Novelist and Time correspondent Nick McDonell brings this stunning account back from the latest iteration of the War in Iraq--an engrossing, ground-level report on the conflict still unfolding under its second commander-in-chief. Traveling to Baghdad and then to Mosul with the 1st Cavalry Division, McDonell offers an unforgettable look at the way things stand now--at the translators stranded in a country that doesn't look kindly on their cooperation, at the infantrymen struggling to make something out of the soft counterinsurgency missions they call chai-ops , at the commanders inured to American journalists and Iraqi officials both--and what the so-called "end of major combat operations" means for where they're going.

Who was the man being The Lord of the Rings ?

John King Fairbank (1907-1991) was best known to the public as the dean of Chinese studies in the United States. John Hersey, Hanu Reischauer, Harrison Salisbury, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are among the more than 125 friends, students, and colleagues to contribute to this volume. Each author attempts to capture the essence of the Fairbank he or she knew. The resulting pieces are alternately incisive, affectionate, intimate, deeply affecting, and hilariously funny. Fairbank Remembered is an endearing and moving portrait of America's doyen on China.

It was the dawn of the twentieth century. A new spirit of freedom, tolerance and hope was sweeping the world, but in reactionary Czarist Russia, a macabre, thoroughly medieval drama was unfolding - a blood libel! A Christian child was found murdered in a suburb of Kiev, and a Jewish factory manager named Mendel Beilis was accused of killing and using his blood for the Passover matzos. This preposterous charge and the arrest and trial of Mendel Beilis, an obviously innocent scapegoat, scandalized the modern world. The battle lines were drawn between the enlightened and the bigoted. Mendel Beilis became more than an innocent man falsely accused. He became a cause celebre, a gallant symbol of the fight against the forces of darkness that would soon engulf the world in a disastrous war. The first edition of Mendel Beilis' autobiography was self-published in New York in 1926 under the title The Story of My Sufferings. This new edition, Scapegoat on Trial: The Story of Mendel Beilis, has been newly annotated and revised to correct the awkwardness of the original translation from the Yiddish. It also features an insightful introduction, which provides an illuminating historical context.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture. In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's thinking: his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise. Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions.

Zum Zeitpunkt seines Todes im Jahr 1820 war Benjamin West der berühmteste Künstler der englischsprachigen Welt und wurde in ganz Europa gefeiert. Aus bescheidenen Verhältnissen in Pennsylvania stammend, hatte er als erster amerikanischer Künstler in Italien studiert und war innerhalb weniger Jahre nach seiner Ankunft in London maßgeblich an der Gründung der Royal Academy of Arts beteiligt und zum Historienmaler von König Georg III. ernannt worden. Wie der Autor in diesem Buch feststellt, gehörte West jedoch zur Avantgarde, die den Neoklassizismus und die Romantik schuf und zu den ersten Malern, die die inspirierenden Qualitäten zeitgenössischer Ereignisse darstellten. Vor allem sein bekanntestes Gemälde, Der Tod des General Wolfe, war ein revolutionäres Werk, das die Kunst nachhaltig veränderte. Es ist das erste Buch, das den Beitrag von West zu den Ideen der Moderne und der Erneuerung der Historienmalerei bewertet und es bietet spannende neue Einblicke in Wests berühmtestes Gemälde.

Louis Lozowick (1892-1973), an American painter and printmaker most noted for his depictions of the urban scene, was in many ways a typical cultural figure of the early twentieth century. Born in Ukraine in an era of revolutionary ferment, involved in the artistic adventures of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow in the 1920s, he was one of the earliest links between the international machine aesthetic and the nascent American Precisionist movement. Set almost wholly in Russia and.

The statesman, scientist, and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) lived a divided life, and in the centuries since his death questions about his true nature have abounded. Deservedly called the "Father of Modern Science," and still best known today for his innovative method of scientific inquiry - a single deductive system covering the entire range of empirical research into the natural world - he spent most of his career immersed not in scientific research but in the cutthroat world of high politics. Was Bacon a noble scholar who longed for solitary contemplation of higher philosophical truths, or a conniving political crook? Was he a captive of his birth and upbringing, an innocent caught in a web of political intrigue? Was he a homosexual? Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart boldly pursue the answers to these questions through a mass of previously untapped archival sources.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

He was a young Texas power-broker. The wealthy scion of the state's most popular governor. And, in 1976, Price Daniel, Jr., shocked his social set by marrying Vickie Carroll, a waitress at the local Dairy Queen--a marriage with tragic consequences. Taking us step by step through the investigation and two trials, this is the behind-the-scenes account of a charmed life destroyed by money, politics, family discord, and sexual perversion. With all the drama of courtroom fiction, it retells the dark secrets of a troubled aristocrat--and the controversial, surprise verdict that will set your heart pounding.--Cover

I Survived Auschwitz by Krystyna Zywulska.

"This book is an ethnographic description of the experiences of the author at a yeshiva located near his home on New York's Lower East Side, Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). Jonathan Boyarin spent a good deal of time at MTJ in the 1980s, before his anthropological training, and returned to it in 2011 when he once again became a regular visitor and participant. This book, in essence, is a portrait of life in this yeshiva. Boyarin introduces the MTJ yeshiva and its place in the wider American Jewish community, then takes up the daily patterns, rituals, and rhythms of the place"--

This lively ethnography traces a fraught three months in the life of a Jewish congregation stubbornly persisting on the Lower East Side, and affords a candid, lucid and intimate introduction to contemporary synagogue practice. In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of "year-round Jews" through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and above all the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform "believers" but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

The author of such classic works as The Republican Roosevelt, V Was for Victory, and Years of Discord, John Morton Blum is one of a small group of intellectuals who for more than a quarter of a century dominated the writing of American political history. Writing now of his own career, Blum provides a behind-the-scenes look at Ivy League education and political power from the 1940s to the 1980s. Blum insightfully recounts a long and distinguished journey that began at Phillips Academy, where he first realized he could make a career of teaching and writing history. He tells how young men were socialized to the values of the Northeastern establishment in those years before World War II, and how as a non-practicing Jew he learned to overcome bigotry both at Andover and at Harvard, which then had no Jewish professors. In 1957 Blum joined the faculty of Yale University's history department, widely regarded as the nation's best, where he became both influential and popular and where his students included one future U.S. president as well as others who aspired to the office. He reveals much about the inner workings of Ivy League education and tells of controversies over the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers, his role in Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, and how he searched for common ground between reactionary faculty and radical students. More than a recounting of a singular life, Blum's story explains how political history was researched and written during the second half of the twentieth century, describing how the discipline evolved, gained ascendancy, and was challenged as historical fashions changed. It also offers revealing glimpses of such prominent academics as Kingman Brewster, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., C. Vann Woodward, and William Sloan Coffin. Over a distinguished career, Blum witnessed considerable change in elite educational institutions, where minorities and women were grossly underrepresented when he first entered academia. In a memoir brimming with insight and laced with humor, he looks back at the academy—"not a refuge from reality but an alternative reality"—as he reflects upon his intellectual journey and his contributions to the study and writing of twentieth-century American history.

READING CREASES ON SPINE. WEAR ON TOP EDGE OF COVER. NO WRITING OR MARKS ON PAGES.