"In this devastating and resilient graphic memoir, Saviano shares his experiences of witnessing the power and violence of the Camorra firsthand and the nightmarish anxieties of living under armed guard, all while courageously continuing to call attention to the deeply rooted crime and corruption that plagues not only his hometown, but also many Italian and foreign cities where criminal organizations have stretched their tentacles."--cover page 4

In Japan, "hibakusha" means "the people affected by the explosion"--specifically, the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945. In this classic study, winner of the 1969 National Book Award in Science, Lifton studies the psychological effects of the bomb on 90,000 survivors. He sees this analysis as providing a last chance to understand--and be motivated to avoid--nuclear war. This compassionate treatment is a significant contribution to the atomic age.

This book examines the cultural and artistic awakening of New York City through a detailed look at the city's architecture and urbanism during the years '890 - 1925, when the city first acquired a distinct sense of itself as the representative American metropolis, comparable to London and Paris.

Abraham Zarco, a renowned kabbalist, is found dead. Berekiah, a talented young manuscript illuminator, investigates his uncle's murder, and discovers in the kabbalah clues that lead him into the labyrinth of secrets which the Jews tried to hide.

"The Color of Law brilliantly recounted how government at all levels created segregation. Just Action describes how we can begin to undo it"--

World-renowned economist, Richard Wolf, explores the roots of the Great Recession and its immense impact on working people

The man the New York Times has called "the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust" tells the stories of those who caused, experienced, and witnessed the great human catastrophe.

The new Sunday Times bestseller from the Baillie Gifford-winning author of East West Street and The Ratline[Bokinfo]

"This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It's an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity." --Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife One of Behavioral Scientist's "Notable Books of 2021" From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists--a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty--and worse than that, boring.

I Thought My Father was God [paperback] Paul Auster [Jan 01, 2001]

From the “master of historical narrative” ( Financial Times ), a dazzling, richly detailed, panoramic work—the first to document the genesis of a continent-wide European culture. The nineteenth century in Europe was a time of unprecedented artistic achievement. It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.

In an unprecedented spirit of co-operation, twenty-seven of the world's best comics artists and writers met the challenge: to compile this collection of their unique, individual reactions to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the breakthrough to freedom which has changed the political map of Eastern Europe. Features Enki Bilal, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Dave McKean, Moebius, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jacques Tardi, Daniel Torres, and many more!

Edward Hopper's paintings are icons of American culture. His representations of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias and hotel rooms embody the solitude of travel and adult life in the America of the thirties, forties and fifties. Because of the familiarity of his subject matter, Hopper has been pigeon-holed both historically, as an American realist, and thematically, as an artist of alienation. Mark Strand, recent poet laureate and writer of many books of award-winning poetry, approaches Hopper's work with a fresh eye, exploring the aesthetic principles behind the paintings. Strand, whose poems move through a terrain similar to that portrayed by Hopper, possesses a unique and powerful understanding of what makes the paintings so moving and memorable. He writes with his distinctive clarity and grace, examining twenty-three of Hopper's most important works. He cites aesthetic reasons for Hopper's continuing ability to deeply move people in an America that has grown considerably more complex both politically and socially since mid-century.

Chapter 12 deals with the Holocaust.

While working as a fur trapper in Labrador, Canada, Clarence Birdseye encountered an age-old problem: bad food and an unappealing, unhealthy diet. However, he observed that fresh vegetables wetted and left outside in the Arctic winds froze in a way that maintained their integrity after thawing. As a result, he developed his patented Birdseye freezing process and started the company that still bears his name. Birdseye forever changed the way we preserve, store, and distribute food, and the way we eat. Mark Kurlansky’s vibrant and affectionate narrative reveals Clarence Birdseye as a quintessential “can-do” American inventor—his other patents include an electric sunlamp, a harpoon gun to tag finback whales, and an improved incandescent lightbulb—and shows how the greatest of changes can come from the simplest of ideas and the unlikeliest of places.

This is the story of Andersonville, the notorious Georgia prison where 50,000 Northern soldiers suffered and lcose to 14,000 died-and the stories of the people whose lives were changed by the grim camp that was erected in their midst. The guilt and greatness of both the Union and the Confederacy are in these pages, in the savagery of the dcamp commandant, the deep compassion of a nearby planter and his gentle daughter, in the merging of valor and viciousness within the stockade itself.

Book by Livia Bitton-Jackson

In his thousand-day presidency, John F. Kennedy led America through one of its most difficult and potentially explosive eras. With the Cold War at its height and the threat of communist advances in Europe and the Third World, Kennedy had the unenviable task of maintaining U.S. solidarity without leading the western world into a nuclear catastrophe. In Kennedy's Wars, noted historian Lawrence Freedman draws on the best of Cold War scholarship and newly released government documents to illuminate Kennedy's approach to war and his efforts for peace. He recreates insightfully the political and intellectual milieu of the foreign policy establishment during Kennedy's era with vivid profiles of his top advisors--Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Robert Kennedy--and influential figures such as Dean Acheson and Walt Rostow. Tracing the evolution of traditional liberalism into the Cold War liberalism of Kennedy's cabinet, Freedman evaluates their responses to the tensions in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. He gives each conflict individual attention, showing how foreign policy decisions came to be defined for each new crisis in the light of those that had gone before. The book follows Kennedy as he wrestles with the succession of major conflicts--taking advice, weighing the risks of inadvertently escalating the Cold War into outright military confrontation, exploring diplomatic options, and forming strategic judgments that would eventually prevent a major war during his presidency.

"A fiercely argued, keenly insightful, hilarious investigation of the impact of COVID-19 on sexual and romantic relationships, in which the author situates her own and others' coupled lockdown experiences against larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and #BLM"--