A real-life thriller about a CIA contractor who vanished in Iran and the international manhunt to find him In late 2013, Americans were shocked to learn that a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 was there on a mission for the CIA. The missing man, Robert Levinson, appeared in pictures dressed like a Guantánamo prisoner and pleaded in a video for help from the United States. Barry Meier, an award-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times , draws on years of interviews and never-before-disclosed CIA files to weave together a riveting narrative of the ex-agent’s journey to Iran and the hunt to rescue him. The result is an extraordinary tale about the shadowlands between crime, business, espionage, and the law, where secrets are currency and betrayal is commonplace. Its colorful cast includes CIA operatives, Russian oligarchs, arms dealers, White House officials, gangsters, private eyes, FBI agents, journalists, and a fugitive American terrorist and assassin. Missing Man is a fast-paced story that moves through exotic locales and is set against the backdrop of the twilight war between the United States and Iran, one in which hostages are used as political pawns. Filled with stunning revelations, it chronicles a family’s ongoing search for answers and one man’s desperate struggle to keep his hand in the game.

"THE PURPOSE OF POLITICS IS NOT TO DEFEAT YOUR OPPONENT AS MUCH AS IT IS TO PROVIDE SUPERIOR LEADERSHIP AND BETTER IDEAS THAN THE OPPOSITION." --JACK KEMP The late 1970s were miserable for America. It was the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, a time of high unemployment, ruinous inflation, gasoline lines, Communist advances, and bottomed-out U.S. morale. In the 1980s, it all turned around: "stagflation" ended and nearly two decades of prosperity ensued. The Soviet Union retreated, then collapsed. America again believed in itself. And around the world, democratic capitalism was deemed "the end of history." Ronald Reagan's policies sparked the American renaissance, but the Gipper's leadership is only part of the story. The economic theory that underpinned America's success was pioneered by a star professional quarterback turned self-taught intellectual and "bleeding-heart conservative": Jack Kemp. Kemp's role in a pivotal period in American history is at last illuminated in this first-ever biography, which also has lessons for the politics of today. Kemp was the congressional champion of supply-side economics--the idea that lowering taxes would foster growth. Even today, almost no one advocates a return to a top income tax rate of 70 percent. Kemp didn't just challenge the Democratic establishment. He also encouraged his fellow Republicans to be growth (not austerity) minded, open their tent to minorities and blue-collar workers, battle poverty and discrimination, and once again become "the party of Lincoln." Kemp approached politics the same way he played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills: with a refusal to accept defeat. Yet he also was incapable of personal attack, arguing always on the level of ideas. He regarded opponents as adversaries, not enemies, and often cooperated with them to get things done. Despite many ups and downs, including failed presidential and vice-presidential bids, he represented a positive, idealistic, compassionate Republicanism. Drawing on never-published papers and more than one hundred Kemp Oral History Project interviews, noted journalists Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes trace Kemp's life, from his childhood through his pro football career to his influential years as a congressman and cabinet secretary. As the American Dream seems to be waning and polarized politics stifles Washington, Kemp is a model for what politics ought to be. The Republican party and the nation are in desperate need of another Kemp.

"If an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball's great umpire baiters, such as Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, and Dick Williams, while ejecting any number of the game's elite--once tearing a hamstring in the process. He was the first Jewish umpire in American League history, and probably the first to eject his own father from the officials' dressing room. But whatever Clark was doing--officiating at Nolan Ryan's three hundredth win, Cal Ripken's record breaker, or the "earthquake" World Series of 1989, or braving a labor dispute, an anti-Semitic tirade by a Cy Young Award winner, or a legal imbroglio--it makes for a good story. Called Out but Safe is Clark's outspoken and often hilarious account of his life in baseball from umpire school through the highlights to the inglorious end of his stellar career. Not just a source of baseball history and lore, Clark's book also affords a rare look at what life is like for someone who works for the Major Leagues' other team"--

"Emma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her-a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before thse categories even existed. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entree into New York's elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as "outlaw" Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe-refugees whose lives had little in common with her own-helped redefine the meaning of America itself. In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus's place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today-a world that she helped to invent."--Publisher's website. A portrait of the iconoclastic poet and activist whose words are are set on the Statue of Liberty follows the complex life and times of Emma Lazarus, from her early literary success, to her roles as a feminist, Zionist, and renowned Jewish-American writer.

"Timely and beautifully written, New England Beyond Criticism provides a passionate defense of the importance of the literature of New England to the American literary canon, and its impact on the development of spirituality, community, and culture in America. An exploration and defense of the prominence of New England's literary tradition within the canon of American literature. Traces the impact of the literature of New England on the development of spirituality, community, and culture in America. Includes in-depth studies of work from authors and poets such as William Bradford, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, Susan Howe, and Marilynne Robinson. Examines the place and impression of New England literature in the nation's intellectual history and the lives of its readers"--

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something ). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

1967. Two rival football teams. Two legendary coaches. Two talented quarterbacks. Together they broke the color line, revolutionized college sports, and transformed the NFL. Freedman’s dramatic account, highly praised as a contributing part of the movement and a riveting sports story, is now available in paperback. In September 1967, after three years of landmark civil rights laws and three months of devastating urban riots, the football season began at Louisiana’s Grambling College and Florida A&M. The teams were led by two extraordinary coaches, Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, and they featured the best quarterbacks ever at each school, James Harris and Ken Riley. Breaking the Line brings to life the historic saga of the battle for the 1967 black college championship, culminating in a riveting, excruciatingly close contest. Samuel G. Freedman traces the rise of these four leaders and their teammates as they storm through the season. Together they helped compel the segre­gated colleges of the South to integrate their teams and redefined who could play quarterback in the NFL, who could be a head coach, and who could run a franchise as general manager. In Breaking the Line , Freedman brilliantly tells this suspenseful story of character and talent as he takes us from locker room to state capitol, from embattled campus to packed stadium. He captures a pivotal time in American sport and society, filling a missing and crucial chapter in the movement for civil rights.

"Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States at age ten, already well educated in the Talmud and carrying with him bitter memories of the pogroms and persecutions visited upon the Jews of Latvia. Few artists have achieved success as quickly, and by the mid-twentieth century, Rothko's artwork was being displayed in major museums throughout the world. In May 2012 his painting Orange, Red, Yellow was auctioned for nearly $87 million, setting a new Christie's record. Author Annie Cohen-Solal gained access to archival materials no previous biographer had seen. As a result, her book is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Rothko the man and the artist, an uncommonly successful painter who was never comfortable with the idea of his art as a commodity"--

All human beings are practicing historians," writes Gerda Lerner. "We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing." It is as important as breathing, too. History shapes our self-definition and our relationship to community; it locates us in time and place and helps to give meaning to our lives. History can be the vital thread that holds a nation together, as demonstrated most strikingly in the case of Jewish history. Conversely, for women, who have lived in a world in which they apparently had no history, its absence can be devastating. In Why History Matters, Lerner brings together her thinking and research of the last sixteen years, combining personal reminiscences with innovative theory that illuminate the importance of history and the vital role women have played in it.Why History Matters contains some of the most significant thinking and writing on history that Lerner has done in her entire career--a summation of her life and work. The chapters are divided into three sections, each widely different from the others, each revelatory of Lerner as a woman and a feminist. We read first of Lerner's coming to consciousness as a Jewish woman. There are moving accounts of her early life as a refugee in America, her return to Austria fifty years after fleeing the Nazis (to discover a nation remarkable both for the absence of Jews and for the anti-Semitism just below the surface), her slow assimilation into American life, and her decision to be a historian. If the first section is personal, the second focuses on more professional concerns. Included here is a fascinating essay on nonviolent resistance, tracing the idea from the Quakers (such as Mary Dyer), to abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld (the "most mobbed man" in America), to Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience, then across the sea to Tolstoy and Gandhi, before finally returning to America during the civil rights movement of the 1950s. There are insightful essays on "American Values" and on the tremendous advances women have made in the twentieth century, as well as Lerner's presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, which outlines the contributions of women to the field of history and the growing importance of women as a subject of history. The highlight of the final section of the book is Lerner's bold and innovative look at the issues of class and race as they relate to women, an essay that distills her thinking on these difficult subjects and offers a coherent conceptual framework that will prove of lasting interest to historians and intellectuals.A major figure in women's studies and long-term activist for women's issues, a founding member of NOW and a past president of the Organization of American Historians, Gerda Lerner is a pioneer in the field of Women's History and one of its leading practitioners. Why History Matters is the summation of the work and thinking of this distinguished historian.

When Joel Derfner's boyfriend proposed to him, there was nowhere in America the two could legally marry. That changed quickly, however, and before long the two were on what they expected to be a rollicking journey to married bliss. What they didn't realize was that, along the way, they would confront not just the dilemmas every couple faces on the way to the altar—what kind of ceremony would they have? what would they wear? did they have to invite Great Aunt Sophie?—but also questions about what a relationship can and can't do, the definition of marriage, and, ultimately, what makes a family. Add to the mix a reality show whose director forces them to keep signing and notarizing applications for a wedding license until the cameraman gets a shot she likes; a family marriage history that includes adulterers, arms smugglers, and poisoners; and discussions of civil rights, Sophocles, racism, grammar, and homemade Ouija boards—coupled with Derfner's gift for getting in his own way—and what results is a story not just of gay marriage and the American family but of what it means to be human.

Now available in paperback for the first time, with a new introduction, the poignant and insightful memoir from Yossi Klein Halevi, the award-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed Like Dreamers—a coming-of-age story about a traumatic family history, radical politics, and spiritual transformation that speaks to a new generation struggling to understand what it means to be Jewish in America. The child of a Holocaust survivor, Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in 1960s Brooklyn perceiving reality through the lens of his family’s brutal past. Increasingly identifying with their history of suffering, he regarded the non-Jewish world with fear and loathing. Determined to take action—and seek retribution—he became a disciple of the late rabbi Meir Kahane and a member of the radical fringe of the American Jewish community. In this wry and moving account, Halevi explores the deep-rooted anger of his adolescence and early adulthood that fueled his increasingly aggressive activism. He reveals how he started to question his beliefs—and his self-inflicted suffering as a hostage of history—and see the world from his own clear perspective. As a journalist and author, Halevi has dedicated himself to fostering interfaith reconciliation. Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist explains how such a transformation can happen—giving hope that peaceful coexistence between faiths is possible.

The rare book dealers who delighted readers with the history of their bookselling days in "Old Books, Rare Friends" now offer the other side of their story -- an intimate look at the joys of a relationship that has lasted more than half a century. When their friendship and business partnership began in the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern were pioneers in a man's world. Now approaching their nineties, the duo, who -- among their many discoveries -- unearthed Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous blood-and-thunder stories, remains a vibrant institution in the rare book trade, even as the Internet changes their field -- and their community -- forever. After publishing "Old Books, Rare Friends," Rostenberg and Stern received a flood of fan mail asking about their personal lives, and they have responded with poignant honesty and the warmth for which they are famous, as they reflect on their lives and their remarkable partnership. "Bookends" recounts their fascinating histories: family backgrounds, business adventures, the men they did not marry, and their approach to the bittersweet trials of aging. More than just a dual memoir, "Bookends" is also a chronicle of the cultural changes of twentieth-century American life and a loving farewell to the golden age of book collecting. Filled with wisdom and humor, this volume is a tribute to Rostenberg and Stern's passion for the written word -- and for life itself. Catching us off guard with their candor, they offer their insights regarding their business, their way of life, and their worldview. Above all, they present the story of a special relationship. At a time when people find it increasingly difficult to connect, here wehave the seamless story of a shared life. It is the unique product of an earlier time, yet it is a timeless reflection on the very nature of friendship. Though their fantastic partnership is un-reproducible, the ideal they have established, for the integration of one life so completely with another, contains lessons for all of us. Without husband or children they created a loving home when this was uncharted territory for women. They nurtured a business and life partnership that has lasted more than half a century and has only gotten stronger with time. When the passing years began to claim one's hearing and the other's sight, they became each other's eyes and ears. A meditation on aging and togetherness, this book is also the narrative of two pioneering single, Jewish women making their way in tandem through a world largely organized to keep them in their place. It is a gentle, wise story, told in their inimitable style, sparse, unadorned, and honest. Their affirmations supersede their uncertainties. As they write, "Bookends support books and come in pairs...If the word encapsulates our past, it looks also to the future, and to the books -- lived together, written together -- that will follow." They confront the challenges of aging in a no-nonsense tone, and, in facing them, give us an ideal of enduring human friendship that can't help but touch the heart.

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.

Hans Bethe, the German American physicist, was one of the world's leading scientific authority on energy. He spent a lifetime on energy-related questions and was a source of information about alternative sources of energy. This work provides a discussion of what the real options are in the energy field are. How much energy will we need, what it will cost, and what are its available sources? How does the process of energy conversion, whether nuclear, solar, or conventional oil and coal, actually work?

Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.

"Songs of Sonderling is the story of Jacob Sonderling's unique contributions to Jewish liturgical music. Rabbi Sonderling was many things: a descendant of Chassidic rebbes, a rationalist, a Reform rabbi, a Zionist, an army chaplain, a celebrated orator, an artistic soul. From his early career at the Hamburg Temple and German Army service in World War I, to his wandering years in the Eastern United States and founding of the Society for Jewish Culture-Fairfax Temple in Los Angeles, Sonderling cultivated a unique aesthetic vision of Judaism, a "five-sense appeal." Jonathan L. Friedmann and John F. Guest document and analyze Sonderling's experience and expression of Judaism through music. Rabbi Sonderling's vision yielded liturgical commissions from exiled Viennese Jewish composers who arrived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. Through these musical settings, activities at the Fairfax Temple, and involvement with the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Sonderling made an indelible mark on the city's Jewish community and the wider musical world. Songs of Sonderling focuses on the commissions Sonderling made from 1938 to 1945: Ernst Toch's Cantata of the Bitter Herbs, Arnold Schoenberg's Kol Nidre, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's A Passover Psalm and Prayer, and Eric Zeisl's Requiem Ebraico. Through musical analyses and an examination of Sonderling's career in Los Angeles, Friedmann and Guest contribute to the study of Jewish liturgical music, to Jewish history in the American West, to Jewish identity in the twentieth century, and to Jewish diaspora writ large"--

Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.

Son of pioneer movie producer Harry Rapf, Maurice Rapf grew up in Hollywood in that city's golden age. After moving from independent filmmaking to Warner Bros., in 1924 the senior Rapf joined Louis Mayer and became one of the founding members of MGM. Hence, movies were a huge influence in Maurice Rapf's early life. After graduating from college, Rapf worked as a screenwriter for major Hollywood studios, but, in 1947, he left Hollywood, never to work for a major studio again. On numerous occasions, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged communist, although he never made a public confession or denial. As a result he was blacklisted from the industry and forced to begin a new career in the East. He eventually became a movie critic and film studies professor. Maurice Rapf knows movies and the movie business as an insider, from first-hand experience, not from books. His autobiography is the story of one person's interaction with an evolving Hollywood. Rapf witnessed the historical progression of movie production: from silents to sound, from a fun-loving frontier community to a huge and fiercely competitive industry, from an apolitical never-never land to a community very much aware of-and nervous about-its social responsibility in a period of economic depression and in a period of world peace seriously threatened by the aggression of fascism. Of interest to students and teachers of film studies, of American history, and of American popular culture, as well as anyone who loves movies.

""Impromptu Man captures the remarkable impact of a singular genius, J.L. Moreno, whose creations-the best-known being psychodrama-have shaped our culture in myriad ways, many unrecognized. The record will be set straight for all time by this can't-put-down biography, a tribute by Jonathan D. Moreno to his father's masterly legacy." -DANIEL GOLEMAN, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ J.L. Moreno (1889-1974), the father of psychodrama, was an early critic of Sigmund Freud, wrote landmark works of Viennese expressionism, founded an experimental theater where he discovered Peter Lorre, influenced Martin Buber, and became one of the most important psychiatrists and social scientists of his time. ?? A mystic, theater impresario and inventor in his youth, Moreno immigrated to America in 1926, where he trained famous actors, introduced group therapy, and was a forerunner of humanistic psychology. As a social reformer, he reorganized schools and prisons, and designed New Deal planned communities for workers and farmers. Moreno's methods have been adopted by improvisational theater groups, military organizations, educators, business leaders, and trial lawyers. His studies of social networks laid the groundwork for social media like Twitter and Facebook. ?? Featuring interviews with Clay Shirky, Gloria Steinem, and Werner Erhard, among others, original documentary research, and the author's own perspective growing up as the son of an innovative genius, Impromptu Man is both the study of a great and largely unsung figure of the last century and an epic history, taking readers from the creative chaos of early twentieth-century Vienna to the wired world of Silicon Valley. Jonathan D. Moreno, called the "most interesting bioethicist of our time" by the American Journal of Bioethics, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. "--