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History
"A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium. . . . Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses."--The New Republic "A profound triumph."--The Big Issue "[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities. . . . It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict."--The Washington Post
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016
A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
I could not put this extraordinary book down. Three Days at the Brink is a masterpiece: elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, and impeccably researched. This book not only sparkles but is destined to be a classic!" --Jay Winik, bestselling author
From the #1 bestselling author and award-winning anchor of Special Report with Bret Baier, comes the gripping lost history of the Tehran Conference, where FDR, Churchill, and Stalin plotted D-Day and the Second World War's endgame. With the fate of World War II in doubt and rumors of a Nazi assassination plot swirling, Franklin Roosevelt risked everything at a clandestine meeting that would change the course of history.
November 1943: The Nazis and their Axis allies controlled nearly the entire European continent. Japan dominated the Pacific. Allied successes at Sicily and Guadalcanal had gained them modest ground but at an extraordinary cost. On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Red Army had been bled white. The path of history walked a knife's edge.
That same month a daring gambit was hatched that would alter everything. The Big Three--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--secretly met for the first time to chart a strategy for defeating Adolf Hitler. Over three days in Tehran, Iran, this trio--strange bedfellows united by their mutual responsibility as heads of the Allied powers--made essential decisions that would direct the final years of the war and its aftermath. Meanwhile, looming over the covert meeting was the possible threat of a Nazi assassination plot, code-named Operation Long Jump.
Before they left Tehran, the three leaders agreed to open a second front in the West, spearheaded by Operation Overload and the D-Day invasion of France at Normandy the following June. They also discussed what might come after the war, including dividing Germany and establishing the United Nations--plans that laid the groundwork for the postwar world order and the Cold War.
Bestselling author and Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier's new epic history, Three Days at the Brink, centers on these crucial days in Tehran, the medieval Persian city on the edge of the desert. Baier makes clear the importance of Roosevelt, who stood apart as the sole leader of a democracy, recognizing him as the lead strategist for the globe's future--the one man who could ultimately allow or deny the others their place in history.
With new details discovered in rarely seen transcripts, oral histories, and declassified State Department and presidential documents from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Baier illuminates the complex character of Roosevelt, revealing a man who grew into his role and accepted the greatest challenge any American president since Lincoln had faced.
--MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, New York Times bestselling author of Presidents of War
The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.
Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." At the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.
In 1942, the Nazis were racing to complete the first atomic bomb. All they needed was a single, incredibly rare ingredient: heavy water, which was produced solely at Norway's Vemork plant. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers pushed production into overdrive. If the Allies could not destroy the plant, they feared the Nazis would soon be in possession of the most dangerous weapon the world had ever seen. But how would the Allied forces reach the castle fortress, set on a precipitous gorge in one of the coldest, most inhospitable places on earth? Based on a trove of top-secret documents and never-before-seen diaries and letters of the saboteurs, The Winter Fortress is an arresting chronicle of a brilliant scientist, a band of spies on skis, perilous survival in the wild, Gestapo manhunts, and a last-minute operation that would alter the course of the war. "A taut and peerlessly told adventure story full of thrills, derring-do and heart-stopping tension." -- Seattle Times "Told with both historical and scientific accuracy . . . this book has rocketed into my pantheon of the top suspense-filled stories about [World War II], along with The 900 Days and The Colditz Story." -- Ethan Siegel, Forbes
A New York Times Notable Book
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Kirkus Reviews
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction)
Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)
A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Gift Guide Selection
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection
A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" (Atlantic).
"Fascinating and heartbreaking . . . timely . . . Beschloss's broad scope lets you draw important crosscutting lessons about presidential leadership."--Bill Gates Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss's Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. Through Beschloss's interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war--or were broken by them. Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race.
Praise for Presidents of War "A marvelous narrative. . . . As Beschloss explains, the greatest wartime presidents successfully leaven military action with moral concerns. . . . Beschloss's writing is clean and concise, and he admirably draws upon new documents. Some of the more titillating tidbits in the book are in the footnotes. . . . There are fascinating nuggets on virtually every page of Presidents of War. It is a superb and important book, superbly rendered."--Jay Winik, The New York Times Book Review "Sparkle and bite. . . . Valuable and engrossing study of how our chief executives have discharged the most significant of all their duties. . . . Excellent. . . . A fluent narrative that covers two centuries of national conflict." --Richard Snow, The Wall Street Journal
The New York Times bestselling author returns with a tale as riveting and suspenseful as any thriller: the true story of the Nazi plot to kill the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. during World War II.
The mission: to kill the three most important and heavily guarded men in the world.
The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.
The stakes: nothing less than the future of the Western world.
The year is 1943 and the three Allied leaders--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubtedly lost, the Germans believe that perhaps a new set of Allied leaders might be willing to make a more reasonable peace in its aftermath. And so a plan is devised--code name Operation Long Jump--to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.
Immediately, a highly trained, hand-picked team of Nazi commandos is assembled, trained, armed with special weapons, and parachuted into Iran. They have six days to complete the daring assignment before the statesmen will return home. With no margin for error and little time to spare, Mike Reilly, the head of FDR's Secret Service detail--a man from a Montana silver mining town who describes himself as "an Irish cop with more muscle than brains"--must overcome his suspicions and instincts to work with a Soviet agent from the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) to save the three most powerful men in the world.
Filled with eight pages of black-and-white photographs, Night of the Assassins is a suspenseful true-life tale about an impossible mission, a ticking clock, and one man who stepped up to the challenge and prevented a world catastrophe.
--Publishers Weekly
Stigmatized and relegated to the margins of Roman society, the Goths were violent "barbarians" who destroyed "civilization," at least in the conventional story of Rome's collapse. But a slight shift of perspective brings their history, and ours, shockingly alive.
Alaric grew up near the river border that separated Gothic territory from Roman. He survived a border policy that separated migrant children from their parents, and he was denied benefits he likely expected from military service. Romans were deeply conflicted over who should enjoy the privileges of citizenship. They wanted to buttress their global power, but were insecure about Roman identity; they depended on foreign goods, but scoffed at and denied foreigners their own voices and humanity. In stark contrast to the rising bigotry, intolerance, and zealotry among Romans during Alaric's lifetime, the Goths, as practicing Christians, valued religious pluralism and tolerance. The marginalized Goths, marked by history as frightening harbingers of destruction and of the Dark Ages, preserved virtues of the ancient world that we take for granted.
The three nights of riots Alaric and the Goths brought to the capital struck fear into the hearts of the powerful, but the riots were not without cause. Combining vivid storytelling and historical analysis, Douglas Boin reveals the Goths' complex and fascinating legacy in shaping our world.
Winner of the 2018 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation Greene Award for a distinguished work of nonfiction
The first battle book from Mark Bowden since his #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968 is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam. In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam's intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence, ordering small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II.
With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over 24 days and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was by far the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.
Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery.
Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.
"Bretos has not only conferred on his beloved Matanzas its rightful place in history but he has provided students and fans of Cuban history with a significant launching point into the future."--Miami Herald
"A marvelously well-researched and engagingly written combination of urban biography and personal autobiography. . . . Erudite and highly instructive, enormously enhanced with outstanding illustrations."--Choice Matanzas is the Cuban city nearest the United States. Located on the north shore of the island of Cuba, on the Bay of Matanzas, sandwiched between Havana and Varadero, it is a mere ninety miles from Florida. The "Athens of Cuba," as it was known in the heyday of the nineteenth-century slave-driven, sugar-based boom, Matanzas is renowned for its cultural heritage.It is the birthplace of the traditional romantic danzón--Cuba's national dance--and the sensual rhythmic guaguancó, a product of the city's preeminence as a hub of Afro-Cuban culture. Matanzas is the only foreign place in which an American vice president was sworn into office. Matanceros engaged in heavy commercial trading with Boston merchants for decades, exporting sugar and importing hard granite cobblestones to pave the streets. It is the place where Cuban baseball and modern Cuban art began. The city was home to the country's first building wired for electricity, the first electric street cars, and the first public library, --yet most Americans have never heard of it.Miguel Bretos's fascinating history of his hometown seeks to remedy that oversight. Bretos arrived in the United States at age eighteen, but his family retains close ties to the city where they lived for generations. From the aboriginal Taínos to the coming of revolution, Bretos unfolds the Matanzas story with solid research, wit, clarity, and the kind of vivid detail that can come only from an insider. Miguel A. Bretos is retired as senior scholar from the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery and is the author of four books, including Cuba and Florida: An Exploration of a Historical Connection, 1593-1991.
When the bombs went off in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania that day, Congress was in recess and the White House, along with the entire country, was focused on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Congress held no hearings about the bombings, the national security community held no after-action reviews, and the mandatory Accountability Review Board focused on narrow security issues. Then on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland and the East Africa bombings became little more than an historical footnote.
Terrorism, Betrayal, and Resilience is Bushnell's account of her quest to understand how these bombings could have happened given the scrutiny bin Laden and his cell in Nairobi had been getting since 1996 from special groups in the National Security Council, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. Bushnell tracks national security strategies and assumptions about terrorism and the Muslim world that failed to keep us safe in 1998 and continue unchallenged today. In this hard-hitting, no-holds-barred account she reveals what led to poor decisions in Washington and demonstrates how diplomacy and leadership going forward will be our country's most potent defense. Purchase the audio edition.
Silver Medal Florida Book Awards NonfictionIn the early 20th century, Bertha Palmer was one of the best-known and wealthiest women in America. She was an art collector, women's rights advocate, businesswoman, owner of Chicago's Palmer House Hotel, and had elegant homes in Chicago, Paris, and London. In 1910 she traveled to the small and rough settlement called Sarasota on the west coast of Florida. For some reason, she decided to spend much of each year for the rest of her life on one of America's last frontiers, investing in cattle and farming, creating communities out of marshlands, pine forests, and tropical jungles. The society queen and social reform advocate excelled as a frontier entrepreneur, just as she had in every other endeavor in her life. She managed to make a good deal of money and to change Sarasota forever.
On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare.
When one young sailor after another began suddenly dying of mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, but was overruled by British officials determined to cover up the presence of poison gas in the devastating naval disaster, which the press dubbed "little Pearl Harbor." Prime Minister Winston Churchill and General Dwight D. Eisenhower acted in concert to suppress the truth, insisting the censorship was necessitated by military security.
Alexander defied British port officials and heroically persevered in his investigation. His final report on the Bari casualties was immediately classified, but not before his breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cells caught the attention of Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads--a pioneering physician and research scientist as brilliant as he was arrogant and self-destructive--who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and ushered in a new era of cancer research led by the Sloan Kettering Institute. Meanwhile, the Bari incident remained cloaked in military secrecy, resulting in lost records, misinformation, and considerable confusion about how a deadly chemical weapon came to be tamed for medical use.
Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Great Secret is the remarkable story of how horrific tragedy gave birth to medical triumph.
Summers at the Vauxhall pleasure garden in London brought diverse entertainments to a diverse public. Picturesque walks and arbors offered a pastoral retreat from the city, while at the same time the garden's attractions indulged distinctly urban tastes for fashion, novelty, and sociability. High- and low-born alike were free to walk the paths; the proximity to strangers and the danger of dark walks were as thrilling to visitors as the fountains and fireworks. Vauxhall was the venue that made the careers of composers, inspired novelists, and showcased the work of artists. Scoundrels, sudden downpours, and extortionate ham prices notwithstanding, Vauxhall became a must-see destination for both Londoners and tourists. Before long, there were Vauxhalls across Britain and America, from York to New York, Norwich to New Orleans.
This edited volume provides the first book-length study of the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth. Nine essays explore the mutual influences of human behavior and design: landscape, painting, sculpture, and even transient elements such as lighting and music tacitly informed visitors how to move within the space, what to wear, how to behave, and where they might transgress. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island draws together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to unfold a cultural history of pleasure gardens, from the entertainments they offered to the anxieties of social difference they provoked.
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian considers the vast array of triumphs and failures of America's modern presidents that paved a path to Donald Trump, offering an understanding of our current moment and hope for a way back to true leadership.
The struggle to preserve the Republic has never been easy or without perils. The rise of conflicting political parties, which the founders opposed, and President John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts repressing First Amendment rights made Franklin's observation at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention--"a republic, if you can keep it"--seem prescient.
In the twentieth century, America endured numerous struggles: economic depression, World War II, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-contra scandal, the war in Iraq--all of which gave rise to demagogues, as did the growth and reach of mass media. But this wasn't the Founding Fathers' vision for our leadership. The resistance to putting a demagogue in the White House survived the anti-Communist agitation of the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But the latter opened the way for Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and Watergate, which again tested our democratic institutions and the rule of law. Nixon's resignation in August 1974 moved Vice President Gerald Ford, his successor, to declare, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."
But was it? Donald Trump's 2016 election has presented a new challenge. How did past politics and presidential administrations pave the way for this current assault on American democracy? Our nation's history provides reassurance that we will restore our better angels to government. Yet it must be considered that earlier administrations and public outlook facilitated the rise of such an un-presidential character as Trump in the first place. In How Did We Get Here?, Robert Dallek considers a century of modern administrations, from Teddy Roosevelt to today, shining a light on the personalities behind the politics and the voters who elected each. His cautionary tale reminds us that the only constant in history is change, but whether for good or ill the choice is Americans' to make.
In this captivating narrative, Chanel's Riviera explores the fascinating world of the Cote d'Azur during a period that saw the deepest extremes of luxury and terror in the twentieth century.
The Cote d'Azur in 1938 was a world of wealth, luxury, and extravagance, inhabited by a sparkling cast of characters including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joseph P. Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, Colette, the Mitfords, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, and Somerset Maugham. The elite flocked to the Riviera each year to swim, gamble, and escape from the turbulence plaguing the rest of Europe. At the glittering center of it all was Coco Chanel, whose very presence at her magnificently appointed villa, La Pausa, made it the ultimate place to be. Born an orphan, her beauty and formidable intelligence allured many men, but it was her incredible talent, relentless work ethic, and exquisite taste that made her an icon. But this wildly seductive world was poised on the edge of destruction. In a matter of months, the Nazis swooped down and the glamour of the pre-war parties and casinos gave way to the horrors of evacuation and the displacement of thousands of families during World War II. From the bitter struggle to survive emerged powerful stories of tragedy, sacrifice, and heroism. Enriched by original research and de Courcy's signature skill, Chanel's Riviera brings the experiences of both rich and poor, protected and persecuted, to vivid life.
Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans--the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia--before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.
To be read alongside thrilling histories by Nathaniel Philbrick, Hampton Sides, and Rinker Buck, Black Flags, Blue Waters vividly reanimates the "Golden Age" of piracy in the Americas-- spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s--when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. "Deftly blending scholarship and drama" (Richard Zacks), best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, not to mention in their own financial interest, and then violently opposed them. Through engrossing episodes of roguish glamour and extreme brutality, Dolin depicts the star pirates of this period, among them towering Blackbeard, illfated Captain Kidd, and sadistic Edward Low, who delighted in torturing his prey. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Black Flags, Blue Waters is a "gripping" (BookPage) and "stirring history that reads like a novel" (Stephen Puleo).
Hurricanes menace North America from June through November every year, each as powerful as 10,000 nuclear bombs. These megastorms will likely become more intense as the planet continues to warm, yet we too often treat them as local disasters and TV spectacles, unaware of how far-ranging their impact can be. As best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin contends, we must look to our nation's past if we hope to comprehend the consequences of the hurricanes of the future.
With A Furious Sky, Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes, such as Benito Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest whose innovative methods for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives, and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
Dolin draws on a vast array of sources as he melds American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation's course. Hurricanes, it turns out, prevented Spain from expanding its holdings in North America beyond Florida in the late 1500s, and they also played a key role in shifting the tide of the American Revolution against the British in the final stages of the conflict. As he moves through the centuries, following the rise of the United States despite the chaos caused by hurricanes, Dolin traces the corresponding development of hurricane science, from important discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin to the breakthroughs spurred by the necessities of the World War II and the Cold War.
Yet after centuries of study and despite remarkable leaps in scientific knowledge and technological prowess, there are still limits on our ability to predict exactly when and where hurricanes will strike, and we remain terribly vulnerable to the greatest storms on earth. A Furious Sky is, ultimately, a story of a changing climate, and it forces us to reckon with the reality that as bad as the past has been, the future will probably be worse, unless we drastically reimagine our relationship with the planet.
"Brilliantly written, vivid, a powerful and often uncomfortable true story that deserves to be read and remembered. It beautifully captures the strength of the bond between a father and son."--Heather Morris, author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz
The #1 Sunday Times bestseller--a remarkable story of the heroic and unbreakable bond between a father and son that is as inspirational as The Tattooist of Auschwitz and as mesmerizing as The Choice.
Where there is family, there is hope
In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholster from Vienna, and his sixteen-year-old son Fritz are arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Germany. Imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, they miraculously survive the Nazis' murderous brutality.
Then Gustav learns he is being sent to Auschwitz--and certain death.
For Fritz, letting his father go is unthinkable. Desperate to remain together, Fritz makes an incredible choice: he insists he must go too. To the Nazis, one death camp is the same as another, and so the boy is allowed to follow.
Throughout the six years of horror they witness and immeasurable suffering they endure as victims of the camps, one constant keeps them alive: their love and hope for the future.
Based on the secret diary that Gustav kept as well as meticulous archival research and interviews with members of the Kleinmann family, including Fritz's younger brother Kurt, sent to the United States at age eleven to escape the war, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is Gustav and Fritz's story--an extraordinary account of courage, loyalty, survival, and love that is unforgettable.
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This book delves into the fascinating and diverse history and culture of Sicily.
With settlers from early tribes to the Greeks and Romans, through the Arabs, Normans, French, Spanish and finally Italians, the island's culture has been changed dramatically by each of the foreign powers. In this book, Jeremy Dummett concludes his trilogy on Sicily with an engrossing history of the entire island, through excess of power, a wealth of cultural prosperity and flourishing art, to extreme poverty and oppression in times of war and invasion. The geography of this Mediterranean island is full of huge variations, from coastal plains with natural harbors to a volcano and a mountainous interior--a decentralized state for most of the past. Dummett delves into the stories and personalities that make up this extraordinary island, with power struggles developing a great cathedral and temples built to impress but never finished; Sicily uncovers the hidden background behind the island's rich culture.
While tension steadily rose between European powers in the 1930s, a different kind of battle was raging across the Himalayas. Contingents from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States had set up rival camps at the base of the mountains, all hoping to become recognized as the fastest, strongest, and bravest climbers in the world.
Carried on across nearly the entire sweep of the Himalayas, this contest involved not only the greatest mountain climbers of the era, but statesmen and millionaires, world-class athletes and bona fide eccentrics, scientists and generals, obscure villagers and national heroes. Centered in the 1930s, with one brief, shining postwar coda, the contest was a struggle between hidebound traditionalists and unknown innovators, one that featured new techniques and equipment, unbelievable courage and physical achievement, and unparalleled valor. And death. One Himalayan peak alone, Nanga Parbat in Kashmir, claimed twenty-five lives in less than three years.
Climbing the Himalayas was the Greatest Generation's moonshot -- one shrouded in the onset of war, interrupted by it, and then fully accomplished. A gritty, fascinating history sure to enrapture fans of Hampton Sides, Jon Krakauer, and Laura Hillenbrand, The World Beneath Their Feet brings this forgotten story back to life.
The Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans curls around an old sugar plantation that long housed one of America's most painful secrets. Locals knew it as Carville, the site of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, where generations of afflicted Americans were isolated--often against their will and until their deaths.
Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights--denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children. Neighbors fretted over their presence and newspapers warned of their dangerous condition, which was seen as a biblical "curse" rather than a medical diagnosis.
Though shunned by their fellow Americans, patients surprisingly made Carville more a refuge than a prison. Many carved out meaningful lives, building a vibrant community and finding solace, brotherhood, and even love behind the barbed-wire fence that surrounded them. Among the memorable figures we meet in Fessler's masterful narrative are John Early, a pioneering crusader for patients' rights, and the unlucky Landry siblings--all five of whom eventually called Carville home--as well as a butcher from New York, a 19-year-old debutante from New Orleans, and a pharmacist from Texas who became the voice of Carville around the world. Though Jim Crow reigned in the South and racial animus prevailed elsewhere, Carville took in people of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds. Aided by their heroic caretakers, patients rallied to find a cure for Hansen's disease and to fight the insidious stigma that surrounded it.
Weaving together a wealth of archival material with original interviews as well as firsthand accounts from her own family, Fessler has created an enthralling account of a lost American history. In our new age of infectious disease, Carville's Cure demonstrates the necessity of combating misinformation and stigma if we hope to control the spread of illness without demonizing victims and needlessly destroying lives.
An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.
Formed seemingly out of steel, glass, and concrete, with millions of residents from around the globe, Miami has ancient roots that can be hard to imagine today. Before the Pioneers takes readers back through forgotten eras to the stories of the people who shaped the land along the Miami River long before most modern histories of the city begin.
Andrew Frank begins the chronicle of the Magic City's long history 4,000 years ago when Tequesta Indians settled at the mouth of the river, erecting burial mounds, ceremonial centers, and villages. They created a network of constructed and natural waterways through the Everglades and trade routes to the distant Calusa on the west coast. Centuries later, the area became a stopover for Spanish colonists on their way to Havana, a haven where they could shelter from storms and obtain freshwater, lumber, and other supplies. Frank brings to life the vibrant colonies of fugitives and seafarers that formed on the shores of Biscayne Bay in the eighteenth century. He tells of the emergence of the tropical fruit plantations and the accompanying enslaved communities, as well as the military occupation during the Seminole Wars. Eventually, the small seaport town flourished with the coming of "pioneers" like Julia Tuttle and Henry Flagler who promoted the city as a place of luxury and brought new waves of residents from the North.
Frank pieces together the material culture and the historical record of the Miami River to re-create the fascinating past of one of the world's most influential cities.
The New York Times bestselling book about the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin "should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country, and ourselves" (The Washington Post).
"After five decades of magisterial output, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians" (USA TODAY). In her "inspiring" (The Christian Science Monitor) Leadership, Doris Kearns Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely--Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)--to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.
Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?
"If ever our nation needed a short course on presidential leadership, it is now" (The Seattle Times). This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today's polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency. "Goodwin's volume deserves much praise--it is insightful, readable, compelling: Her book arrives just in time" (The Boston Globe).
Elsie says: What we are searching for by one of our most esteemed authors.
A unique and timeless guide to American government and its electoral process--as relevant today as when it was first published in 1972--from the voice of black consciousness, cultural icon Dick Gregory, the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and author of the NAACP Image Award-winning Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies and the classic bestseller Nigger: An Autobiography.
For most of his life, Richard Claxton "Dick" Gregory worked to educate Americans about the issues--and the forces of power--shaping their lives. A brilliant and informed student of the American experiment, he viewed and understood politics with an acuity few possess. Nearly fifty years ago, on the eve of Richard M. Nixon's reelection, he wrote a classic guide to the American political system for ordinary folks. Today, when American democracy is threatened, his primer is more necessary than ever before.
In Dick Gregory's Political Primer, Gregory presents a series of lessons accompanied by review questions to educate and empower every citizen. He provides amusing, concise, and clear information and commentary on the nature of political parties, the three branches of government and how they operate, how the campaign process works and the costs, and more. Gregory offers imaginative comparisons such as the Hueys--Long, the populist Louisiana governor and Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panthers--and numerological parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. He also includes a trenchant glossary that offers insights into some of the major players, terms, and institutions integral to our democracy and government.
An essential guide to American history unlike any other, Dick Gregory's Political Primer joins the ranks of classics such as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and is essential reading for every American.
From the bestselling author of Hero Found comes the incredible true story of one of the greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 World War II prison camp raid at Los Baños in the Philippines--a tale of daring, courage, and heroism that joins the ranks of Ghost Soldiers, Unbroken, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.
In February 1945, as the U.S. victory in the Pacific drew nearer, the Japanese army grew desperate, and its soldiers guarding U.S. and Allied POWs more sadistic. Starved, shot and beaten, many of the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Baños prison camp in the Philippines--most of them American men, women and children--would not survive much longer unless rescued soon.
Deeply concerned about the half-starved and ill-treated prisoners, General Douglas MacArthur assigned to the 11th Airborne Division a dangerous rescue mission deep behind enemy lines that became a deadly race against the clock. The Los Baños raid would become one of the greatest triumphs of that war or any war; hailed years later by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell: "I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook operation for all ages and all armies."
Combining personal interviews, diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and archival research, Rescue at Los Baños tells the story of a remarkable group of prisoners--whose courage and fortitude helped them overcome hardship, deprivation, and cruelty--and of the young American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas who risked their lives to save them.
A Time Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling "account that reads almost like the script for a movie" (The Wall Street Journal)--a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history's worst nuclear disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a "riveting, deeply reported reconstruction" (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. "The most complete and compelling history yet" (The Christian Science Monitor), Higginbotham's "superb, enthralling, and necessarily terrifying...extraordinary" (The New York Times) book is an indelible portrait of the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will--lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.
