This affordable, chronologically arranged anthology features 72 short stories carefully selected for their representation of international voices and techniques, their significance in the development of fiction, and their educational and thematic value. Selections are weighted toward the modern and contemporary, with a fair representation of earlier stories. Story groupings help instructors shape thematic units, and help students recognize thematic and technical points of comparison between readings. Multiple stories by the same author allow students to compare works and analyze the evolution of the writer's literary technique.

Emerging from a collection of city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a critical and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate. Raising important questions for our post-Brexit landscape, Kampfner asks why, despite its faults, Germany has become a model for others to emulate, while Britain fails to tackle contemporary challenges. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, Why the Germans Do It Better is a rich and witty portrait of an eternally fascinating country.

A son's funny, frank, and "endlessly fascinating" memoir of his father, Wizard of Oz star Bert Lahr ( Harper's Magazine ). Bert Lahr, best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz , made audiences laugh from burlesque stages to vaudeville to Broadway--and impressed them as Estragon in the American theater debut of Waiting for Godot . But reality wasn't always funny for the legendary actor and comedian, or his family. Drawing on personal recollections and the memories of his father's colleagues, a veteran writer for the New Yorker and renowned theater critic brilliantly explores both the long and glorious professional career of a Hollywood icon and the experience of growing up with him. Here, in rich detail, is Bert Lahr evolving from a low-comic star to a Ziegfeld Follies sophisticate, hamming it up with the Scarecrow and Tin Man on the set of The Wizard of Oz , and garnering rich praise as he performed in Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. But while Lahr could be equally raucous and polished in public, in private he was painfully insecure and self-absorbed, keeping his family at arm's length as he quietly battled his inner demons. "A work of literature, a work of history, a subtle psychological study," Notes on a Cowardly Lion is more than one man's quest to understand his father. It is an extraordinary examination of a life on the stage and screen ( Harper's Magazine ). From a writer with an intimate knowledge of the theater and show business world, this is both a "frank and objective" ( The New York Times Book Review ) family memoir that will appeal to readers of Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking or Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son , and a "book-length love letter. To open it is to enter a life, to participate in a sensibility and, perhaps most important, to laugh. Uproariously" ( Life) .

This intensely interesting—and troubling—book is the product of a lifetime of reflection and study of democracy. In it, John Lukacs addresses the questions of how our democracy has changed and why we have become vulnerable to the shallowest possible demagoguery. Lukacs contrasts the political systems, movements, and ideologies that have bedeviled the twentieth century: democracy, Liberalism, nationalism, fascism, Bolshevism, National Socialism, populism. Reflecting on American democracy, Lukacs describes its evolution from the eighteenth century to its current form—a dangerous and possibly irreversible populism. This involves, among other things, the predominance of popular sentiment over what used to be public opinion. This devolution has happened through the gigantic machinery of publicity, substituting propaganda—and entertainment—for knowledge, and ideology for a sense of history. It is a kind of populism that relies on nationalism and militarism to hold society together. Lukacs's observations are original, biting, timely, sure to inspire lively debate about the precarious state of American democracy today.

The days from May 24 to May 28, 1940 altered the course of the history of this century, as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. The decisive importance of these five days is the focus of John Lukacs's magisterial new book. Lukacs takes us hour by hour into the critical unfolding of events at 10 Downing Street, where Churchill and the members of his cabinet were painfully considering their war responsibilities. We see how the military disasters taking place on the Continent-particularly the plight of the nearly 400,000 British soldiers bottled up in Dunkirk-affected Churchill's fragile political situation, for he had been prime minister only a fortnight and was regarded as impetuous and hotheaded even by many of his own party. Lukacs also investigates the mood of the British people, drawing on newspaper and Mass-Observation reports that show how the citizenry, though only partly informed about the dangers that faced them, nevertheless began to support Churchill's determination to stand fast. Other historians have dealt with Churchill's difficulties during this period, using the partial revelations of certain memoirs and private and public papers. But Lukacs is the first to convey the drama and importance of these days, and he does so in a compelling narrative that combines deep knowledge with high literary style.

A study of three surfing friends coming to terms with adulthood, during the Vietnam War. As the obstacles of their lives pull them apart, the call of the waves eventually brings them together one last time to test themselves against the ocean.

A distinguished historian examines the nation's involvement in a war that most americans thought necessary and righteous. He focuses on the home front: how our culture and politics affected the course of the war and how the war in turn affected us. Index.

Not since World War II has Japan faced a crisis like the one before it now. An apparently endless recession has weakened the foundations of the traditional family and severed the bond between Japan's corporations and employees. Unruly children turn classrooms into battlefields. Ultranationalist pride and xenophobia are celebrated in best-selling comic books and championed by media superstars, including the governor of Tokyo. Upheavals across the society have significant ramifications for America. As the Japanese reject their traditions wholesale, they view their half-century-old connection to the United States with mounting skepticism. Drawing on his fluent Japanese and unmatched intimacy with the culture, John Nathan reveals a nation newly unmoored from the traditions that have shored it up and sometimes stifled it. Dramatic changes in business are augured by Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian president of Nissan, once scorned as an outsider, now hailed for reviving a moribund giant. The soft-spoken artist Yoshinori Kobayashi foments and reflects rabid nationalism among millions with his hugely popular comic books. Yasuo Tanaka, a puckish writer and bon vivant, wins the governorship of Nagano and revolutionizes Japanese politics with his radical populism. Nathan delves beyond Japan's celebrities to map the epic shifts in daily life. He unveils the horrors of the Japanese school system. He goes inside a "career transition service" to witness the novel, nuanced rituals of job-hunting Japanese-style. He takes the pulse of ordinary citizens who are caught up in the country's many profound social shifts: agitprop pop culture, emerging feminism, environmentalism, teenage consumerism, entrepreneurship, and more. With immediacy and élan, John Nathan dispels conventional wisdom about Japan and replaces it with a brilliant vision of a country roiling with pride, uncertainty, creativity, fear, and hope.

In his rousing and inspiring style, John Robbins, author of the acclaimed best-seller Diet for a New America, turns his attention to the national debate on health care. Calling for nothing short of a revolution in the basic beliefs on which health care is based, he convincingly demonstrates the enormous human and financial costs of the polarization of conventional and alternative medicine. Although Americans spend far more money on medical care than any other people in the world, many of us cannot afford the most basic coverage; we rank 25th among the world's nations in infant mortality; the toll in human suffering from degenerative disease continues to rise; the danger from virulent communicable diseases is increasing daily; and, meanwhile, women are growing increasingly frustrated with the care they receive from a male-dominated system.

The worst thing that happened to some Holocaust survivors was that they became like Nazis. How and why - and why they stopped - is the subject of this book. It is a story of Jewish revenge - and Jewish redemption. An Eye for an Eye is a riveting account of the appalling events that accompanied the end of World War II. In 1945 the Soviet Union, which occupied Poland and parts of Germany, a region inhabited by ten million German civilians, established the Office of State Security and deliberately recruited survivors of the Holocaust to carry out a policy of de-Nazification. The Office entered German homes and rounded up German men, women, and children - 99 percent of them noncombatant, innocent civilians - and took them to cellars, prisons, and 1,255 concentration camps, where inmates subsisted on starvation rations, where typhus ran rampant, and where torture was common-place. In this brief period, between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans died in the Office's custody. The book tells the story of what drove people who had been through unimaginable suffering to turn around and inflict the same on others. John Sack focuses on people like Lola, a young woman who became commandant of a prison, determined to avenge the death of her mother, brother, sister, and one-year-old baby . . . Pinek, Lola's gentle childhood friend who after the war became head of security for all of Silesia but never saw what was going on in his jurisdiction and, bitter because it had ignored Auschwitz, refused to allow the Red Cross to come and look . . . and Shlomo, a commandant who bragged that "What the Germans couldn't do in five years at Auschwitz, I've done in five months at Schwientochlowitz." (In fact, his arithmetic was faulty: the Germans at Auschwitz killed just as many people in five short hours.). Nothing has ever been written about this. To unearth the story, the author spent seven years doing research and conducting interviews in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. Sixty-fi

An unlikely journalist, a murder case in Mississippi, and a fascinating literary true crime story in the style of Jon Ronson. A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race—or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex. John Safran, a young white Jewish Australian documentarian, had been in Mississippi and interviewed Barrett for a film on race. When he learned of Barrett’s murder, he returned to find out what happened and became caught up in the twists and turns of the case. During his time in Mississippi, Safran got deeper and deeper into this gothic southern world, becoming entwined in the lives of those connected with the murder — white separatist frenemies, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbors, the stunned families, even the killer himself. And the more he talked with them, the less simple the crime — and the people involved — seemed to be. In the end, he discovered how profoundly and indelibly complex the truth about someone’s life — and death — can be. This is a brilliant, haunting, hilarious, unsettling story about race, money, sex, and power in the modern American South from an outsider’s point of view.

Yet only that last point is actually true. In this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. From his early days as a child prodigy performing for the imperial royal family in Vienna to the last months of his short life, driven to exhaustion by a punitive workload, one thing remained constant: his happy disposition Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart--blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humor, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating

A biography of Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It examines the man from the perspectives of those who know him best and the Americans who have negotiated with him, his allies and enemies, and Arafat himself. It includes details of his childhood and student days.

Vintage paperback

St. John of the Cross was a Catholic saint and mystic who played a key role in the 16th century's Counter-Reformation. This is one of his treatises.

St. John of the Cross was a Catholic saint and mystic who played a key role in the 16th century's Counter-Reformation. This is one of his treatises.

After three decades since the first nearly complete edition of John von Neumann's papers, this book is a valuable selection of those papers and excerpts of his books that are most characteristic of his activity, and reveal that of his continuous influence.The results receiving the 1994 Nobel Prizes in economy deeply rooted in Neumann's game theory are only minor traces of his exceptionally broad spectrum of creativity and stimulation.The book is organized by the specific subjects-quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, operator algebra, hydrodynamics, economics, computers, science and society. In addition, one paper which was written in German will be translated and published in English for the first time.The sections are introduced by short explanatory notes with an emphasis on recent developments based on von Neumann's contributions. An overall picture is provided by Ulam's, one of his most intimate partners in thinking, 1958 memorial lecture. Facsimilae and translations of some of his personal letters and a newly completed bibliography based on von Neumann's own careful compilation are added.