On August 10, 1938, Lucy S. Dawidowicz set sail from New York to Vilna, Poland, to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). For a year, while she studied the Jewish past, she immersed herself in Vilna's present, getting to know the Jewish rich and poor, witnessing Poland's brutal anti-Semitism. Then she was forced to flee Vilna, just a week before German tanks and troops rumbled into Poland and eventually destroyed this citadel of East European Jewish culture forever. After the war Lucy Dawidowicz again sailed to Europe -- this time to work with Jewish survivors and to identify the remnants of the precious YIVO library of Vilna.

Originally published in 1958, this is Lillian Roth's story in her own words following up on her blockbuster memoir I'll Cry Tomorrow. "Nothing in my wildest imaginings could have prepared me for what has happened these past five years," says Lillian Roth in her new book, which continues the story of her life from the publication of I'll Cry Tomorrow to the present. Catapulted back into the limelight as a "reformed" alcoholic, faced with the problems of a professional come-back, besieged by people who sought solace and advice, troubled by her own weaknesses and doubts, she found herself on the verge of panic and blindness. But the love and strength of her husband, the will to make good on her own, and the faith and affection of a vast audience who turned to her for help, carried her over the troubled waters. Step by step she found her way out of the darkness that still threatened her. With the same frankness and honesty that made her autobiography a deeply moving experience, Lillian Roth now describes her struggle back to the top of the nightclub circuit, of the lean and the full years, of the disappointments and triumphs, and of her search for religious understanding. She tells of her decision to become a serious actress, of the way she finally found a home, after forty-six years, and of the never-ending struggle that everyone is faced with. "Life is a struggle-and to stop struggling is to stop living. But that struggle is not for money alone, but to create, to realize the best within us." "People turned to me for help, not realizing that I too suffered human frailty. But wondrously, they brought me their strength along with their fears." Seldom has there been a story as inspiring and warmly human as this continuation of the record of a woman's search to find peace and happiness within herself.

"An intimate, inspiring memoir by educator and labor union leader Karen Lewis, a formidable fighter, a staunch defender of teachers and students, and a beloved Chicagoan. In 2012, Karen Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union to a historic strike, challenging the city's powerful mayor and paving the way for an unprecedented wave of teacher strikes in the decade that followed. But Lewis's life took her in rich and surprising directions long before she landed in the CTU President's office. I Didn't Come Here to Lie, written in collaboration with historian and education expert Elizabeth Todd-Breland, tells Lewis's story in full for the first time, capturing her lively wit, her charisma, and her commitment to building the schools and communities teachers, students, and families deserve. From her childhood on Chicago's South Side to her teen years organizing Black Power walkouts, from her education at Mount Holyoke and Dartmouth to her years in Oklahoma and Barbados and her stints in medical school and film school, readers follow Lewis through a life full of exploration. Wherever she was, she maintained a strong commitment to building fairness. She found her calling in the classroom, teaching science for more than twenty years before becoming a union leader in Chicago. Up until her untimely death from brain cancer in 2021, Karen Lewis was spirited, unshakeable, and fierce. She remains a model for current organizers and teachers doing the day-to-day work of building a better world. I Didn't Come Here to Lie is a testament to one of the true revolutionaries of her generation"--

“A satisfying read from a masterful stylist, this will appeal to any fan of nature writing or personal essays.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Ever since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook several years ago, Esther Woolfson has been fascinated with corvids, the bird group that includes crows, rooks, magpies, and ravens. Today, the rook, named Chicken, is a member of the Woolfson family along with a talking magpie named Spike, a baby crow named Ziki, a starling, a parrot, and others. From their elaborate bathing rituals to springtime broodiness and their tendency to stash food in the most unlikely places, these corvids share bonds with Woolfson that would have been considered rare, if not impossible, before. Letting her experience speak for itself, Woolfson likens the fears and foibles of corvids to those of humans, taking into account the science of bird intelligence, evolution,song, and flight. She highlights their big personalities and capacity for affection: Chicken hates computers and machines, while she loves evening neck scratches on Woolfson’s knee. It is through this intimate lens that Woolfson invites us to reconsider what creatures can be human’s best friend. “Woolfson shares a house with a host of free–ranging birds who cache bits of brie and raw squid in jean cuffs and under rugs, who excavate holes in the kitchen wall, and who, ahem, are decidedly not housebroken. But are these lifestyles really so peculiar? Should we not applaud them?” — Orion Magazine “What makes Woolfson’s memoir such enjoyable reading (even for the non–birdobsessed) is that she is funny and knows it’s rather crazy to have a magpie, crow, starling or, more significantly, a rook named ‘Chicken’ running about your house.” —Bookslut

Seducing the Demon has introduced Erica Jong to readers who hadn't been born when Fear of Flying was published in 1973. Now one of her finest works of nonfiction -and a New York Times bestseller-is back in print with a new afterword. In Fear of Fifty , a New York Times bestseller when first published in 1994, Erica Jong looks to the second half of her life and "goes right to the jugular of the women who lived wildly and vicariously through Fear of Flying" ( Publishers Weekly ), delivering highly entertaining stories and provocative insights on sex, marriage, aging, feminism, and motherhood. "What Jong calls a midlife memoir is a slice of autobiography that ranks in honesty, self-perception and wisdom with [works by] Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy," wrote the Sunday Times (U.K.). "Although Jong's memoir of a Jewish American princess is wittier than either."

A comic and heartwarming memoir about childhood's second act from Real Simple journalist Catherine Newman. Much is written about a child's infancy and toddler years, which is good since children will never remember it themselves. It is ages 4-14 that make up the second act, as Catherine Newman puts it in this delightfully candid, outlandishly funny new memoir about the years that "your children will remember as childhood." Following Newman's son and daughter as they blossom from preschoolers into teenagers, CATASTROPHIC HAPPINESS is about the bittersweet joy of raising children--and the ever-evolving landscape of issues parents traverse. In a laugh out-loud, heart-wrenching, relatable voice, Newman narrates events as momentous as grief and as quietly moving as the moonlit face of a sleeping child. From tantrums and friendship to fear and even sex, Newman's fresh take will appeal to any parent riding this same roller coaster of laughter and heartbreak.

A finalist for the 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award "A compelling, absolutely unputdownable story . . . And, in case you're wondering, yes, the book is funny. In places, very funny. A remarkable story, magnificently told." -- Booklist In this richly reported, scene-driven narrative, Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv from its unlikely beginnings in McCarthy-era Chicago. We witness the chance meeting between Mike Nichols and Elaine May, hang out at the after-hours bar where Dan Aykroyd hosted friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, and go behind the scenes of cultural landmarks from The Graduate to The Colbert Report . Along the way, we befriend pioneers such as Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Alan Arkin, Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, and many others. Wasson shows why improv deserves to be considered the great American art form of the last half century. " One of the most important stories in American popular culture . . . Wasson may be the first author to explain [improv's] entire history . . . For that reason alone, it's a valuable book . " -- New York Times Book Review "A compelling history . . . It holds the element of surprise--true to the spirit of its subject." -- Entertainment Weekly

Candid, practical, and fun, My Friends Secrets is the fascinating follow-up to Joan Collins best-selling Health, Youth and Happiness: My Secrets. Now the ever-glamorous star talks with some of the world s most successful and beautiful women Angie Dickinson, Michelle Phillips, Joan Rivers, Ivanna Trump, Shirley MacLaine, Diahann Carroll, Shakira Caine, Twiggy all of whom share their secrets for maintaining a youthful appearance and living life to the fullest. With an instructive practical section pulling together celebrity advice on skin care, diet, health, exercise, make-up, alternative therapies, exercise, and cosmetic surgery My Friends Secrets dispels the negative image of aging and encourages you to have the time of your life.

My Brothers’ Keeper carries the reader through a deeply personal and intimate journey, as Gloria Reuben explores her love of the life she shared with her brothers, as well as the myriad of emotions and experiences after their sudden deaths. The death of a sibling is unlike any other. Gloria Reuben’s little brother died just before his twenty-second birthday. Two decades later, her oldest brother Denis died two weeks short of his sixtieth birthday. Just as Gloria felt like she was finally healing from David’s death, the shock of Denis’ unexpected death was almost too much to take. In My Brothers’ Keeper , Gloria bares her soul as she reveals the intimate details of her life at home as a young girl. How the death of her father when she was twelve shaped her view of love and life. How David’s death was the impetus for her move from Canada to the United States. And how her brother Denis was her heart’s twin in a multitude of ways. Gloria, most well known as an actress, debuts her talent as a writer in My Brothers’ Keeper , an intimate and honest tribute to David and Denis. Their lives. Their deaths. And the hope that awaits. “Gloria has written a truly wonderful and inspirational tribute to her brothers and to life. Helpful to all of us who have suffered losses.”—Pete Earley

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.

"This annotated edition of Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's postwar memoir follows her life as an investigative journalist during the emergence and deterioration of the communist state in Poland. Once a devoted communist herself, Nomberg-Przytyk recounts how antisemitism and government corruption shattered her illusions"--

Lauren Book, now 25, was 11 years old when her new nanny, Waldina Flores, joined the family. For the next six years Lauren endured daily sexual and physical abuse. "I was a people pleaser," she says. "I was beaten every day...Waldy was very smart, like all predators are. She hit me and bruised me where my parents wouldn't look. When you are 13 and 14 parents never look at their children's stomachs or lower backs or butts or upper thighs." Lauren is the oldest of three children; her father, Ron Book, is a prominent Florida attorney and lobbyist. In 2002, after being encouraged by her boyfriend, Lauren confessed to her therapist, who in turn called her parents. Her father fired Flores. She fled to Oklahoma and was arrested one month later while coaching a 10-year-old girls' soccer team. While in prison, Flores wrote love letters to Lauren asking for money and ultimately was sentenced to another 10 years on top of the initial 15 years. Since then, Lauren and her father have successfully mounted a legislative onslaught against predators; the many laws they are responsible for include the right to get 48-hour access to predators' HIV test results, a ban on molesters from ever contacting their victims or families, passed legislation to create a statewide network of sexual assault treatment centers, and the controversial act that barred predators from living 2500 feet from public places where children gather such as schools, parks, and playgrounds. Lauren's memoir is a book about hope in the face of extreme adversity. While it deals with a tremendously sensitive and "dark" subject, the hope that it delivers to readers carries an everlasting positive impact. Her story will empower readers to address abuse issues in their own lives and move them to understand the resulting deep emotional matrix that results from abuse and the incredible power of an individual's ability to recover and embrace life.

The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy ) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of the renowned Warburg family, from her great-great-uncle, the eccentric art historian Aby Warburg, whose madness inspired modern theories of iconography, to her great-grandfather Paul M. Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve System whose unheeded warnings about the stock-market crash of 1929 made him “the Cassandra of Wall Street.” As she throws new light on her beloved grandmother’s life and many amours, Weber also considers the role the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg played in her family history, along with the ways the Warburg family has been as celebrated for its accomplishments as it has been vilified over the years by countless conspiracy theorists (from Henry Ford to Louis Farrakhan), who labeled Paul Warburg the ringleader of the so-called international Jewish banking conspiracy. Her mother, Andrea Swift Warburg, married Sidney Kaufman, but their unlikely union, Weber believes, was a direct consequence of George Gershwin’s looming presence in the Warburg family. A notorious womanizer, Weber’s father was a peripatetic filmmaker who made propaganda and training films for the OSS during World War II before producing the first movie with smells, the regrettable flop that was AromaRama. He was as much an enigma to his daughter as he was to the FBI, which had him under surveillance for more than forty years, and even noted Katharine’s birth in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. Colorful, evocative, insightful, and very funny, The Memory of All That is an enthralling look at a tremendously influential—and highly eccentric—family, as well as a consideration of how their stories, with their myriad layers of truth and fiction, have both provoked and influenced one of our most prodigiously gifted writers.

From uptight Afrikaners to flying Dutchmen, from New York high-fliers to the earthy charmers of Puerto Rico--Xaviera got a taste of them all, first as a freewheeling freelance, and later as the most beautiful, famous, and merry madam of Manhattan. "The Happy Hooker" is the book that launched the high priestess of hookerdom on an unsuspecting world. And although this frank sexual shocker raised eyebrows on first publication, Xaviera didn't tell all! This revised version of her internationally bestselling autobiography reveals what modesty forbade--and really takes the lid off the bedtime habits of an astonishing variety of men--and women--in the sin capitals of the world, detailing Xaviera's penetrating personal insights into men and their morals.

The oboist looks back at her twenty-five year career, offering a glimpse into the world of classical music and providing details of substance abuse and the practice of trading sexual favors for jobs.

. 1982clean copy, light wear to covers, no markings, Professional booksellers since 1981

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells the riveting story of the female pilots who each dreamed of being the first American woman in space. When the space age dawned in the late 1950s, Jackie Cochran held more propeller and jet flying records than any pilot of the twentieth century-man or woman. She had led the Women's Auxiliary Service Pilots during the Second World War, was the first woman to break the sound barrier, ran her own luxury cosmetics company, and counted multiple presidents among her personal friends. She was more qualified than any woman in the world to make the leap from atmosphere to orbit. Yet it was Jerrie Cobb, twenty-five years Jackie's junior and a record-holding pilot in her own right, who finagled her way into taking the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts. The prospect of flying in space quickly became her obsession. While the American and international media spun the shocking story of a "woman astronaut" program, Jackie and Jerrie struggled to gain control of the narrative, each hoping to turn the rumored program into their own ideal reality-an issue that ultimately went all the way to Congress. This dual biography of audacious trailblazers Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb presents these fascinating and fearless women in all their glory and grit, using their stories as guides through the shifting social, political, and technical landscape of the time.

A daring darling from the Live Girls series offers a collection of provocative, confessional stories sure to inspire one-handed reading. This isn't dusty, for-ladies-only fiction, just high-quality erotica that doesn't require a whips-and-chains appetite for thorough enjoyment of each sensual, sometimes wicked admission. Recalling the sweat and sizzle of an old affair, a woman wonders if her former lover can ever forgive her for having ended up with his wife. A Haitian couple reveals the passion born of desperation and the searing fires of loss and love. A young woman abroad loses her virginity to a sophisticated older man in a scorching-hot life lesson in sexual possibility. Ovulation brings sweet, slippery horniness?and volatile, supercharged impregnation fantasies?to a childless-by-choice bi-chick. And a pregnant bitch goddess recounts the night she took over her husband's body the same way her growing baby took over her own: relentlessly and with delicious, paradoxical pleasure and pain. The memoir-like style of these stories allows the reader to devour private letters, peek into diaries, and listen to the most intimate confessions of women acting out in inspirational sexual abandon. Seasoned editor Blank has collected only the hottest, most ?confidential” and scintillating erotic moments by expert eroticists including Dawn O'Hara, Adhara Law, Lisa Bland, and R. Gay.

Passionate, profound and funny, Berman is inspiring people from all walks of life to get off the sidelines and fight the good fight--and win. This unique book--part manifesto from a leader, part humorous activist memoir from a soccer mom--offers a wryly honest, behind-the-scenes, ultimately uplifting look at the state of the planet. For almost 20 years, Tzeporah Berman has been one of our most influential environmentalists. A founder of ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, she was instrumental in shaping the tactics and concerns of the modern environmental movement. In her early 20s she faced nearly one thousand criminal charges and 6 years in prison for her role organizing blockades in Canada's rainforest. She later transformed her tactics and sat down with CEOs and political leaders to reshape their policies and practices. In her new role at Greenpeace International she is fighting the problem of our time: climate change. This Crazy Time is an impassioned plea for a better world.

"We are on our way to Le Havre. The train is going so fast that the landscape is all but a blur. From time to time, I can see a farm in the mist surrounded by a sea of green fields. I am excited but also scared. It is 1955, and we are on our way to New York." So begins the marvelous journey of Colette Rossant, just married to an American architect and about to leave France for a new life in the heart of New York City. At first, Colette finds Americans' manners to be as mystifying as their cuisine, but before long, she discovers the myriad charms of her adopted country. Between taking on an astoundingly diverse series of jobs, raising four children, and renovating a Soho town house, Colette develops her own flair for food -- and for superb food writing. In this spirited and deliciously entertaining memoir, Colette shares the unforgettable stories of her forty tumultuous years at the heart of American and international cuisine. The children's cooking school she starts for her daughter's friends turns into a starring role on a PBS television series. As New York magazine's "Underground Gourmet," she hails the city's staggering array of outstanding ethnic cuisine. Either with her husband and children, or on her own, she travels to Africa, China, Japan, and South America, exploring cuisine and culture around the globe. She rides camels through the Australian outback, barters lipstick for fresh vegetables in Tanzania, and is almost arrested as a spy by the Chinese secret police -- just because she is trying to eat like a local. Charming, indomitable, endlessly curious and adventurous, Colette Rossant inspires us to savor every meal -- and every day. With a wonderful array of mouth-watering recipes, The World in My Kitchen is an irresistible celebration of family, food, and life.