"Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara had lived in France, just as Hitler started to gain power in Europe, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Until long after her grandmother's death, she found a shoebox tucked in a closet. In it was: a photograph of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger; a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross; and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long journey, as she tried to uncover the significance of these keepsakes. Her search took her from the Picasso archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in the Auvergne, from Long Island to Auschwitz. Here, Freeman pieces together the puzzle of her family's past. Sarah had three brothers: Jacques, Henri, and Alex. Their lives in France during the war--at times typical, at times remarkable--illustrates the broad range of experiences of Eastern European Jews. Jacques was one of the first to be arrested and sentenced to the concentration camps, where he died. He was on the same train as Irene Nemirovsky, the author of Suite Francaise. Henri hid in his apartment, and survived. He invented a microfilming machine that the resistance used to protect French secrets. Alex, a successful haute couture designer before the war, served in the French Legion. When he was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, he pulled up the floorboards of the train, escaped, and was hidden by communists in the French countryside. He went on to become an influential gallerist, and a close friend of Picasso; the boy who began life in a ghetto ended his days living in the most expensive street in Paris. Sarah left for America. Freeman assumed her grandmother must have been thrilled to escape, but the truth was she was miserable-she'd been tricked by her brothers into leaving in the first place. This is a thrilling family saga, with extraordinary twists, vivid characters, and famous cameos. It describes the Jewish and immigrant experience, discussing issues like assimilation, identity and home-issues still relevant today"--

The first true character study of a lost president and his disastrous legacy In this fascinating, timely book, Glenn Greenwald examines the Bush presidency and its long-term effect on the nation, charting the rise and steep fall of the current administration, dissecting the rhetoric, and revealing the faulty ideals upon which George W. Bush built his policies. Enlightening and eye-opening, this is a powerful look at the man whose incapability and cowboy logic have left America at risk.

According to Jewish theology, the Evil Inclination, or yetzer ha-ra, is the little voice inside us all, goading us -- against our better judgment -- to do bad things. Travels with the Evil Inclination is Gershon Winkler's hilarious account of his struggles with the Evil One and the life journey that takes him from an ultra-Orthodox upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, to an ultra-Flexidox lifestyle in rural New Mexico. Through his early childhood in Denmark and his yeshiva boyhood in Brooklyn, his years in the U.S. Army and those spent ranching in Colorado, Winkler's faith and belief undergo constant upheaval as he grapples towards a reconciliation of his passion for religious tradition with his passion for things more earthly. With irreverence and humor, Winkler tells his tale of personal spiritual dissolution and his subsequent re-emergence as a teacher and writer exploring the long-forgotten connections between Judaism and shamanism. Travels with the Evil Inclination is an inspiring and entertaining story of the unusual life of a most original man.

Presents the stories of non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, based on interviews with them in the 1980s. Arranged according to country: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine. Contains numerous photographs. The prologue appears on pp. xi-xvi.

This is the true story of Staten Island badboy Louis Pasciuto's meteoric rise to the top of Wall Street's notorious chop houses - by the award-winning journalist who broke it. Hood brokers. Monthly million dollar paychecks. Thirty-six hour cocaine binges. Rocky themed pep rallies. Run-ins with Mafia thugs toting Mac 10 machine pistols. This was the life of Louis Pasciuto, a fast talking Staten Island kid who, from the age of 19 to 25, moved stocks for 17 different brokerage houses - most of the time without a fake license. This inside account of the Mafia's infiltration of Wall Street details Louis' career as the consummate liar, selling phantom stocks to naive Americans and leading a lifestyle worthy of Caligula. To avoid a long prison sentence, Pasciuto eventually became state witness. Now, Gary Weiss shares the inside story of Wall Street's notorious chop houses, best known as the crooked Mob-run brokerages, where rampant thievery netted several billion dollars from gullible investors.

[Astaire] likeable personality illuminates an anecdotal, very eventful account. (Booklist)

"Forrest Galante, host of Extinct or Alive and the world's #1 rare species expert, takes readers along with him through the deepest wilderness and most remote and dangerous parts of the world to find all the animals we thought were extinct. In the course of his travels, Galante has been attacked by lions, stung by jellyfish, bitten by snakes and had run-ins with pissed off hippos. Still Alive offers a travelogue of Galante's most harrowing adventures, introducing readers to some of the most unique rare species he's encountered--while also adding the unpredictable drama and human element of traveling to some of the world's most isolated locations. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive is a calling card for conservation, highlighting not just Galante's toughness as he finds animals thought to be lost, but also the resiliency of the animals themselves, as they keep their species alive in spite of the odds"--

Contains the complete text of the diaries (pp. 1-231) of Etty Hillesum, and of her letters from Westerbork (pp. 233-360). Her diaries contain references to the Nazi anti-Jewish measures and her work for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam and in Westerbork, where she was interned from July 1942 until her deportation to Auschwitz in September 1943. Her letters describe life in camp Westerbork.

Nobelist Eric Kandel's account of how his personal quest to understand memory intersected with the emergence of a new science. In Search of Memory relates the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplinesbehaviorist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biologyconverged into a powerful new science of mind. Through its profound insights into thought, perception, action, recollection, and mental illness, this new science is revolutionizing our understanding of learning and memory while simultaneously showing great promise for more effective healing. The narrative follows Eric R. Kandel through the last five decades, focusing on Vienna, where he became fascinated with memory. With intrepid scientific ardor, Kandel was captivated first by history and psychoanalysis, then by neurobiology, and finally by the biological processes of memory. His resulting, multifaceted perspective was the foundation for his path-breaking research that will continue to dominate modern thoughtnot only in science but in culture at large. 50 illustrations.

It's thirty seconds to air. The interviewee has walked off in a huff. The next guest hasn't arrived. There's a wall of riot police behind me. The cameraman only speaks Hungarian and has cut my head out of the shot but I don't know his word for 'wide angle'. Then comes the quiet. Utter silence in my head. We've just lost comms with the whole team back in London. I can choose to scream. Or to surrender to the moment. Then, a hand is waved at me as a visual cue. And I start talking. The things that are said on camera are only part of the story. Behind every interview there is a backstory. How it came about. How it ended. The compromises that were made. The regrets, the rows, the deeply inappropriate comedy. Making news is an essential but imperfect art. It rarely goes according to plan. I never expected to find myself wandering around the Maharani of Jaipurs bedroom with Bill Clinton or invited to the Miss USA beauty pageant by its owner, Donald Trump. I never expected to be thrown into a provincial Cuban jail, or to be drinking red wine at Steve Bannon's kitchen table or spend three hours in a lift with Alan Partridge. I certainly didnt expect the Dalai Lama to tell me the story of his most memorable poo. The beauty of television is its ability to simplify, but that's also its weakness: it can distill everything down to one snapshot, one soundbite. Then the news cycle moves on. Airhead is my step back from the white noise. Before and after the camera started rolling, this is what really happened.

The author presents the calendar year, with recipes and remembrances for as she cooked with her mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor, "she learned other secrets as well; for as Miriam cooked, she talked: about growing up in a Polish village, about the war years, about pioneer times in Israel, about becoming a Yankee, about worlds lost and survival."

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built on the ferocity of mother-daughter love, moral obligation, and the possibility and promise of healing. Having survived a harrowing childhood at the hands of her mother, Elissa is finally settled in Connecticut with her wife of almost twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, orbiting around her mother, but keeping far enough away from her to preserve the independent, quiet life she has built for herself. All of this is suddenly at risk when Rita, whose days are spent traversing the streets of Manhattan from Bergdorf's to Bloomingdale's and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall that leaves her fully dependent on her only child. Forced to confront her mother's desperate need for beauty, her view of the world through a medley of men, her lost days in the spotlight, addiction, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of maintaining her youth, Elissa must navigate the waters of their shared history, obligation, the problems of caregiving and age, and the frenetic, co-dependent love that has defined their obsessive relationship. Motherland asks the universal mother-daughter question: How much love is too much love?"--

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built on the ferocity of mother-daughter love, moral obligation, and the possibility and promise of healing. Having survived a harrowing childhood at the hands of her mother, Elissa is finally settled in Connecticut with her wife of almost twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, orbiting around her mother, but keeping far enough away from her to preserve the independent, quiet life she has built for herself. All of this is suddenly at risk when Rita, whose days are spent traversing the streets of Manhattan from Bergdorf's to Bloomingdale's and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall that leaves her fully dependent on her only child. Forced to confront her mother's desperate need for beauty, her view of the world through a medley of men, her lost days in the spotlight, addiction, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of maintaining her youth, Elissa must navigate the waters of their shared history, obligation, the problems of caregiving and age, and the frenetic, co-dependent love that has defined their obsessive relationship. Motherland asks the universal mother-daughter question: How much love is too much love?"--

"A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz. In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city's famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black 'sporting world.' It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast. Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world--the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium"--

"Love and Math tells the two intertwined stories of mathematics and the adventure of one man in learning it. The result is a story about how he became one of the twenty-first century's leading mathematicians, working on one of the biggest ideas to come out of mathematics in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. As Frenkel proves, a mathematical formula can be as elegant and beautiful as a painting, a poem, or a piece of music. And the process of creating new mathematics is just that, an artistic pursuit--a deeply personal experience, which requires passion, dedication, and love. In Love and Math, Frenkel shows readers the aesthetic--and the truly powerful--side of mathematics, and enables appreciation of the field even from those who have long been terrified by it."--Provided by publisher.

"Edie is a talented dancer and skilled gymnast with hopes of making the Olympics. Between her rigorous training and her struggle to find her place in a family where she's considered the daughter "with brains but no looks," Edie's too busy to dwell on the state of the world. But life in Hungary in 1943 is dangerous for a Jewish girl. Just as Edie falls in love for the first time, Europe collapses into war, and Edie's family is forced onto a train bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp. Even in that darkest of moments, Edie's beloved, Eric, kindles hope. "I'll never forget your eyes," he tells her through the slats of the cattle car. Auschwitz is horrifying beyond belief, yet through starvation and unthinkable terrors, dreams of Eric sustain Edie. Against all odds, Edie and her sister Magda survive, thanks to their sisterhood and sheer grit. In this young adult edition of her bestselling, award-winning memoir The Choice, renowned psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger gives readers a gift of hope and strength"--