''Mind blowingly brilliant'' PHILIPPA PERRY''Few other writers have such passion for granular detail, intellectual heft and boundless curiosity'' THE TIMES''As suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER'' GUARDIANA near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death―and what might follow―by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger travelled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.This experience spurred Junger―a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical―to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when we are forced to reckon with such existential questions?In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.''Moving, compact, philosophically ambitious … A humbling volume'' OBSERVER‘Stunning … A powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human’ JAMES PATTERSON''An instant classic that filled me with wonder, gratitude and awe'' WILL SCHWALBE''A stunning account I didn’t so much read as inhale, awed and riveted and forever changed'' MICHAEL FINKEL

A profound rumination on the concept of freedom from the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm 'Sebastian Junger bears witness to a hard-won and an uncertain new world, framed in vital and brilliant prose: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don't coexist easily: we value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. In this intricately crafted and thought-provoking book, Sebastian Junger examines this tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. For much of a year, Junger and three friends--a conflict photographer and two Afghan war vets--walked the railroad lines of the east coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another. In Freedom, Junger weaves his account of this journey together with primatology and boxing strategy, the role of women in resistance movements and apache renegrades, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. Written in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, the result is a powerful examination of the primary desire that defines us.

A Recommended Read from: The Los Angeles Times * Town and Country * The Seattle Times * Publishers Weekly * Lit Hub * Crime Reads * Alma From the author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts, the astonishing story of a murderer who conned the people around him—including conservative thinker William F. Buckley—into helping set him free In the 1960s, Edgar Smith, in priso[Bokinfo]

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi--a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters--was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.

Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction Jamaica Kincaid’s brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid’s incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother’s life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

A quick search on the net reveals some 2,400,000 sites about the 23-year-old socialite who is famous for doing little and baring little. But what is it about Paris Hilton that continues to fascinate everyone worldwide and why do or should we care? (oh, but we do). Paris has teamed up with entertainment/fashion/beauty/celebrity writer Merle Ginsberg and Jeff Vespa, Paris's fave photographer, to write her autobiography CONFESSIONS OF AN HEIRESS: A TONGUE-IN-CHIC PEEK AT LIFE BEHIND THE POSE. There are chapters on sister Nicky, the jet/set life, and Paris's cavalcade of paramours including Rick Salomon and the notorious sex tape that "has made me change my life. I used to have fun and dress up and that was my life. But now I'm moving on, I've grown up a lot." Wow. CONFESSIONS OF AN HEIRESS also include a section on how to tell if a guy is only interested in your money. "If they offer to pay for dinner, that's a good sign," Paris advises. "But if they talk about how 'you're so rich,' if they do stuff like that, I can tell they like money more than they like me. But I think girls are more gold-diggers than guys." Ouch. CONFESSIONS OF AN HEIRESS doesn't just include Paris's thoughts on men and money. She also weighs in on nutrition ("Never drink Diet Coke. Diet Coke is for fat people.") and the hardships of travel ("Having a stewardess spill something on you can totally ruin your flight. I hate rude stewardesses. It's like, 'Hello, I'm paying, be nice to me.'"). Like, hello, we think they're called flight attendants now.

Alfred Kazin burst onto the American literary scene in 1942, when his first book, "On Native Grounds," announced the arrival of an important new literary critic. "A Walker in the City," his second, signaled the other direction his career would follow: author of several intense, intimate, and lyrical memoirs. Years later he would admit how he struggled writing it. He thought he wanted to concentrate on New York itself, describing a series of walks around the city. But what emerged was the story of his own boyhood encounters with it, starting from Brownsville, the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of his birth, then stretching out to alluring, mysterious Manhattan and from there to the world. Each walk is simultaneously a journey out and a journey in: outward, from the neighborhood to the land beyond, the great, electric, canyoned streets of the city; inward, into his own soul, as it grows and falls in love with books and language and literature, with music and metaphysics and politics, with the city and the country and the world and rapturously tries to take them all in.

Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.

This encyclopedia provides the first standard reference work on the lives, history and activities of Jewish women in the United States. Covering a period which extends from the arrival of the first Jewish women in North America in 1654 to the present, this two-volume set presents the most comprehensive and detailed portrait of American Jewish women ever published, and brings together for the first time the wealth of recent scholarship on this subject. Includes: * Biographical entries on over 800 individual women. * 128 topical articles on organizations such as Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, Mizrachi, and the Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. * Major essays on Jewish women's participation in the movement for women's suffrage, social reform, civil rights, and the recent women's movement. * The activities of Jewish women in politics, business, education, the arts, and religion. * A readable, inviting format with over 500 large photographs. * Bibliographies at the end of each entry which include overviews of major scholarship in the field, complete citations of more general works and citations of additional bibliographical and reference sources. * The comprehensive index includes citations to every substantive discussion in the entries as well as all proper names appearing in the text, such as organizations, book, song and film titles, schools, and individuals. The "Encyclopedia" provides information on American Jewish women in all fields of endeavor, and pays special attention to the work of women in the arts, academics, law, the labor movement, education, science, medicine, journalism and publishing, and on the lives of ordinary Jewish women during all time periods and in all regions of the United States.

“The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other.”—George Plimpton, author of Truman Capote Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into crosswords and scotch, and her much older siblings played “grown-up” games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer’s perceptive account of her family’s lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit’s inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds.

Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her. Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.

Through two award-winning National Public Radio documentaries, and now this powerful book, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have made it their mission to be loud voices from one of this country's darkest places, Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project. Set against the stunning photographs of a talented young photographer from the projects, Our America evokes the unforgiving world of these two amazing young men, and their struggle to survive unrelenting tragedy. With a gift for clear-eyed journalism, they tell their own stories and others, including that of the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old who was dropped to his death from the fourteenth floor of an Ida B. Wells apartment building by two other little boys. Sometimes funny, often painful, but always charged with their dream of Our America, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman reach out to grab your attention and break your heart.

Julien Benda's classic study of 1920s Europe resonates today. The "treason of the intellectuals" is a phrase that evokes much but is inherently ambiguous. The book bearing this title is well known but little understood. This edition is introduced by Roger Kimball. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in a universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilized society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, and instead glorified particularisms and moral relativism. The "treason" of which Benda writes is the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. He criticizes European intellectuals for allowing political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation, ushering the world into "the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds." From the savage flowering of ethnic and religious hatreds in the Middle East and throughout Europe today to the mendacious demand for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses everywhere in the West, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama.

When Hamilton Jordan died of peritoneal mesothelioma in 2008, he left behind amostly finished memoir, a book on which he had been working for the last decade. Jordan's daughter, Kathleen-with the help of her brothers and mother-took up the task of editing and completing the book. A Boy from Georgia -the result of this posthumous father-daughter collaboration-chronicles Hamilton Jordan's childhood in Albany, Georgia, charting his moral and intellectual development as he gradually discovers the complicated legacies of racism, religious intolerance, and southern politics, and affords his readers an intimate view of the state's wheelers and dealers. Jordan's middle-class childhood was bucolic in some ways and traumatizing in others. As Georgia politicians battled civil rights leaders, a young Hamilton straddled the uncomfortable line between the southern establishment to which he belonged and the movement in which he believed. Fortunate enough to grow up in a family that had considerable political clout within Georgia, Jordan went into politics to put his ideals to work. Eventually he became a key aide to Jimmy Carter and was the architect of Carter's stunning victory in the presidential campaign of 1976; Jordan later served as Carter's chief of staff. Clear eyed about the triumphs and tragedies of Jordan's beloved home state and region, A Boy from Georgia tells the story of a remarkable life in a voice that is witty, vivid, and honest.

A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moïse de Camondo. 63 rue de Monceau, Paris Dear friend, As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. Count Moïse de Camondo lived a few doors away from Edmund de Waal’s forebears, the Ephrussi, first encountered in his bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes . Like the Ephrussi, the Camondos were part of belle epoque high society. They were also targets of antisemitism. Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art for his son, Nissim, to inherit. But when Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and, upon the Count’s death, was bequeathed to France. The Musée Nissim de Camondo has remained unchanged since 1936. De Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and uncovers new layers to the family story. In a series of haunting letters addressed to the Count, he tells us what happened next.

In this book gender is the lens through which autobiography and biography are scrutinized. The authors show what is revealed when they magnify the gendered aspects of both men’s and women’s writing. The eternal questions of identity, choice, responsibility, happiness, tragedy, and even death are interpreted in terms of gender analysis. The book presents a sequence of studies from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century that includes individuals such as American poet Anne Sexton and German writers Christa Wolf and Paul Celan, and groups such as nineteenth-century Mexican women and members of the British working class. It extends the paradigm of “self-reflexive” literature to include and highlight the overlap between autobiography and biography, especially in the case of women who often wrote their lives obliquely through the biographies of their famous male relatives, e. g., Adèle Hugo and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The authors refuse to accept a monolithic conception of gender. The studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, Nadezhda Durova, and John Stuart Mill demonstrate that even in the nineteenth century, a binary gender system is inadequate as a mode of approach to actual life stories.

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

More than three decades have passed since Robert Kennedy was assassinated seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. During that time, a powerful legend has grown around him, decreeing that he would have quickly ended the Vietnam War, violence in the cities, and racial and social injustice across the land. Millions of Americans continue to believe that legend. Drawing on his striking interpretation of RFK's character, award-winning historian Ronald Steel examines the life against the legend that Kennedy consciously helped create.

"Whenever women are honest about their struggles, they give other women a gift. Mia delivers." Elizabeth GilbertThis book is for every woman who's been told success is as simple as Lean In, Say Yes, Live Your Best Life, Beat Your Fear, Follow Your Dream... and then feel #soblessed.It's for guilty friends, bad mums, crap wives, imperfect feminists, rebellious daughters and any girl with a big mouth and at least one foot in it. It's for any woman who's ever asked: 'Am I the only one who isn't quite coping?'Here is Mia Freedman's low road to the top - a fearless, hilarious, inspiring and surprising collection of modern misadventures to read, relate to and rejoice in, then share with all the women in your life.MORE PRAISE FOR MIA FREEDMAN"Funny, raw, fierce and - at heart - profoundly generous." Annabel Crabb"There are few writers in Australia who care as much about what makes women tick as Mia Freedman and who reveal so much of themselves." Leigh Sales"Mia Freedman is one of the most inspirational, informative and accessible voices among contemporary Australian writers ... She is dedicated to improving the lives of other women. Hers is an important unique voice in our national conversation." Cate McGregor

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her. The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Her fantasies of reunion with her parents in New York kept her going but came to naught: she had not expected to fall from a wealthy childhood into the life of the working-class poor, as a millinery apprentice or a diamond cutter. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. Unhappy and anxious, she anticipated the social changes in America, and returned to Europe with her second husband and her two children. She arrived at the beginning of the Italian miracle--its post-war revitalization. In Milan she met many Americans as an active member of its community and of the British-American club. After personal tragedy she returned to New York, and only then pursued her early intellectual ambitions. The author eventually became a professor of sociology and quickly climbed up the academic ladder. Just as she had been as a little girl, she still "wanted to know everything," beginning with her study of Italian entrepreneurs and going on to European history and French thought, to psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Her early writings prompted William Phillips, co-founder and editor of Partisan Review, to invite her into the elite circle of New York intellectuals. She worked alongside him, first as a reader, then as executive editor, and took over the editorship of the legendary journal during its final period. Kurzweil's journey was one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth. Full Circle will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians, literary and Holocaust scholars, and American studies specialists.