In this riveting account of the explosive relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, renowned journalist and author Burton Hersh sets their highly publicized clashes in the context of Joe Kennedy's ongoing manipulation of Congress and his children's careers, and his lifelong connections to organized crime. Theirs was a unique triumvirate, marked by conflict and betrayal, and culminating in a near-Shakespearean tragedy. Based on compelling new research, and told in gripping anecdotal style, Hersh chronicles the complex relationship between the two antagonists, from their early brushes during the McCarthy years to their controversial deaths.

Where God Was Born combines the adventure of a wartime chronicle, the excitement of an archaeological detective story, and the insight of personal spiritual exploration. Taking readers to biblical sites not seen by Westerners for decades, Bruce Feiler's journey uncovers little-known details about the common roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and affirms the importance of the Bible in today's world. In his intimate, accessible style, Feiler invites readers on a never-in-a-lifetime experience: Israel Feiler takes a perilous helicopter dive over Jerusalem, treks through secret underground tunnels, and locates the spot where David toppled Goliath. Iraq After being airlifted into Baghdad, Feiler visits the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham. Iran Feiler explores the home of the Bible's first messiah and uncovers the secret burial place of Queen Esther. Where God Was Born is a daring quest that offers a rare, universal vision of God that can inspire different faiths to an allegiance of hope.

As quintessentially British as a plate of fish and chips or a British Bulldog, the boxy, utilitarian Land Rover Defender has become an iconic part of what it is to be British. It is said that for more than half the world's population, the first car they ever saw was a Land Rover Defender.

"In this pioneering book, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed nearly 150 photographs--some never before published--from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration ... From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end."--Book jacket

"Kabbalah For Dummies" presents a balanced perspective of Kabbalah as an "umbrella" for a complex assemblage of mystical Jewish teachings and codification techniques. "Kabbalah For Dummies" also shows how Kabbalah simultaneously presents an approach to the study of text, the performance of ritual and the experience of worship, as well as how the reader can apply its teaching to everyday life.

In 1906, at a prosperous Long Island summer home, a family falls ill and typhold is diagnosed. When Dr George Soper is called in to find the source of the contagion, he notices that the household cook has gone missing. She is Mary Mallon, the woman who would become known as Typhoid Mary. Soper, sanitary engineer turned sleuth, sees Mary as his Moriarty. He finds there has been an outbreak of typhoid fever in every household she has worked in over the past decade. Mary is a 'carrier', a seemingly healthy individual who passes on her dangerous germs, sometimes with fatal consequences. Now Soper must hunt the cook down before she can infect more unsuspecting victims. A poor Irish immigrant, Mary refuses to believe that she can harbour typhoid in her strong and healthy body, and she doesn't intend to go quietly. In this fascinating true story Bourdain, in an homage from one cook to another, follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a desperate and unintentional murderer, and examines a time, and a life, with his inimitable style.

What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist author of The View from Nebo examines the formation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, demonstrating that it began earlier than popularly believed while discussing the role played by Zionism, Arab nationalism, and World War I.

The son of a prominent Japanese mathematician who came to the United States after World War II, Ken Ono was raised on a diet of high expectations and little praise. Rebelling against his pressure-cooker of a life, Ken determined to drop out of high school to follow his own path. To obtain his father's approval, he invoked the biography of the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom his father revered, who had twice flunked out of college because of his single-minded devotion to mathematics. Ono describes his rocky path through college and graduate school, interweaving Ramanujan's story with his own and telling how at key moments, he was inspired by Ramanujan and guided by mentors who encouraged him to pursue his interest in exploring Ramanujan's mathematical legacy. Picking up where others left off, beginning with the great English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914, Ono has devoted his mathematical career to understanding how in his short life, Ramanujan was able to discover so many deep mathematical truths, which Ramanujan believed had been sent to him as visions from a Hindu goddess. And it was Ramanujan who was ultimately the source of reconciliation between Ono and his parents. Ono's search for Ramanujan ranges over three continents and crosses paths with mathematicians whose lives span the globe and the entire twentieth century and beyond. Along the way, Ken made many fascinating discoveries. The most important and surprising one of all was his own humanity

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests --so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice --was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith.

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-createsthe European world of 1934–45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale --

"From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as "the best in the business," comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Paris, 1941. The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu leads one such Resistance cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England. This suspenseful, fast-paced thriller by the author whom Vince Flynn calls "the most talented espionage novelist of our generation" captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. Alan Furst brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act. As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all. Shot through with the author's trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst's A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller. Praise for Alan Furst "Furst never stops astounding me."--Tom Hanks "Suspenseful and sophisticated. No espionage author, it seems, is better at summoning the shifting moods and emotional atmosphere of Europe before the start of World War II than Alan Furst."--The Wall Street Journal "Though set in a specific place and time, Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell."--Los Angeles Times "[Furst] remains at the top of his game."--The New York Times "A grandmaster of the historical espionage genre."--The Boston Globe"--

Called "the Fabergé of our time" by Diane von Furstenberg, Joel A. Rosenthal, who works in Paris under the name JAR, is one of the most acclaimed jewellery designers of the past thirty years. JAR is known for his use of precious and semi-precious stones resplendent with myriad shades of vibrant colour and set in organic shapes: one brooch, for instance, features lifelike petals in subtly differentiated hues, made from a thousand pavé sapphires and amethysts. The New York Times has described his jewellery as "belligerent, stubborn, audacious, funny, contradictory", while JAR himself has characterised his work as "somewhere between geometry and a bouquet of flowers". This book, featuring nearly 70 pieces from throughout JAR's career, provides a concise, accessible, elegantly designed retrospective of the best of his jewellery creations, and is the only book of its kind on his work available in English

While the special relationship of all ethnic and religious minorities in the USA with their old countries and the existence of their pressure groups is regarded as normal, the support given by U.S. Jews to Israel and the pro-Israeli lobby causes some Americans to view the Jews as disloyal to the USA. Examines the "paper" by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" (first published in 2006 on the Internet and then in the "London Review of Books"; an expanded book appeared later, in 2007). The authors contend that U.S. support of Israel is harmful to American interests, and is due to pressure exerted by a mighty Israel Lobby which acts to the detriment of the state. They argue that the Israel Lobby had a crucial part in the decision to attack Iraq in 2003. Notes that despite the academic style of their paper, Mearsheimer and Walt have revived the myths of a Jewish conspiracy, of Jewish control of the mass media, and of a Jewish secret power. Dwells, also, on the Tony Judt affair. In 2006 Judt, who supported Mearsheimer and Walt, was to deliver a lecture on a binational alternative for Israel. His lecture was cancelled, which he ascribed to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League. Supporters of Mearsheimer and Walt used it as a demonstration of the Israel Lobby's intervention. Criticizes Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" (2006) for its clear anti-Israel bias.

Traces the role of Judaism and the Jewish people in God's plan for the salvtion of mankind, from Abraham through the Second Coming, as revealed by the Catholic faith and by a thoughtful examination of history. It will give both Jews and Christians a deeper understanding of Judaism, both as a religion in itself and as a central component of salvation history. The book examines the unique and central role Judaism plays in the destiny of the world. It documents that throughout history attacks on Jews and Judasim have been rooted, not in Christianity, but in the most anti-Christian of forces. Areas addressed in depth include: the Messianic prophecies in Jewish Scripture; the very anti-Christian roots of Nazi anti-Semitism; the links between Nazism and Arab anti-Semitism; the theological insights of well-known Jewish converts; and the role of the Jews in the Second Coming.

This book willserve as the basic work on the rise and development of bop in jazz. Engendered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, bebop, now known as bop, quickly became the most powerful musical force in modern jazz. Today it is still the main musical language of jazz musicians. Over a ten-year period, Ira Gitler interviewed more than 50 of the seminal figures in jazz history to preserve for posterity their recollections of how jazz moved from the big band era in the late '30s and '40s into the modern jazz period. The musicians interviewed recreate not only their own experiences but also evoke the legendary figures of bop who where so influential in its development but were never recorded, people like Clyde Hart and Freddie Webster. Swing to Bop shows how the music first established itself in jam sessions in Harlem and then spread to New York's famed 52nd Street and beyond. Separate chapters describe how young musicians in major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit became swept up in the movement. Along with the music and the personalities who made it, the book vividly recreates the atmosphere of the country in the '30s and '40s: traveling on the ballroom theather curcuit; racial attitudes and interaction; extra-musical pastimes; the relationship to World War II; and the influence of drugs. Thus Swing to Bop reveals not only how the music evolved but the environment in which it flourished and what effect in turn the music had on that environment and the music to follow. About the Author Ira Gitler is the author of Jazz Masters of the '40s and The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies. He was previously Professor of Jazz History at City College of New York and Associate Editor of Downbeat.

Folklore. Washington Irving and Mark Twain used it in their fiction; Sigmund Freud and William James incorporated it into their work; Henry Ford and Franklin Roosevelt promoted it. Their efforts were set against the background of folklorists who brought collections of traditional tales, songs, and crafts to the attention of a modernizing society. The ideas of these folklorists influenced how Americans thought about the character of their society and the directions it was taking.Here for the first time is a history of American folkloristic ideas and the figures who shaped them. Simon Bronner puts these ideas in cultural context, showing the interconnection of folklore studies with historical events, social changes, and intellectual movements. He follows the beginnings of American folklore studies in the antiquarian literature of the 1830s through the rise of folklore societies in the 1880s to the emergence of an independent discipline in the 1950s. In this progression, Bronner identifies several major themes tying folklore studies to intellectual history: first, the unearthing of a hidden, usable past; second, the charting of time and space; and third, the structuring of communication. More than a chronological or biographical history, this book is an interpretation of folkloristic ideas and their relationship to American society.

We are born with the instinct to create and invent. Indeed our ability to do so is what separates we humans from the rest of the animal world. The moment man first converted a stone to a useful tool set him on a relentless path toward greater control and power over his environment. But have our creative ideas always produced desirable results in line with their original good intention? How many ill-effects and dangers have they brought about along the way? And have they really served us well? Bad Ideas? traces the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement but also questions their value. The dubious consequences of the development of weaponry, for example, is self-evident from the primitive but lethal sling to the devastating nuclear bomb. But what of apparently more innocuous inventions such as farming, writing or medicine? All were initiated for the greater good but have nonetheless produced unforeseen fallout that continues to this day. What are their undesirable side-effects, how did they emerge over the years and where will they take us in the future? Written against a huge historical canvas, we join Robert Winston on a thrilling and inspiring journey from our earliest days to the present. We learn about the history of modern science, engineering, IT and much more, following the unexpected twists and turns of their progress. We meet the individuals who played a key role in their development, and share quirky anecdotes about their lives and brainwaves. Inspiring, unusual, and at times controversial, Bad Ideas? enables us by appreciating the past to look forward to the technological opportunities and ethical challenges of the future. In so doing it celebrates man's extraordinary capacity for achievement whilst warning us that his good intentions can sometimes end up as thoroughly bad ideas.