1973: by Immanuel Velikovsky - 363 pages.

This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero--depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier--and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is as compelling as the fiction. "Simon Wiesenthal" is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

'My nature', wrote Queen Victoria, 'is too passionate, my emotions too fervent, and I am a person who has to cling to someone in order to find peace and comfort.' To Queen Victoria, the love, attention and protection of a man was all but indispensable. During her long life, there were six men with whom her emotions were romantically involved: her first prime minister, the urbane Lord Melbourne; her husband, the idealistic Prince Albert; her fellow sovereign, the fascinating Napoleon III; her ghillie, the rough-hewn John Brown; another prime minister, the silver-tongued Disraeli; and her Indian servant, the exotic Munshi. The main appeal to Queen Victoria of these six apparently disparate characters was that they were men of distinctive personality: there was something exceptional about each of them. And they all treated her as a woman first, a queen second. By focusing on the Queen's romantic associations and making full use of recently revealed material, Theo Aronson has painted a fresh, intriguing and startlingly different portrait of Queen Victoria. With his talent for narrative and characterization, he has produced one of the most incisive and readable of his many royal biographies. Praise for Heart of a Queen: ’Theo Aronson always writes very thoughtfully and thoroughly. This book gave great insight into the relationships Queen Victoria had with the men in her life’ - Amazon review ‘Interesting angle on Queen Victoria who it seems could be amused! An intriguing read … Makes the Queen seem far less remote than some other portrayals’ - Amazon review Theo Aronson (1929–2003) was a South African-born writer who specialised in biographies of royal and other dynastic or celebrated figures. His warm and relaxed manner made him popular with the subjects of his works and their connections, many of whom granted him personal interviews, while C. P. Snow described his work as ‘bright with intelligence and human wisdom’.

The Year That Keeps Returning is Goldstein's astonishing historical memoir of that fateful year--when the Ustasha, the pro-fascist nationalists, were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia. On April 10, when the German troops marched into Zagreb, the Croatian capital, they were greeted as liberators by the Croats. Three days later, Ante Pavelić, the future leader of the Independent State of Croatia, returned from exile in Italy and Goldstein's father, the proprietor of a leftist bookstore in Karlovac--a beautiful old city fifty miles from the capital--was arrested along with other local Serbs, communists, and Yugoslav sympathizers. Goldstein was only thirteen years old, and he would never see his father again. More than fifty years later, Goldstein seeks to piece together the facts of his father's last days. The moving narrative threads stories of family, friends, and other ordinary people who lived through those dark times together with personal memories and an impressive depth of carefully researched historic details. The other central figure in Goldstein's heartrending tale is his mother--a strong, resourceful woman who understands how to act decisively in a time of terror in order to keep her family alive.

"Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered international law and redefined the world's understanding of group rights. He invented the concept and word "genocide" and propelled the idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law, and--not least--an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal law"--

Letters of Flip (Philip) Slier, written to his parents in 1942 while he was in a forced labor camp during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Architect and social critic Michael Sorkin develops his own vision of the future lower Manhattan through a series of chronologically organized essays illustrated with full-color images of his own plans. Mixing his inimitable brand of social criticism with more personal reflections, Starting From Zero offers a striving challenge to the Ground Zero redevelopment plan recently chosen by New York's establishment insiders.

Sobibor traces the life of Berek (later Bernard) Schlesinger from his Polish shtetl childhood to his life during the Holocaust - hiding in the woods, finding refuge with non-Jews, confinement in Sobibor, escape during the uprising, working with partisans' documents. A physician after the war, he follows a relentless, unfulfilled pursuit of retribution for Nazi war criminals through the courts. The Sobibor uprising and its leaders, Alexander Pechersky, are pivotal to the novel. The author, Michael Lev, a product of Soviet Jewish culture, avoids loud rhetoric and heroic pathos, keeping the narration within the limits of realism. A flowing, masterful read.

Trachtenberg's book exmines the urban transformation of Florence in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo, he documents in engaging detail how and why urban planners, in league with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces. Articulating the design principles that served as the foundation for these urban renewal projects, Trachtenberg's book fundamentally revises our understanding of urban planning in the early modern period, countering the received claim that rational planning begins only in the Renaissance. His book also brings a new depth of understanding to the entire visual culture of Trecento Florence, demonstrating how many of the developments in painting, sculpture and architecture of this period form the basis of the achievements of the Quattrocento, particularly the discovery of perspective. Combining both empirical and post-structuralist methods, Trachtenberg's book is among the first, if not the first, to question critically many of the assumptions that have formed the basis of scholarship of Renaissance art since the sixteenth century.

Written and photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, with many of her stunning black & white photos, it tells the story of The Russian-Nazi German war in 1941 as Bourke-White personally saw it happening.

This book tells the story of the Dönme, the descendents of Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their conversion, the Dönme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonikan society. The Dönme helped transform Salonika into a cosmopolitan city, promoting the newest innovation in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education. They eventually became the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic. To their proponents, the Dönme are enlightened secularists and Turkish nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Dönme were anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise. But it is time that we take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman Empire, the Dönme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century.

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.

"Diplomacy is essential to the conduct of foreign policy and international business in the twenty-first century. Yet, few international actors are trained to understand or practice effective diplomacy. Poor diplomacy has contributed to repeated setbacks for the United States and other major powers in the last decade. Drawing on deep historical research, this book aims to 'reinvent' diplomacy for our current era. The original and comparative research provides a foundation for thinking about what successful outreach, negotiation, and relationship-building with foreign actors should look like. Instead of focusing only on failures, as most studies do, this one interrogates success. The book provides a framework for defining successful diplomacy and implementing it in diverse contexts. Chapters analyze the activities of diverse diplomats (including state and non-state actors) in enduring cases, including: post-WWII relief, the rise of the non-aligned movement, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the U.S. opening to China, the Camp David Accords, the reunification of Germany, the creation of the European Union, the completion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and relief aid to pre-2001 Afghanistan. The cases are diverse and historical, but they are written with an eye toward contemporary challenges and opportunities. The book closes with systematic reflections on how current diplomats can improve their activities abroad. Foreign Policy Breakthroughs offers rigorous historical insights for present policy"--

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