"Shut Up, I'm Talking" is a smart, hilarious insider take on Israeli politics that reads like the bastard child of Thomas Friedman and David Sedaris. Now a political writer for Salon, Gregory Levey stumbled into a job as speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations at age twenty-five and suddenly found himself, like a latter-day Zelig, in the company of foreign ministers, U.S. senators, and heads of state. Much to his surprise, he was soon attending U.N. sessions and drafting official government statements. The situation got stranger still when he was transferred to Jerusalem to write speeches for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Shut Up, I'm Talking" is a startling account of Levey's journey into the nerve center of Middle Eastern politics at one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history. During his three years in the Israeli government, the Second Intifada continued on in fits and starts, Yasser Arafat died, Hamas came to power, and Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Levey was repeatedly thrust into highly improbable situations -- from being the sole "Israeli" delegate (even though he's Canadian) at the U.N. General Assembly, with no idea how "his" country wanted to vote; to nearly inciting an international incident with his high school French translation of an Arab diplomat's anti-Israel remarks; to communicating with Israeli intelligence about the suspected perpetrators of suicide bombings; to being offered leftover salami from Ariel Sharon's lunch. As Levey got better acquainted with the personalities in the government's inner sanctum, he witnessed firsthand the improvisational and ridiculously casual nature of the country's behind-the-scenes leadership -- and realized that he wasn't the only one faking his way through politics. With sharp insight and great appreciation for the absurd, Levey offers the first-ever look inside Israel's politics from the perspective of a complete outsider, ultimately concluding that the Israeli government is no place for a nice Jewish boy.

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of Lord Byron and a close friend to many of the leading figures of the Victorian era; based on her report on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine she is also generally known as the inventor of the science of computer programming. In this engrossing biography, Dorothy Stein strips away the many layers of myth to reveal a story far more dramatic and fascinating than previous accounts have indicated. Dorothy Stein is a psychologist with a special interest in thought and language and a background in physics and computer programming. She has taught courses in nineteenth-century women's history and in the biology and psychology of sex differences, and is particularly concerned with the use of myth in science.

"I write with light", Andre Kertesz once said of his work. In one of the medium's longest, most productive careers, he created a vast and lyric narrative that shaped the history of photography. The first proponent of the small-format 35-millimeter camera, Kertesz created stunning images of everyday moments, memories, and scenes. His role in the art world was marked by periods of rapturous acclaim and times of regrettable neglect. In pre-World War II Paris, he was recognized as a pioneer in the medium and a celebrated member of a milieu that included Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, and Tristan Tzara. Subsequently, he was known as the inspiration to a generation of photographers, including Man Ray, Brassai, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Berenice Abbott. In later years, however, he endured long periods of obscurity. It was not until the early 1960s that a subsequent generation began to look anew and recognize Kertesz's genius. Through more than sixty years of photographing, he worked without pretense, using the camera to question, to record, and to preserve his relationships to the world and to his art. Collected here are the finest images from his life's work.

Jerusalem is more than a holy city built of stone. Domain of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, Jerusalem is a perpetual contest, and its shrines, housing projects, and bulldozers compete in a scramble for possession. Now one of Jerusalem's most respected authorities presents a history of the city that does not fall prey to any one version of its past. Meron Benvenisti begins with a reflection on the 1996 celebration of Jerusalem's 3000-year anniversary as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel. He then juxtaposes eras, dynasties, and rulers in ways that provide grand comparative insights. But unlike recent politically motivated histories written to justify the claims of Jews and Arabs now living in Jerusalem, Benvenisti has no such agenda. His history is a polyphonic story that lacks victors as well as vanquished. He describes the triumphs and defeats of all the city's residents, from those who walk its streets today to the meddlesome ghosts who linger in its shadows. Benvenisti focuses primarily on the twentieth century, but ancient hatreds are constantly discovered just below the surface. These hostilities have created intense social, cultural, and political interactions that Benvenisti weaves into a compelling human story. For him, any claim to the city means recognizing its historical diversity and multiple populations. A native son of Jerusalem, Benvenisti knows the city well, and his integrated history makes clear that all of Jerusalem's citizens have enriched the Holy City in the past. It is his belief that they can also do so in the future.

"The world almost conquered famine. Until the 1980s, this scourge killed ten million people every decade, but by early 2000s mass starvation had all-but-disappeared. Today, famines are resurgent, driven by war, blockade, hostility to humanitarian principles, and a volatile global economy. In Mass Starvation, world-renowned expert on humanitarian crisis and response Alex de Waal, provides an authoritative history of modern famines: their causes, dimensions, and why they ended. He analyzes starvation as a crime, and breaks new ground in examining forced starvation as an instrument of genocide and war. Refuting the enduring but erroneous view that attributes famine to overpopulation and natural disaster, he shows how political decision or political failing is an essential element in every famine, while the spread of democracy and human rights, and the ending of wars, were major factors in the near-ending of this devastating phenomenon. Hard-hitting and deeply informed, Mass Starvation explains why man-made famine and the political decisions that could end it for good must once again become a top priority for the international community"--

Book by Bauer, Yehuda

"On the eve of the Crimean War, about half a million people lived in the land of Palestine. They were Arabic-speaking. Most were Muslims, but about 60,000 were Christians of various denominations, and around 20,000 were Jews. In addition, they had to tolerate the presence of 50,000 Ottoman soldiers and officials as well as 10,000 Europeans. Their administrative life revolved around the sanjaq, the Ottoman sub-province, of which Ottoman Palestine had three: Nablus, Acre and Jerusalem. To some extent these administrative divisions corresponded to the topography. Palestine had four hilly regions: the Jerusalem mountains, the Nablus mountains, and two other areas: Hebron in the Jerusalem district, and Galilee in the Acre sub-province. Each geographical and administrative area had a major town as its capital, so that some of Palestine's most famous cities were foci of social and cultural life. Acre, Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus were among these important towns, as were the smaller coastal towns of Haifa, Jaffa and Gaza"--

As a kid, Noam Chomsky handed out the Daily Mirror at his uncle's newsstand on 72nd Street, inadvertently finding himself in a buzzing intellectual and political hub for European immigrants in New York. Iranian human rights Nobelist Shirin Ebadi and her husband signed their own legal contract, attempting to restore equality to their marriage after the Iranian Revolution effectively erased the legal rights of women. Elizabeth Warren set out to expose those frauds declaring bankruptcy and taking advantage of the system-only to discover, in her research, a very different story of hard-working middle-class families facing economic collapse in the absence of a social safety net. While studying at Oxford, a young Tariq Ali made a bet with a friend that he could work the Vietnam War into every single answer on his final exams. In this rousing, thoughtful, often funny, and always inspiring volume, a diverse and impressive group of thinkers reflect on those formative experiences that shaped their own political commitments. A fascinating new window into the revealing links between the personal and the political, Political Awakenings will engage readers across generations.

But this is just part of the story, a little part of it. For I Sleep in Hitler's Room is also a book about modern anti-Semitism, about hate that refuses to disappear, about a disease that won't get cured and a curse that won't let go. All told in the clearest of style and most amazing of humor. But this is not fiction. From beginning to end "I Sleep in Hitler's Room" is a true tale, a tale about a country that created the Holocaust and a story about a continent that moves in the direction of creating another. The target group, as in the last round, is the same: the "Jews." Why is Europe, the cradle of our civilization, so obsessed with Jews? Read "I Sleep in Hitler's Room" to find the answer. "I Sleep in Hitler's Room" will make you think, make you worry, make you cry, and make you laugh out loud. It is a book you will never forget. Ever. Buy it today. And run to tell all your friends. Traveling across Germany and seeking out that elusive quality that is the German character, playwright and journalist Tuvia Tenenbom wonders whether he has identified it in any one of several striking social phenomena--the proclivity of Germans to join clubs and group activities; how their aptitude for visual design shapes their architecture and their daily life; how their daily life is suffused with soccer and beer, the omnipresent beverage for all occasions; how they proudly self-define themselves by their achievements in precision technology; and, what is most disturbing to this son of Holocaust survivors, how their crushing awareness of their dark history coexists with virulent anti-Semitism and a stubborn obsession with Israel. Tenenbom integrates deep seriousness with the most lighthearted comic touch in this critical but affectionate look at both left and right in contemporary German politics and society. Listen in on his meetings with leaders in German industry and media, including former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, as well as with scores of private citizens whose everyday conversation Tenenbom ponders even as he gently teases them.

A panoramic new history of modern Britain, as told through the story of one extraordinary family, and one groundbreaking company. In the early 1800s, Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and made their way to Whitechapel in London's East End. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to pull themselves out of poverty, creating a small tobacco factory that grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J. Lyons. For over a century, Lyons was on every high street, in every home, in every coffee and teacup. It was an ascent from rags to riches in the face of many obstacles: poverty, hatred and anti-Semitism stood between this poor immigrant family and the British Dream. Legacy charts the rise and fall of one of the most influential dynasties in British history through the lives of five astonishing generations. Both sweeping and intimate, it is a story of sacrifice and selflessness, betrayal and personal tragedy, and Empire and its cost. It is also an illuminating new exploration of Britain and its place in the world, from the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake.

"Where did they all go?" Sixteen-year-old orphan William Wythers, is eager to try life in the New World. He and the other settlers face an arduous voyage and difficult months ahead on Roanoke Island, off the coast of Virginia. Yet there is a wonderful freedom in defining the rules for this new world in America. And when William falls in love with a young Native American woman, it seems that life is going to be happy after all. But when John White arrives from England with fresh supplies for the settlement, not a single person remains. Who knows what happened? An unsolved mystery in American history comes brilliantly alive in Sonia Levitin's historical novel about the lost colony in Roanoke.

Seeing the Insane is a richly detailed cultural history of madness and art in the Western world, showing how the portrayal of stereotypes has both reflected and shaped the perception and treatment of the mentally disturbed. Covering the Middle Ages through the end of the nineteenth century, Sander L. Gilman explores the depictions of mental illness as seen in manuscripts, sculptures, lithographs, and photography. With artistic renderings and medical illustrations side-by-side, this volume includes over 250 visual displays of the mentally ill. These images capture society's reliance on visual motifs to assign concrete qualities to abstract ailments in an attempt to understand the marginalized. Gilman's collection of images demonstrates how society has relegated the mentally ill to a state of "otherness" and portrays how society's perceived realities concerning the insane have morphed and evolved over centuries. Sander L. Gilman, PhD, is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A respected educator, he has served as Old Dominion Visiting Professor of English at Princeton; Northrop Frye Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto; Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Tulane University; Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell University; and Professor of the History of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. He has written and edited several books including The Face of Madness and Sexuality: An Illustrated History . " Seeing the Insane is a visual history of the stereotypes that have shaped the perception of the mentally ill from medieval through modern times. The result is nearly as heartbreaking as a visual history of the Holocaust. In picture after picture, the book portrays centuries of intolerance for deviance, mindless cruelty, unthinking prejudice, and self-righteous abuse of the weak and ill." - American Journal of Psychiatry "As extraordinary in concept as it is in its execution. . . . This remarkable book helps laymen as well as specialists to see the insane, but it does far more. When we study the past, we understand the present. When we see the conventional stereotype images of insanity, we find they still color our concepts of madness. Through these pictures of the insane, we see all humanity. We look, not through a glass darkly, but through a multiplicity of media, brightly." - Antiquarian Bookman Readers interested in related titles from Sander L. Gilman will also want to see: Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography (ISBN: 9781626549234), Sexuality: An Illustrated History (ISBN: 9781626549227).

Developed by French physicist Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques, the bathyscaph Trieste was a scientific marvel that allowed unprecedented scientific, technical, and military feats in the ocean depths. France and the United States both acquired and subsequently developed variants of the original bathyscaph. While both France and the United States employed the bathyscaph as a tool for scientific investigation of the deepest ocean depths, the U.S. Navy developed and employed the Trieste for military missions as well. From its earliest years, participants in the Trieste program realized that they were making history, blazing a trail into previously unexplored and unexploited depths, developing new capabilities and opening a new frontier. Comparisons with developments in space and the space-race between the United States and the Soviet Union often were made concerning the Trieste program and contemporary developments in undersea technologies and capabilities. The Trieste opened the entire oceans to exploration, exploitation, and operations. The bathyscaph was a first-generation system, a Model-T that spawned an entirely new industry and encouraged new concepts for deep-ocean naval operations. Advances in deep-sea technologies lacked the gee-whiz factor of the concurrent space race, but were highly significant in the development of new technology, new knowledge, and new military capabilities. Opening the Great Depths is the story of the three Trieste deep-ocean vehicles, their officers and enlisted men, and the civilians, often told in their own words, documenting for the first time the earliest years of humanity's probing into Earth's final frontier.

Overview: A lively, richly informed argument for the natural superiority of women from the acclaimed author of The Tangled Wing. There is a human genetic fluke that is surprisingly common, due to a change in a key pair of chromosomes. In the normal condition the two look the same, but in this disorder one is malformed and shrunken beyond recognition. The result is a shortened life span, higher mortality at all ages, an inability to reproduce, premature hair loss, and brain defects variously resulting in attention deficit, hyperactivity, conduct disorder, hypersexuality, and an enormous excess of both outward and self-directed aggression. It is called maleness. In Women After All, Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. With patience and wit he explores the knotty question of whether men are necessary in the biological destiny of the human race. He draws on multiple, colorful examples from the natural world-such as the mating habits of the octopus, black widow, angler fish, and jacana-and argues that maleness in humans is hardly necessary to the survival of the species. In characteristically humorous and engaging prose, Konner sheds light on our biologically different identities, while noting the poignant exceptions that challenge the male/female divide. We meet hunter-gatherers such as those in Botswana, whose culture gave women a prominent place, invented the working mother, and respected women's voices around the fire. Recent human history has upset this balance, as a dense world of war fostered extreme male dominance. But our species has been recovering over the past two centuries, and an unstoppable move toward equality is afoot. It will not be the end of men, but it will be the end of male supremacy and a better, wiser world for women and men alike. Provocative and richly informed, Women After All is bound to be controversial across the sexes

Written in rivetings fashion by the coauthors of The Secret War Against the Jews, Unholy Trinity tells one of the darkest tales of World War II. After the war had ended, fearing a surge of Soviet growth, the Papacy entered into an espionage alliance with British and American intelligence agents. Subsuming justice to the nascent Cold War ideology, these three powers ferreted Nazi criminals out of Europe so that they could be used in the supposedly greater fight against Communism. The Vatica's Nazi smuggling network was penetrated by Prince Anton Turkul, the great Soviet double agent who turned the operations into a sting for his masters in the Kremlin. Unholy Trinity exposes Turkul's "Red Nazi" operation for the first time and shows how Kim Philby, the infamous British-Soviet double agent, and his network were nearly sacrificed to preserve Turkul's Vatican operation. Exploring the Vatican's role in aiding Nazi criminals to escape punishment for their crimes, this book, originally published in 1991, first revealed the Vatican--Swiss bank connection to Nazi gold and documented the hidden links to Western investors in Nazi Germany. Since 1991, major revelations about the role of Swiss banks have confirmed Unholy Trinity's expose of the flight of the Nazi's stolen treasures; the new introduction and new final chapters, written by Aarons and Loftus for this edition, bring the book completely up to date and show how the media have missed the vital Vatican connection in the Swiss-bank story. Among other things, the authors demonstrage that U.S. and British code-breakers were fully aware of the Holocaust as early as 1941 but lied to the Western press; that the code-breakers bugged the Swiss banks and then buried secrets of Nazi gold transfers to protect U.S. intelligence chief Allen Dulles; and that the Australian, Brisih, and Canadian governments are still waging a campaign to keep their citizens ignorant about the Nazi war criminals living among them. Covers all these topics and more, Unholy Trinity is the definitive history of a series of profoundly disturbing cover-ups involing the Holy See, Allen Dulles, the Swiss banks, and the remnants of the Third Reich.

The idea that 'home' is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it. But, as Judith Flanders shows in her fascinating new book, 'home' is a relatively new idea. When in 1900 Dorothy assured the citizens of Oz that 'There is no place like home', she was expressing a view that was the climax of 300 years of change. In The Making of Home, Flanders traces the evolution of the house from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century across northern Europe and America, and shows how the 'homes' we know today bear only a faint resemblance to 'homes' though history. Along the way she investigates the development of ordinary household items - from cutlery, chairs and curtains, to the fitted kitchen, plumbing and windows - while also dismantling many domestic myths.

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In The Gifts of Athena , Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large--as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change. Mokyr draws a link between intellectual forces such as the European enlightenment and subsequent economic changes of the nineteenth century, and follows their development into the twentieth century. He further explores some of the key implications of the knowledge revolution. Among these is the rise and fall of the "factory system" as an organizing principle of modern economic organization. He analyzes the impact of this revolution on information technology and communications as well as on the public's state of health and the structure of households. By examining the social and political roots of resistance to new knowledge, Mokyr also links growth in knowledge to political economy and connects the economic history of technology to the New Institutional Economics. The Gifts of Athena provides crucial insights into a matter of fundamental concern to a range of disciplines including economics, economic history, political economy, the history of technology, and the history of science.

Examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations, ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. A historian who has written extensively on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the author now offers a new chapter in this long, sad history.

Howard Engel, an internationally published and award-winning mystery writer, takes dead aim, so to speak, at this fascination we all share, and produces a wonderfully wise and witty social history of the men and women who represent our agents of death, and have done our dirty work over the centuries. 60 photos and line drawings.