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Last stop Auschwitz: my story of survival from within the camp

Wind, Eddy de
Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife Friedel, whom he had met while volunteering in the Westerbork labour camp. On arrival, they made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work in the medical barracks. In their new life, each day, each hour became a battle for survival. For De Wind, this meant negotiating the volatile guards. For Friedel, it meant avoiding the inevitable fate of Joseph Mengele's medical experiments. Despite all this, love prevailed. Passing notes through the fence, sometimes stealing a brief embrace, Friedel and De Wind made it through. As the last Nazis fled at the end of the war, De Wind hid himself in an abandoned barracks and began to write with furious energy about his experiences at Auschwitz. The result is an extraordinary account of life as a prisoner, a near real-time record of the daily struggle, stress and horror, but also of the flickering moments of joy De Wind and Friedel found in each other. Last Stop Auschwitz is a document of the best and the worst of humanity, a reminder of what we as humans were - and are - capable of. A harrowing and eloquent account of suffering and survival, love and despair, it's a unique and timeless story that reminds us there is hope, even in hell. And it will linger with you long after the final page has been turned. -- Provided by publisher.
Doubleday 2020 260 pages

The forger's spell: a true story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the greatest art hoax of the twentieth century

Dolnick, Edward
As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter, Han van Meegeren, who dared to impersonate Vermeer centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.
Harper 2008 349 pages

The Piano Teacher

Elfriede Jelinek
The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of boredom, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night to watch live sex shows and sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity, suppressed violence, and human degradation. Celebrated throughout Europe for the intensity and frankness of her writings and awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in the world today. The Piano Teacher was made into a film, released in the United States in 2001, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
Grove Press 2004 280 pages

How to Actually Change Your Mind

Eliezer Yudkowsky
“I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future, and what human civilization becomes in the future. One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not. “And that makes your rationality my business. “Is this a dangerous idea? Yes, and not just pleasantly edgy 'dangerous.' People have been burned to death because some priest decided that they didn’t think the way they should. Deciding to burn people to death because they ‘don’t think properly’—that’s a revolting kind of reasoning, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want people to think that way, why, it’s disgusting. People who think like that, well, we’ll have to do something about them...“I agree! Here’s my Let’s argue against bad ideas but not set their bearers on fire.” Human intelligence is a an amazing capacity that has single-handedly put humans in a dominant position on Earth. When human intelligence defeats itself and goes off the rails, the fallout therefore tends to be a uniquely big deal. In How to Actually Change Your Mind , decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky asks how we can better identify and sort out our biases, integrate new evidence, and achieve lucidity in our daily lives. Because it really seems as though we should be able to do better— —and a three-pound all-purpose superweapon is a terrible thing to waste.
Machine Intelligence Research Institute 2017-02-11 310 pages

Trust and reciprocity: interdisciplinary lessons from experimental research

Ostrom, Elinor
Trust is essential to economic and social transactions of all kinds, from choosing a marriage partner, to taking a job, and even buying a used car. The benefits to be gained from such transactions originate in the willingness of individuals to take risks by placing trust in others to behave in cooperative and non-exploitative ways. But how do humans decide whether or not to trust someone? Using findings from evolutionary psychology, game theory, and laboratory experiments, Trust and Reciprocity examines the importance of reciprocal relationships in explaining the origins of trust and trustworthy behavior. In Part I, contributor Russell Hardin argues that before one can understand trust one must account for the conditions that make someone trustworthy. Elinor Ostrom discusses evidence that individuals achieve outcomes better than those predicted by models of game theory based on purely selfish motivations. In Part II, the book takes on the biological foundations of trust. Frans de Waal illustrates the deep evolutionary roots of trust and reciprocity with examples from the animal world, such as the way chimpanzees exchange social services like grooming and sharing. Other contributors look at the links between evolution, cognition, and behavior. Kevin McCabe examines how the human mind processes the complex commitments that reciprocal relationships require, summarizing brain imaging experiments that suggest the frontal lobe region is activated when humans try to cooperate with their fellow humans. Acknowledging the importance of game theory as a theoretical model for examining strategic relationships, in Part III the contributors tackle the question of how simple game theoretic models must be extended to explain behavior in situations involving trust and reciprocity. Reviewing a range of experimental studies, Karen Cook and Robin Cooper conclude that trust is dependent on the complex relationships between incentives and individual characteristics, and must be examined in light of the social contexts which promote or erode trust. As an example, Catherine Eckel and Rick Wilson explore how people's cues, such as facial expressions and body language, affect whether others will trust them. The divergent views in this volume are unified by the basic conviction that humans gain through the development of trusting relationships. Trust and Reciprocity advances our understanding of what makes people willing or unwilling to take the risks involved in building such relationships and why. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
Russell Sage Foundation 2003-02-27 409 pages

The empowered patient: how to get the right diagnosis, buy the cheapest drugs, beat your insurance company, and get the best medical care every time

Cohen, Elizabeth
"Combining the personal stories of patients across America with crucial advice on receiving the best possible health care, this guide will enable you to confront and often confusing and perilous system--and come out ahead" --Cover, p. 4.
Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks 2010-08-10 216 pages

The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L.
Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.
Cambridge University Press 1979 794 pages

Amber Brown Horses Around

Paula Danziger,Bruce Coville,Elizabeth Levy
Even when things don't go as planned, Amber Brown is always bold, bright, and colorful. #Amber Brown is out now on Apple TV+ Amber Brown is one happy camper. She and her best friend, Justin, are spending the summer at Camp Cushetunk. Learning to ride Cinnamon, the sweetest horse ever, is so amazing that Amber doesn’t even mind shoveling her poop. Then Amber becomes the target of a series of pranks. Certain she knows who is behind them, Amber and her friends come up with the biggest prank ever to get revenge. But the outcome is not what they expect. Turns out horsing around can lead to big trouble. But sometimes, Amber is surprised to learn, big trouble can lead to big changes for the better.
Penguin 2015-08-04 224 pages

Survivor Café The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

Elizabeth Rosner
Named a Best Book of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle "Survivor Café . . . feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart.... Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world." — San Francisco Chronicle As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten? Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory—from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small–group cross–cultural encounters. Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear–eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty–first–century human inheritance—not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever–changing conversations alive between the past and the present.
Catapult 2018-09-04 288 pages