On August 10, 1938, Lucy S. Dawidowicz set sail from New York to Vilna, Poland, to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). For a year, while she studied the Jewish past, she immersed herself in Vilna's present, getting to know the Jewish rich and poor, witnessing Poland's brutal anti-Semitism. Then she was forced to flee Vilna, just a week before German tanks and troops rumbled into Poland and eventually destroyed this citadel of East European Jewish culture forever. After the war Lucy Dawidowicz again sailed to Europe -- this time to work with Jewish survivors and to identify the remnants of the precious YIVO library of Vilna.

Advocates of a strong versus a weak presidency have struggled throughout American history, but never so fiercely as in the twentieth century, which saw the rise of progressivism. This is the story of four progressive presidents, from the first Roosevelt, who himself brought plenty of backbone to the office, to Woodrow Wilson , who articulated the theory of a progressive presidency, to FDR, who brought it unique power, and, finally, to Lyndon Johnson, who provided perhaps its last great surge in our century. In a time of progressive malaise, it is important to know the history, to see the benefits as well as the liabilities, in the progressive presidential tradition. That is the aim and achievement of this book.

Updated for the Paperback Edition During his first term as secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan was one of the most widely admired men in the world. In 2001, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Then the UN failed to stop war in Iraq and genocide in Darfur, and the institution was engulfed by the Oil-for-Food scandal. By the time Annan left office in December 2006, both he and the UN had suffered a terrible loss of standing. Did the UN's failures arise from its own structure and culture or from a clash with an American administration determined to go its own way in defiance of world opinion? In The Best Intentions, New York Times Magazine writer James Traub traces the entwined histories of Kofi Annan and the UN from 1992 to the present, and offers a definitive portrait of the institution's role in the age of American dominance.

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

For more than three decades, Ed Koch has been one of America's most interesting and outspoken political figures. In this provocative new book, Koch with Rafael Medoff guides readers through the major battles in his life-long fight against anti-Semitism. Interviews, speeches, new essays, never-before published personal correspondence, and more highlight his leadership--on campuses, in the media, on the streets of New York City, and in the halls of power in Washington, DC. The book also features personal letters from Henry Louis Gates, former President George Bush, and other prominent figures. Koch will reveal startling information for the first time here, and his writings are controversial, piercing, teasing, and questioning. This book will ignite discussion for years to come

The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq is the comprehensive source on George Bush's campaign of disinformation before, during, and after the second Gulf War. From the careful linking of Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, to the WMD canard, to the September 2003 damage-control sideshow. AlterNet's Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry team up with renowned journalist Robert Scheer to tak

On the motion-picture front, no other publication of our age has achieved the stature, vitality, or magic of Vanity Fair. In its coverage of the film industry, the magazine prides itself on assigning the world's top photographers, writers, and illustrators to explore the brightest stars in the Hollywood firmament. Now, for the first time, the most memorable renderings of this illustrious pantheon have been assembled in one volume: Garbo and Swanson, Fairbanks and Pickford, Gable and Grant, Tracy and Hepburn, Taylor and Burton -- along with today's cinematic giants, including Cruise and Kidman, Nicholson and Streep, De Niro and DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and scores more. As this sweeping, lavish book makes clear, Vanity Fair's stable of photographers (Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen, Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, and many others represented here) have helped define modern portraiture. Likewise, Vanity Fair's Hollywood includes Vanity Fair contributors of the past (D.H. Lawrence, Clare Boothe Luce, Dorothy Parker, Carl Sandburg, Walter Winchell, and P.G. Wodehouse) and of the present.

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorRiding a bicycle across the United States is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few fulfill. In 2011 at the age of fifty-seven, New York Times obituary writer Bruce Weber made the trip alone and wrote about it as it unfolded mile by mile. Now, expanding upon the articles and blog posts that quickly became a must-read adventure story, Weber gives us a witty, inspiring, and reflective diary of his journey.

"The Speed of Dark will resonate with musicians, those interested in art, music and history, and those who seek to carve their own path in a world filled with high expectations and seemingly unlimited resources." (Sel Kardan, President, Colburn School of Performing Arts, LA)"The clear and elegant prose on the theme of collecting reveals a dedication and self-understanding that is rare." (Michael Hall, PhD, Curator of the Rothschild family collections, Exbury Estate, Hampshire, GB)"Piatigorsky's memoir will provide particular interest to students, scholars, and fellow collectors knowledgeable in the creative traditions of Native North American artists." (Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad, Independent Curator, Inuit Art)"Piatigorsky's memoir demonstrates that artistry can be found in science." (Joseph Horwitz, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology/Biophysics, Jules Stein Eye Institute, UCLA)"Piatigorsky's unique story will receive a wide audience: professional and lay scientists, art collectors, musicians, historians, writers and those who have struggled to find their identity." (Hamid Shams, BBP Films Producer and Cinematographer)"This memoir is not just worth reading, it is worth remembering!" (James Mathews, Author of Last Known Position)"This fascinating account of his journey becomes a meditation on art, wonder, and creativity, of bucking the status quo and following one's heart. " (Barbara Esstman, Author of The Other Anna, Night Ride Home, and A More Perfect Union)

"Every page, every paragraph, every sentence sparkles with captivating metaphors, delightful verbal concoctions, alchemical insights, philosophic whimsy, absurd illogicals, scientific comedy routines, relentless, non-stop waves of hilarity. The comparisons to James Joyce are undeniable. Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!"" Timothy Leary The strangest memoir you will ever read. You or your parents lived it. I helped start it. And it was an accident. It was the era of myth, legend, sex, and extreme adventure called The Sixties. "I blasted through Howard Bloom's How I Accidentally Started The Sixties like the wildfire swallowing up my mountain in California. I loved it. The molecular amusement ride, the sexual Disneyland, the Chevy 350 Impala blasting down the freeway at 120 mph. The universal essence is its brilliant simplicity.....Reality is really a mind field seen through Bloom's neurotic Buddha-like mind resplendent with every major family issue mortal humans will ever come across in a life time: identity, parents, meaning, self, non-self, food, habitation, education, goals, marriage, family, children, God, sex, more sex----DRUGS. It slithers like a rattlesnake across the page, the way a story should. What I love most is the off the wall comedy. Howard Bloom as Harpo Marx riding a freight train like Buddha carrying his life in a sleeping bag. I mean it's priceless. Bloom's psychedelic journey across the American landscape, is deciphered through the irresistible minds of murderers, crackpots, Nobel Prize Playboy bunnies, scholars, waiters, hobo gurus, cops, professors, French majors, psychiatrists, cock suckers, recreational drug users, Mormons, Jews, nut jobs, laundry mat owners, demonic children, lizards...........Aldous Huxley with a pinch of Timothy Leary.............and every molecule in the universe. It separates Bloom from any scientist/global mind who ever lived. Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, and Aldous Huxley would be proud. Each man strived to marry science, art, and poetry but never managed to pull it off. How I Accidentally Started the Sixties does. I salute Howard Bloom. His doctrine sparkles every page with his Promethean fire; distilled in Shakespeare's immortal words, 'From women's eyes this doctrine I derive'.....[women] are the books, the arts, the academies, that show, contain and nourish the world.' Love's Labour Lost, only in Bloom's case, found, lost, and then found again. God only knows what else this mastermind is hiding from the rest of us." Mark Lamonica, winner of the Southern California Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, author of Junk Yard Dogs And William Shakespeare and Renaissance Porn Star: The Saga of Pietro Aretino, The World's Greatest Hustler

“A satisfying read from a masterful stylist, this will appeal to any fan of nature writing or personal essays.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Ever since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook several years ago, Esther Woolfson has been fascinated with corvids, the bird group that includes crows, rooks, magpies, and ravens. Today, the rook, named Chicken, is a member of the Woolfson family along with a talking magpie named Spike, a baby crow named Ziki, a starling, a parrot, and others. From their elaborate bathing rituals to springtime broodiness and their tendency to stash food in the most unlikely places, these corvids share bonds with Woolfson that would have been considered rare, if not impossible, before. Letting her experience speak for itself, Woolfson likens the fears and foibles of corvids to those of humans, taking into account the science of bird intelligence, evolution,song, and flight. She highlights their big personalities and capacity for affection: Chicken hates computers and machines, while she loves evening neck scratches on Woolfson’s knee. It is through this intimate lens that Woolfson invites us to reconsider what creatures can be human’s best friend. “Woolfson shares a house with a host of free–ranging birds who cache bits of brie and raw squid in jean cuffs and under rugs, who excavate holes in the kitchen wall, and who, ahem, are decidedly not housebroken. But are these lifestyles really so peculiar? Should we not applaud them?” — Orion Magazine “What makes Woolfson’s memoir such enjoyable reading (even for the non–birdobsessed) is that she is funny and knows it’s rather crazy to have a magpie, crow, starling or, more significantly, a rook named ‘Chicken’ running about your house.” —Bookslut

These interviews with Henry Rollins conducted by RE/Search (and Search & Destroy) founder V. Vale focus on Henry's travels -- often to countries considered dangerous and off-limits. There are references to Punk Rock history, the Occupy movement, and numerous personal adventures and experiences over the past 30-plus years of combing the planet giving musical and Spoken Word performances, and generally being as creative and humorous as possible no matter what the situation may be . Whatever Henry wants to do, he does it while giving his full attention, like a kind of Zen master. RE/Search tries to reveal the full scope of his creativity, achievements and darkly sardonic perceptiveness and contempt for cliche. This book is full of both humor and inspiration.

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells the riveting story of the female pilots who each dreamed of being the first American woman in space. When the space age dawned in the late 1950s, Jackie Cochran held more propeller and jet flying records than any pilot of the twentieth century-man or woman. She had led the Women's Auxiliary Service Pilots during the Second World War, was the first woman to break the sound barrier, ran her own luxury cosmetics company, and counted multiple presidents among her personal friends. She was more qualified than any woman in the world to make the leap from atmosphere to orbit. Yet it was Jerrie Cobb, twenty-five years Jackie's junior and a record-holding pilot in her own right, who finagled her way into taking the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts. The prospect of flying in space quickly became her obsession. While the American and international media spun the shocking story of a "woman astronaut" program, Jackie and Jerrie struggled to gain control of the narrative, each hoping to turn the rumored program into their own ideal reality-an issue that ultimately went all the way to Congress. This dual biography of audacious trailblazers Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb presents these fascinating and fearless women in all their glory and grit, using their stories as guides through the shifting social, political, and technical landscape of the time.

This astonishing true story is the tale of a young American man who was sent to the Soviet Union with his parents by the Ford Motor Company to set up an auto plant. He was eventually thrown into Soviet prisons and could not return to America until forty-five years later. During his life in and out of Russian prisons, he met and fell in love with a beautiful Russian gymnast who followed him into exile and lived with him and their child for a year in Siberia, in a caved chopped out under the ice. Theirs is the compelling story of a romance destined to thrive under even the most desperate conditions. It was 1938 when Victor Herman was inexplicably thrown into prison, after he had become a celebrity in the Soviet Union, having won acclaim as "the Lindbergh of Russia" for his flying and world-record-breaking parachute jumps. But what happened to him was a common nightmare during the Stalin years: those who survived imprisonment and torture were sent north to hard labor in the icy forests an

Creativity and play erupt in the most solemn of everyday worlds as individuals reshape traditional forms in the light of changing historical circumstances. In this lively volume, fourteen distinguished anthropologists explore the life of creativity in social life across the globe and within the study of ethnography itself. Contributors include Barbara A. Babcock, Edward M. Bruner, James W. Fernandez, Don Handelman, Smadar Lavie, José E. Limon, Barbara Myerhoff, Kirin Narayan, Renato Rosaldo, Richard Schechner, Edward L. Schieffelin, Marjorie Shostak, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Edith Turner.

CHINA SPY by Maury Allen is the true, heroic story of the only American CIA agent to die with honor in a Chinese Communist prison during the height of the cold war. Hugh Francis Redmond, a World War II paratrooper with landings at Normandy on D-Day & at the Market-Garden in Holland with the famed 101st Airborne Division, died in 1970 in the Ward Prison in Shanghai under mysterious circumstances. Unlike every other captured CIA agent, Redmond never admitted his connection with the Company. His gravesite in his hometown of Yonkers, New York reads, "His Country Above All Else." The book includes interviews with boyhood friends of Redmond, fellow paratroopers, CIA officials, priests who spent time in Chinese prisons with him & many who worked tirelessly for his freedom. His dramatic tale has been read by Bill & Hillary Clinton, General Colin Powell, CIA & FBI leaders & dozens of key government leaders. See what has excited all of them. Available single copies with photos $19.95 each or $17.75 each for ten or more directly from Maury Allen, 157 Northfield Ave., Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 or phone: 914-693-5547.

"Nearly every family has a skeleton in its closet, an ancestor who "sins" against custom and tradition and pays a double price. Karen Tintori refused to allow the truth to remain forgotten. This is a book for anyone who shares the conviction that all history, in the end, is family history."--Frank Viviano, author of Blood Washes Blood and Dispatches from the Pacific Century "Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine " Unto the Daughters reads like a nonfiction version of the film Godfather II--if it had been told from the point of view of a female Corleone."--Eleni N. Gage, author of North of Ithaka Karen Tintori thought she knew her family tree. Her grandmother Josie had immigrated from Sicily with her parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Detroit, and with Josie's eight siblings, worked to create a home for themselves away from the poverty and servitude of the old country. Their descendants were proud Italian-Americans. But Josie had a sister that nobody spoke of. Her name was Frances, and at age sixteen, she fell in love with a young barber. Her father wanted her to marry an older don in the neighborhood mafia--a marriage that would give his sons a leg up in the mob. But Frances eloped with her barber. And when she returned a married woman, her father and brothers killed her for it. Her family then erased her from its collective memory. Even 80 years and two generations later, Frances and her death were not spoken of, her name was erased from the family genealogy, her pictures burned, and her memory suppressed. Unto the Daughters is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps the many layers of family, honor, memory, and fear to find an honor killing in turn of the century Detroit. "Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours. It's a must read for anyone researching their Italian ancestry."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine KAREN TINTORI is a writer and journalist who lives in Michigan with her family. Karen's books include Trapped, a 2002 Chicago Tribune favorite book, and The Book of Names (co-author), among others. Visit her website at: www. karentintori .com

It was 1994: post-Liz Phair, mid-Courtney Love, just shy of Alanis Morissette. After seven years of slogging it out in the Boston music scene, Jen Trynin took a hard look at herself and gave "making it" one last shot. It worked. Suddenly Trynin became the spark that set off one of the most heated bidding wars of the year. Major labels vied for her, to the tune of millions of dollars in deals. Lawyers, managers, and booking agents clamored for her attention. Billboard put her on the cover. Everyone knew she was the Next Big Thing. But then she wasn't. In a series of dizzying, hilarious, heartbreaking snapshots, Trynin captures what it's like to be catapulted to the edge of rock stardom, only to plummet back down to earth. Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be is the story of a girl who got what she wished for--and lived happily ever after anyway.

s/t: The Story of the Men Who Were Defeated for the Presidency