Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and journalist, has written a fascinating first novel based on the life of his real-life ancestor, Elizabeth Bathory, the legendary Blood Countess. Codrescu expertly weaves together two stories in this neo-gothic work: that of the 16th-century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a beautiful and terrifying woman who bathes in the blood of virgin girls; and of her distant descendent, a contemporary journalist who must return to his native Hungary and come to terms with his bloody and disturbing past. Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a Hungarian-born journalist who has lived in the United States, returns to his native Hungary, only to be the target for recruitment among a patriotic group that wants to restore the glory--and the horror--of the Hungarian aristocracy. As a descendent of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, he is heir to all that is wonderful and terrible about his country and his family's past. Codrescu brilliantly explores Drake's anguish, as he realizes the truth behind his gruesome family history. But more importantly, Codrescu also creates a convincing and historically accurate picture of a sadistic woman obsessed with youth, vigor, beauty, and blood_a woman with enough power to order the deaths of 650 virgins so that she could bathe in their blood. "The Blood Countess" is a bizarre and compelling book about the horrors of the past, shown so effectively in the monstrous yet attractive personality of Elizabeth, and what pull these horrors have on those who live now.

Ever since Colonial times, Americans have been bedeviled by high taxes that seem to return little of material value to citizens. Taking a page from Thomas Paine's "Greedy Hand" manifesto, Amity Shlaes has written a provocative and fascinating book exposing the inequities of our present tax system, and offers concrete, coherent solutions to simplify our lives. Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in peacetime history. We truly live in the land Paine foresaw when he warned of government "thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way taxes influence our behavior, and how they force us into an arbitrary system that punishes families and individual enterprise. Shlaes shows how so-called tax breaks do little to help families and how married women are unfairly taxed more. She uncovers the problems that engage and enrage us, proving that Social Security issues and school inadequacies are at heart tax problems. And she charts a course out of the madness of tax oppression, offering a number of solutions that will give each of us a fairer, simpler system. With compassion for Americans and their dreams, Shlaes makes the best case yet for rethinking our tax code.

In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of science, Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multi-billion euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise.

Though she was once a happy teenager with a wonderful family and a full life, Turquoise Draka is now a hunter. In a deadly world of vampires, shapeshifters, and mercenaries, she’ll track any prey if the price is right. Her current assignment: to assassinate Jeshikah, one of the cruelest vampires in history. Her employer: an unknown contact who wants the job done fast. Her major obstacle: she’ll have to hide her strength and enter Midnight, a fabled vampire realm, as a human slave. . . .

A masterful introduction to the to the great repository of Jewish wisdom, the Talmud In The Essential Talmud , the renowned Israeli scholar and teacher Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz succinctly describes the history, structure, and methodology of the sacred text by which the Jewish people have lived and survived through the ages. Rabbi Steinsaltz summarizes the Talmud's main principles, demonstrates its contemporary relevance, and captures the spirit of this unique and paradoxical text as a human expression of divine law. This expanded edition features a historical overview of life in the times of the Talmud and an in-depth look at the content and appearance of the original Talmudic page. As Rabbi Solomon S. Bernards of the B'Nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League puts it, "this book is indispensable to those, Jews and Christians alike, who would like to gain an insight into what it is that moves the contemporary Jew."

Discusses how the CEO of British Petroleum, John Browne, helmed one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history only to have it fall apart due to deadly accidents and environmental crimes, culminating in the Deepwater Horizon disaster--

Don Juan of Austria, one of history's most triumphant and inspiring heroes, is reborn in this opulent novel by Louis de Wohl. Because of the circumstances of his birth, this last son of Emperor Charles the Fifth spent his childhood in a Spanish peasant's hut. Acknowledged by King Philip as his half-brother, the attractive youth quickly became a central figure in a Court where intrigues and romances abounded. Don Juan's intelligence, kindness and devout attachment to the Church enabled him to live unscathed in an environment of luxury, violence and treachery. De Wohl paints in brilliant color the vivid scenes and characters at the Court of King Philip, Juan's campaign against rebel Moriscos in Andalusia, and the amazing climactic victory at Lepanto where he saved the Christian world from Islamic dominance. Here is a novel of high adventure which brings to life the turbulence of the sixteenth century with its conflicts of wickedness and piety, its sins of pride and conquest, its seething heresies and its great faith.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments-his success in seizing India's imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country's minorities, outcasts, and rural poor. Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in vivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi's sense of mission, social values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on another subcontinent-during two decades in South Africa-and then tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma, or "Great Soul," while following him only a small part of the way to the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges as one of history's most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to political and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through the heroic-and tragic-last months of this selfless leader's long campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended only with his own assassination. India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a pedestal as "Father of the Nation" but were less inclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables- for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole-produced their own leaders. Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of Gandhi's extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy, which more than six decades after his death still ensures his place as India's social conscience-and not just India's.

"Event of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings . . . which combine into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance." —Gertrude Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939 So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with other displaced Jews. They describe her factory work as a learning experience and assert, in the face of ever worsening conditions, that true art, never dependent on comfort or peace, is "capable of triumphing over . . . time and place." These letters are a triumph of art, proclaiming the freedom of the human will amidst oppression. Though prevented by Nazi censorship from saying too much too directly, Kolmar still conveys the intensity and determination of her inner world, as well as the relentlessness of the outer world bent on crushing her. For its insight into the mind and soul of a poet submitting to and denying fate, and for its interior vision of one of history's darkest moments, My Gaze Is Turned Inward is a unique document of literary, historical, and spiritual power.

From one of America's most brilliant satirical artists: his best, his funniest, his most deliciously wicked and memorable caricatures of the past thirty years. Here are history's great and near great--166 heroes, rogues, fools, and geniuses: from Moses leading his kvetching people ("Some miracle! If I don't get pneumonia, that'll be a miracle") through the parted Red Sea waters, to George Gershwin teaching Fred Astaire a dance step, to Madonna seen as a horseperson of the apocalypse ; from Brahms dozing off as Liszt plays, to Rodin auditioning models, and Reagan as Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Here are such fabulous targets for the satirist's pen as LBJ, Nixon and the Watergate Gang, a holstered Jimmy Carter at high noon in the hostage crisis, and a poignant Dan Quayle as the central figure in a comic strip about a man who wants a little respect. And it's pure pleasure to watch Sorel portray Tom Wolfe in his famous white suit or Woody Allen and Mia Farrow caught in The Storm, or draw a bead on such superstars as Picasso and John Updike, Barbra Streisand, Colette, Truman Capote, and the entire cast of Casablanca. Each of the book's three sections--"History," "Entertainment and the Arts," "Politics" --has a wry autobiographical introduction, and every drawing has its own pithy, informative caption. Here's wit aplenty, visual and verbal--a splendid satirical view of the wise, the beautiful, the clever, and the flawed, over the centuries, who loom large in our lives and in our imaginations.

The acclaimed author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Infinite Ascent offers an enlightening and enthralling tour of the basics of mathematics, and reveals a world of fascination in fundamental mathematical ideas. One, Two, Three is David Berlinski’s captivating exploration of the foundation of mathematics, its fundamental ideas, and why they matter. By unraveling the complex answers to these most elementary questions—What is a number? How do addition, subtraction, and other functions actually work? What are geometry and logic?—Berlinski reveals the intricacy behind their seemingly simple exteriors. Peppered with enlightening historical anecdotes and asides on some of history’s most fascinating mathematicians, One, Two, Three, revels in the beauty of numbers as Berlinski shows us how and why these often slippery concepts are as essential to the field of mathematics as to who we are.

A general survey of the history of the Sephardic Jews, from Roman Spain to the independence of the Arab countries and the Jews' emigration to Israel. Pp. 1-144 describe Jewish life in Spain, as well as anti-Jewish persecutions under Visigoth and Spanish kings: antisemitic legislation, forced conversion, discrimination against Conversos, Inquisition tribunals, and expulsions.

SHIPS FROM CALIFORNIA!!

In this definitive history of the evolution of the Com- munist Party in America--from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence as a legal entity in the 1920s--Theodore Draper traces the native and foreign strains that comprised the party. He emphasizes its shifting policies and secrets as well as its open activities. He makes clear how the party in its infancy "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power," a fact that Draper develops in his succeeding volume, American Communism and Soviet Russia. In his special, prescient way, Theodore Draper himself had the final words on American Communism: "It is like a museum of radical politics. In its various stages, it has virtually been all things to all men... There are many ways of trying to understand such a movement, but the first task is historical. In some respects, there is no other way to understand it, or at least to avoid seriously misunderstanding it. Every other approach tends to be static, one-sided or unbalanced." Draper correctly notes that the formative period of the American Communist movement has remained a largely untold and even unknown story. In part, the reasons for this are that the Communist movement, although a child of the West, grew to power in the Soviet East. But Draper rescues this chapter with deep appreciation for the fact that communism was not something that happened just in Russia, but also in the United States. This is a must read for scholars and laypersons alike. This volume is conceived as an independent and self-contained study of the American Communist movement. Draper correctly notes that the formative period is largely untold and even unknown. In part, the reasons for this are that the Communist movement, although a child of the West, grew to power in the Soviet East. Draper appreciates the fact that communism was not something that happened only in Russia, but also took place in the United States. That experience is the focus of this volume.

Volume three of a three volume narrative history of the battles, characters, and situations during the Civil War.

One of the most elite educational institutions in the world, the Air Force Academy has, from its inception, attracted the best and the brightest, producing leaders not only in the military but throughout American society. In recent years, however, the Academy has also been producing a cadre of zealous evangelical Christians intent on creating a fundamentalist power base at the highest levels of our country. With God on Our Side is shocking exposé of life inside the United States Air Force Academy and the systematic program of indoctrination sanctioned, coordinated, and carried out by fundamentalist Christians within the U.S. military. It is also the story of Michael L. Weinstein, a proud Academy graduate and the father of two graduates and a current cadet, who single-handedly brought to light the evangelicals' utter disregard of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state that is so essential to the nation's military mission. Weinstein's war would pit him and his small band of fellow graduates, cadets, and concerned citizens against a program of Christian fundamentalist indoctrination that could transform our fighting men and women into "right-thinking" warriors more befitting a theocracy. In the process, he would come face to face with religious bigotry and at its most extreme and fight an unrelenting battle to save his beloved Academy, the ideals it stood for, and the very future of the country. An important book at a critical time in our nation's history, With God on Our Side is the story of one man's courageous struggle to thwart a creeping evangelism permeating America's military and to prevent a taxpayer-funded theocracy in which only the true believers have power.

The only comprehensive and up-to-date look at Reform Judaism, this book analyzes the forces currently challenging the Reform movement, now the largest Jewish denomination in the United States. To distinguish itself from Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, the Reform movement tries to be an egalitarian, open, and innovative version of the faith true to the spirit of the tradition but nonetheless fully compatible with modern secular life. Promoting itself in this way, Reform Judaism has been tremendously successful in recruiting a variety of people—intermarried families, feminists, gays and lesbians, and interracial families among others—who resist more traditional forms of worship. As an unintended result of this success, the movement now struggles with an identity crisis brought on by its liberal theology, which teaches that each Jew is free to practice Judaism more or less as he or she pleases. In the absence of the authority that comes from a theology based on a commanding, all-powerful God, can Reform Judaism continue to thrive? Can it be broadly inclusive and still be uniquely and authentically Jewish? Taking this question as his point of departure, Dana Evan Kaplan provides a broad overview of the American Reform movement and its history, theology, and politics. He then takes a hard look at the challenges the movement faces as it attempts to reinvent itself in the new millennium. In so doing, Kaplan gives the reader a sense of where Reform Judaism has come from, where it stands on the major issues, and where it may be going. Addressing the issues that have confronted the movement—including the ordination of women, acceptance of homosexuality, the problem of assimilation, the question of rabbinic officiation at intermarriages, the struggle for acceptance in Israel, and Jewish education and others—Kaplan sheds light on the connection between Reform ideology and cultural realities. He unflinchingly, yet optimistically, assesses the movement's future and cautions that stormy weather may be ahead.

"In this immensely readable and wide-ranging book Bernard Lewis charts the successive transformations of the Middle East, beginning with the two great empires, the Roman and Persian; the development of monotheism and the growth of Cristianity; the astonishingly rapid rise and spread of Islam; the waves of invaders from the east and the Mongol hordes of Jengiz Khan; the rise of the Ottoman Turks, and the changing balance of power between the Muslim and Christian worlds. As well as describing the forces which shaped the history of the Middle East, Bernard Lewish looks and the prevasive impact, in modern times, of Western ideas and technology" --

Here, the respected scholar Bernard Lewis has brought together his reflections on Middle Eastern history & foreign affairs written over six decades. The collection ranges from English originals of articles published before only in foreign languages, to previously unpublished writings to his highly regarded essays from publications such as Foreign Affairs & The New York Review of Books. With more than 50 pieces in all, prefaced by a new, personal memoir by Lewis, this volume contains a wealth of profound reflections on Middle Eastern history, culture, politics, & current events. Remarkable succinct . . . A concise study of the Muslim world s responses to the West & of its own long, sad decline. The worlds foremost Islamic scholar.

A historical and critical study