551 results for "History"

The investigator: fifty years of uncovering the truth

Lenzner, Terry F.
The Los Angeles Times once called investigative lawyer Terry Lenzner “one of the most powerful and dreaded private investigators in the world.” In his fifty-year career, Lenzner has worked with politicians, celebrities, governments, and corporations worldwide; with a steadfast commitment to the truth, he has uncovered facts that have shaped policy and influenced major legal battles. In this captivating memoir, Lenzner speaks about his varied career and high-profile cases for the first time. At the Justice Department in 1964, he investigated the murder of three civil rights workers—an infamous event that inspired the film Mississippi Burning . He led the national Legal Services Program for the poor, prosecuted organized crime in New York, defended peace activist Philip Berrigan, and represented CIA operative Sid Gottlieb. As a counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, Lenzner investigated Nixon’s dirty tricks and followed the money trail that led to the Watergate burglary and cover-up. He was the first person to deliver a congressional subpoena to a sitting U.S. president. He uncovered cost overruns of the Alaska oil pipeline, helped identify the Unabomber, investigated the circumstances of Princess Diana’s death, and cleared Hugo Chavez of false corruption charges. Lenzner also worked with President Clinton’s defense team during the impeachment hearings. The Investigator is a riveting personal account: Lenzner astounds with anecdotes of scandal and intrigue, offers lessons in investigative methods, and provides an eye-opening look behind some of the most talked-about media stories and world events of our time.
Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) 2013 371 pages

Laboratory for world destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe

Wistrich, Robert S.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was rife with ethnic tensions that undermined the possibilities for Jewish assimilation in Central Europe. The Jews were trapped between rising German nationalism and other nationalisms. Discusses various Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes toward the "Jewish problem", whereby Jews were often stereotyped (e.g. by Rosa Luxemburg) or were considered to need a solution separate from that of European majority peoples (e.g. Nathan Birnbaum and Max Nordau). Views Nietzsche as belonging more to the philosemites than the antisemites, for whom he had great scorn; however, his complexity and obscurity provided ammunition for antisemites, including the Nazis. Herzl believed that a Jewish state was needed to provide a home for Jews suffering from antisemitism. Freud's experience of antisemitism, combined with his negative view of human nature, left no room for illusions about Austrian and German acceptance of Jews. Karl Kraus exhibited elements of Jewish self-hatred when he identified the worst elements of contemporary journalism and capitalism with Jews. Karl Lueger used political antisemitism to become mayor of Vienna. He provided a model for Hitler, who imbibed antisemitic attitudes and stereotypes from the cauldron of nationalisms that was Austria-Hungary.
Published by University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2007 404 pages

The great book of Detroit sports lists

Stone, Mike
Sports talk in America has evolved from small-time barroom banter into a major media smorgasbord that runs 24/7 on TV and radio. With hundreds of billions of dollars generated annually by pro and college teams in major markets nationwide, sports fans across the country are more dedicated than ever to their teams. And when it comes to sports talk—especially all-sports radio—it's all about entertainment, information, prognostication, analysis, rankings, and endless discussion. Prominent sports-media figures in each of the three target cities—Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—engage in this phenomenon with a compilation of sports lists sure to delight as well as stir up debate within these already-buzzing sports communities. List topics include: • What were the most lopsided trades in local sports history? • Who were the most overrated athletes to play in our town? • What local athlete had the best appearance in TV or film? • What was the most heartbreaking loss in local sports history? • What was the greatest single play in local sports history? • Who are our team's most hated rivals? • Plus dozens of “guest” lists contributed by famous local sports and entertainment celebrities. Not only does Detroit host major pro sports teams—the Lions (NFL), the Red Wings (NHL), the Tigers (MLB), and the Pistons (NBA)—the area also includes prominent college sports programs such as the University of Michigan. Detroit's fans are some of the most educated and fanatical in the country, thanks to the work of long-time commentators Mike Stone and Art Regner.
Running Press Book Publishers 2008-10-14 324 pages

White boy: a memoir

Naison, Mark
How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.
Temple University Press 2002-03-08 225 pages

Hans Bethe, prophet of energy

Bernstein, Jeremy
Hans Bethe, the German American physicist, was one of the world's leading scientific authority on energy. He spent a lifetime on energy-related questions and was a source of information about alternative sources of energy. This work provides a discussion of what the real options are in the energy field are. How much energy will we need, what it will cost, and what are its available sources? How does the process of energy conversion, whether nuclear, solar, or conventional oil and coal, actually work?
Basic Books 1980 212 pages

The true Herod

Vermès, Géza
Who was Herod the Great? How did he come to govern one of the most politically tumultuous regions in the world? Was he the heartless baby-killer of Matthew's Gospel, or does this popular tale do Herod a great disservice? Geza Vermes, whose work on the Historical Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls has made him one of the most recognisable names in Biblical and Jewish studies, provides a new portrait of Herod. Vermes examines Herod's legacy as a political leader, and a potentate, a man of culture, and an all-round smooth operator. Vermes opens up the fascinating character of Herod, from his sizable and fragile ego to his devastation at the execution of his beloved wife, an execution that Herod ordered himself. Beginning with the key historical sources (notably Josephus) Vermes moves on to consider Herod's greatest legacy and testament - his extensive building works, which include the Temple in Jerusalem, Masada and Herodium. Colour images, combined with Vermes' lively prose make this new picture of Herod an enticing and informative guide to one of ancient history's most misunderstood figures.
Bloomsbury T & T Clark 2014-05-22 181 pages

The hard way around: the passages of Joshua Slocum

Wolff, Geoffrey
A masterful biographer now offers a thrilling, definitive portrait of one of history’s most legendary icons of adventure. In 1860, sixteen-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. Despite having only a third-grade education, Slocum rose through the nautical ranks at a mercurial pace; just a decade later he was commander of his own ship. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Francisco, and Australia—where he met and married his first wife, Virginia, who would sail along with him for the rest of her life, bearing and raising their children at sea. He commanded eight vessels and owned four, enduring hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, a mutiny, and the death of his wife and three of his children. Yet his ultimate adventure and crowning glory was still to come. In 1895 Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts—by himself—in the Spray, a small sloop of thirty-seven feet. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated until 1925. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World , soon made him internationally famous. He met President Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions and became a presence on the lecture circuit, selling his sea-saga books whenever and wherever he could. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—and was never seen again. Geoffrey Wolff captures this singular life and its flamboyant times—from the Golden Age of Sail to a shockingly different new century—in vivid, fascinating detail.
Alfred A. Knopf 2010 218 pages

Albert and Victoria: the rise and fall of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

Feuchtwanger, E. J.
When Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha married his cousin, the young Queen Victoria, in 1840, it was not only a match whose fertility and personal devotion provided a model for the queen's subjects, it was also a triumph of dynastic politics. It drew the couple deeply into European politics, where their personal and family relationships with many of the rulers often had repercussions at home. Despite the death of Albert in 1861, the marriage of Victoria's children into Europe's royal houses continued the dynastic theme. It was a tragedy for Germany and Europe that Vicky, Victoria's eldest daughter, and her husband, the heir to the German throne were unable to master Bismarck. Albert and Victoria is a portrait of a marriage. It also traces Albert to his unhappy family roots in Coburg and shows how important his attitudes, most of them shared by Victoria, were in their joint dynastic enterprise. >
Hambledon Continuum 2006-01-01 299 pages

My mantelpiece: a memoir of survival and social justice

Goodman, Carolyn,Angelou, Maya
Carolyn Goodmans life was punctuated by tragedy, including a brothers premature death, childhood molestation, a fathers suicide, and a sons infamous murder. But hers is foremost a tale of survival, of turning personal anguish into social conscience. When her twenty-year-old son, Andy, was one of three civil rights volunteers to disappear in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, the story galvanized the nation. A half century after the Mississippi murders, this is the first time that a victims family member has expounded about the experience and the myriad emotions--from guilt to resolve--that it spawned. More than simply a memoir, My Mantelpiece is the story of a centurys seminal progressive movements seen through the lens of a remarkable womans singular journey. **Along with a foreword by National Book Award-winner Maya Angelou, MY MANTELPIECE includes back-cover testimonials from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congressman John Lewis, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and performer-activist Harry Belafonte.
Why Not Books 2014 200 pages

Footnote to history

Laszlo, Andrew
Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1926 in the village of Bikoly and grew up in the town of Pápa, west of Budapest. Pp. 99-221 deal with the Holocaust period. At first, Hungary's anti-Jewish policies did not affect the family much, but the situation changed drastically with the German occupation in March 1944. A ghetto was established in Pápa, and in June 1944 Laszlo was drafted into a military labor service unit. While he was working at Kőszeg, his parents were deported. After his labor unit was destroyed by the Soviets in Jibou, northwestern Romania, Laszlo fled to Budapest, then under the control of the Arrow Cross. In October 1944 Laszlo was deported to Bergen-Belsen, and then to Theresienstadt. There he met his father, who died shortly after the liberation; the rest of his family had perished earlier. After the war he settled in the USA.
University Press of America 2002 334 pages

Patti Smith: dream of life

Smith, Patti
Dream of Life is an intimate look into the interior life of the musician, artist, and poet Patti Smith. Integrated throughout the book are quotes and private transcripts, along with personal and unpublished photographs that reveals Patti's extraordinary personal journey. Captured are such colourful moments as Patti reciting "Prayer for New York" in 1975, hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe, jamming with colloborator Sam Shepard, Patti's reading of an Allen Ginsberg poem at his funeral, kicking around the beach with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so much more.
Rizzoli 2008 431 pages

Judah Benjamin: counselor to the confederacy

Traub, James
Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.
Yale University Press 2021 185 pages

Memoirs of a Jewish extremist: the story of a transformation

Klein Halevi, Yossi
Now available in paperback for the first time, with a new introduction, the poignant and insightful memoir from Yossi Klein Halevi, the award-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed Like Dreamers—a coming-of-age story about a traumatic family history, radical politics, and spiritual transformation that speaks to a new generation struggling to understand what it means to be Jewish in America. The child of a Holocaust survivor, Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in 1960s Brooklyn perceiving reality through the lens of his family’s brutal past. Increasingly identifying with their history of suffering, he regarded the non-Jewish world with fear and loathing. Determined to take action—and seek retribution—he became a disciple of the late rabbi Meir Kahane and a member of the radical fringe of the American Jewish community. In this wry and moving account, Halevi explores the deep-rooted anger of his adolescence and early adulthood that fueled his increasingly aggressive activism. He reveals how he started to question his beliefs—and his self-inflicted suffering as a hostage of history—and see the world from his own clear perspective. As a journalist and author, Halevi has dedicated himself to fostering interfaith reconciliation. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist explains how such a transformation can happen—giving hope that peaceful coexistence between faiths is possible.
Harper/Perennial 2014-10-07 352 pages

Familiar stranger: a life between two islands

Hall, Stuart
This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world. When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left, and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory. Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall's struggle in post-war England: that of building a home and a life in a country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light. Told with passion and wisdom, this is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.
Duke University Press 2017-04-12 301 pages

Saving one's own: Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust

Paldiel, Mordecai
"In this remarkable, historically significant book, Mordecai Paldiel recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which, at great risk to their own lives, Jews rescued other Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing he puts to rest the widely held belief that all Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe wore blinders and allowed themselves to be led like 'lambs to the slaughter.' Paldiel documents how brave Jewish men and women saved thousands of their fellow Jews through efforts unprecedented in Jewish history. Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One's Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers' dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation. The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy - and in saving literally thousands of Jews - is finally revealed"--front jacket flap.
University of Nebraska Press 2017 585 pages

A childhood under Hitler and Stalin: memoirs of a "certified" Jew

Wieck, Michael
A bestseller in Germany, Michael Wieck's account of his childhood in Königsberg recalls a German city obliterated by fire-bombing during the Second World War. As the child of a Jewish mother and Gentile father, Wieck was persecuted first as a "certified Jew" by the Nazis, then as a German by the Russian occupiers, including horrific internment in the Rothenstein concentration camp. His emigration to the West in 1948 marked the end of the 408-year history of the Jewish community in Königsberg. From the earliest delights of a childhood filled with music, family, and the smell of pines and the sea, Wieck retraces his life. He tells of his school days and their sudden end, the shock of Kristallnacht, his Aunt Fanny being sent by train to a destination unknown, the chemical factory where Jewish workers gradually disappeared, the bombs falling on Königsberg. The Russian occupation was anything but the expected delivery from the horrors of the war. In the midst of privation, savagery, and death, there were moments of absurdity, and Wieck powerfully depicts them in this unforgettable memoir.
the University of Wisconsin Press 2003 293 pages