reeling from a disastrous naval defeat in the Caribbean. A stubborn George III dismissed Yorktown as a minor defeat and refused to yield an acre of "my dominions" in America. In Paris, Ambassador Benjamin Franklin confronted violent hostility to France among his fellow members of the American peace delegation. In his riveting new book, Thomas Fleming moves elegantly between the key players in this drama and shows that the outcome we take for granted was far from certain. Not without anguish, General Washington resisted the urgings of many officers to seize power and held the angry army together until peace and independence arrived. With fresh research and masterful storytelling, Fleming breathes new life into this tumultuous but little known period in America's history.

Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, will always be remembered for her film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. After the war, Riefenstahl was shunned by the film industry both in Europe and America, despite a 1952 court ruling proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable...  more

Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, will always be remembered for her film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. After the war, Riefenstahl was shunned by the film industry both in Europe and America, despite a 1952 court ruling proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, this is a fine and balanced study of a still-controversial figure.

For the first time, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor speaks directly to his fans and shares his worldview about life as a sinner. And Taylor knows how to sin. As a small-town hero in the early '90s, he threw himself into a fierce-drinking, drug-abusing, hard-loving, live-for-the...  more

For the first time, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor speaks directly to his fans and shares his worldview about life as a sinner. And Taylor knows how to sin. As a small-town hero in the early '90s, he threw himself into a fierce-drinking, drug-abusing, hard-loving, live-for-the moment life. Soon Taylor's music exploded, and he found himself rich, wanted, and on the road. His new and ever-more extreme lifestyle had an unexpected effect, however; for the first time, he began to actively think about what it meant to sin and whether sinning could -- or should -- be recast in a different light. Seven Deadly Sins is Taylor's personal story, but it's also a larger discussion of what it means to be seen as either a "good" person or a "bad" one. Yes, Corey Taylor has broken the law and hurt people, but, if sin is what makes us human, how wrong can it be?

Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called "the other holocaust." Over the course of 24 years, more innocent men, women, and children perished than died in Hitler's murder of European Jews. This book originated 30 years ago when Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian...  more

Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called "the other holocaust." Over the course of 24 years, more innocent men, women, and children perished than died in Hitler's murder of European Jews. This book originated 30 years ago when Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University, first began researching the lives of those victims released after Stalin's death. There was precious little information available, and many of the victims were still afraid, but Cohen persisted, and through the years accumulated the remarkable stories of their return to society.