This bestselling account of the most important season in baseball history, 1947, tells the dramatic story of how Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and changed baseball forever. April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front—and Robinson had a chance to lead the way. In Opening Day , Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime’s most sacred myth. He offers new insights into events of sixty years ago and punctures some familiar legends. Was it true that the St. Louis Cardinals plotted to boycott their first home game against the Brooklyn Dodgers? Was Pee Wee Reese really Robinson’s closest ally on the team? Was Dixie Walker his greatest foe? How did Robinson handle the extraordinary stress of being the only black man in baseball and still manage to perform so well on the field? Opening Day is also the story of a team of underdogs that came together against tremendous odds to capture the pennant. Facing the powerful New York Yankees, Robinson and the Dodgers battled to the seventh game in one of the most thrilling World Series competitions of all time. Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration’s promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball’s ultimate story.

"The definitive biography of an American icon, from a New York Times best-selling author with unique access to Ali's inner circle. He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest (as he told us himself). Muhammad Ali was one of the twentieth century's most fantastic figures and arguably the most famous man on the planet. But until now, he has never been the subject of a complete, unauthorized biography. Jonathan Eig, hailed by Ken Burns as one of America's master storytellers, radically reshapes our understanding of the complicated man who was Ali. Eig had access to all the key people in Ali's life, including his three surviving wives and his managers. He conducted more than 500 interviews and uncovered thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files, as well dozens of hours of newly discovered audiotaped interviews from the 1960s. Collectively, they tell Ali's story like never before--the story of a man who was flawed and uncertain and brave beyond belief. "I am America," he once declared. "I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me--black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me." He was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost. Like so many boxers, he stayed too long. Jonathan Eig's Ali reveals Ali in the complexity he deserves, shedding important new light on his politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition. Ali is a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world."--Publisher's description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Signal Fires and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets : a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test, an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. “Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” — People In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Dani Shapiro’s memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace—part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.

Stanislaw Lem's Highcastle is at once a remembrance and a meditation. Even as Lem gives an account of his childhood in Lvov in the years between the two world wars, he ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. His recollections of growing up the son of a bourgeois doctor at Number 4 Brajerska Street are stunningly evocative, re-creating with acuity a boy's perception of the world around him: his gossipy French tutor; the magical window of Zalewski's Confectionery; his father's anatomy books and carefully hidden French pornography; a trip to Klaften's Toy Shop; an aborted visit to a tattooed lady at the Eastern Fair; the trams, organ grinders, and halvah stands of Lvov.

A brilliant lawyer, a leader of the Civil Rights movement, and the first African-American justice of the US Supreme Court. A strong-willed boy, Marshall grew up in Baltimore, MD with the guidance of his parents who believed in the power of equality, education, and the importance of hard work. His determination carried him through law school at Howard University where he graduated at the top of his class. Marshall worked for the NAACP (National Association for ther Advancement of Colored People) and was the first African American to win a case before the United States Supreme Court. He argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court—winning twenty-nine. His greatest court victory was the case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topek a—a turning point in the battle against segregation. Ultimately, Marshall would be appointed as a justice on the Supreme Court. When he retired in 1991, he was called a true American hero and the most significant lawyer of his time. For almost thirty years, David Adler’s Picture Book Biography series has profiled famous people who changed the world. Colorful, kid-friendly illustrations combine with Adler’s “expert mixtures of facts and personality” ( Booklist ) to introduce young readers to history through compelling biographies of presidents, heroes, inventors, explorers, and adventurers. These books are ideal for first and second graders interested in history or who need reliable sources for school book reports.

THE STORY: HAVING OUR SAY opens as 103-year-old Sadie Delany and 101-year-old Bessie Delany welcome us into their Mount Vernon, New York, home. As they prepare a celebratory dinner in remembrance of their father's birthday, they take us on a remark

A major figure in Israeli politics chronicles his long career and his fervent belief in Zionism, recounting how he left Poland to join the Jewish underground of Palestine, spent years in the Mossad, and became Prime Minister. 12,500 first printing.

The memoir of a woman who leaves her faith and her marriage and sets out to navigate the terrifying, liberating terrain of a newly mapless world Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age forty she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community, and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her husband and her faith. After years of trying to silence the voice inside her that said she did not agree, did not fit in, did not believe, she strikes out on her own to discover what she does believe and who she really is. This will mean forging a new way of life not just for herself, but for her children, who are struggling with what the divorce and her new status as "not Orthodox" mean for them. This is a memoir about what it means to decide to heed your inner compass at long last. To free the part of yourself that has been suppressed, even if it means walking away from the only life you've ever known. Honest and courageous, Tova takes us through her first year outside her marriage and community as she learns to silence her fears and seek adventure on her own path to happiness.

Surviving Auschwitz, 18-year old Elli leaves behind painful memories to start fresh in America in 1951. She faces challenges of creating a new life in hectic New York City. A powerful glimpse of immigrant America through the eyes of this teenager.

National bestseller: This "harrowing" true story of two Jewish families who survived hiding in the heart of the Nazi capital "honors the human spirit" (Andrea Dworkin). In January 1943, unable to flee Germany, the four members of the Arndt family went underground to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Ellen Lewinsky and her mother, Charlotte, joined them; a year later, Bruno Gumpel arrived. Hiding in a small factory near Hitler's bunker, without identification cards or food-ration stamps, they were dependent on German strangers for survival. When Russian soldiers finally rescued the group in April 1945, the families were near death from starvation. But their will to live triumphed and two months later, four of the survivors--Erich Arndt and Ellen Lewinsky, and Ruth Arndt and Bruno Gumpel--reunited in a double wedding ceremony. Survival in the Shadows chronicles the previously untold story of the largest group of German Jews to have survived hiding in Berlin through the final and most deadly years of the Holocaust. Relayed to Barbara Lovenheim by three survivors from the group, the riveting story is a touching portrayal of the bravery of these seven Jews, and a heartfelt acknowledgment of the fortitude and humanity of the compassionate Germans who kept them alive.

Comedy is full of famously funny Jews, from Groucho Marx to Larry David to Sarah Silverman. This smart and funny book includes tales from many of these much-loved comics, and will appeal to their broad audience, while revealing the history, context, and wider culture of Jewish joking.The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as "funny"? And how old can a joke get?With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon.

Lisa Fittko's Escape through the Pyrenees (Northwestern, 1991) told the extraordinary true tale of her life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the Nazi invasion of 1940, when she and her husband smuggled small groups of refugees to safety along a tortuous route through the mountains. Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 is Fittko's equally gripping memoir of the preceding years in the underground and exile. The volume opens with Hitler's.

Israel's Mossad is one of the world's most powerful intelligence agencies. Having served as its director, Efraim Halevy has witnessed the Middle East crisis from the inside-out. As the secret envoy to prime ministers ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to Ariel Sharon, Halevy was privy to many of the top-level negotiations that changed the landscape of the region—and, in turn, the rest of the modern world. In Man in the Shadows , he provides a fascinating, deeply informed look at the secret workings and global repercussions of Mossad's fight against Islamic terror, and writes with passion and authority about such topics as: • S eptember 11, 2001 : What the Mossad knew before and after the attacks; his critique of the 9/11 report; and his assertion that we haven't seen the worst of radical Islam • His candid thoughts about the Bush Administration; George Tenet and his dismissal; the assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal; and other key players in the war on terror • Iraq : From Operation Desert Storm to the WMD crisis to the war of the present day, Halevy offers a modern history of the region, as well as an action-plan for the future ...and more. By turns a powerful history lesson and a roadmap to world peace, Man in the Shadows is a must-read for the twenty-first century.

A new, updated edition of Jack Newfield's hard-hitting unauthorized biography of boxing kingpin Don King, source of the Emmy-winning film starring Ving Rhames. With a new epilogue. Working his way out of a life of street crime and numbers running - and jail time for manslaughter - King rose to become a powerhouse in the fight game, outnegotiated corporate giants, fleeced the treasuries of entire countries, and amassed a vast personal fortune while ruining the lives and careers of some of boxing's greatest champions. The dying words of the man King stomped to death on the streets of Cleveland in 1966 - Don, I'll pay you the money! - became the motif for Don King's ascendancy.

Learn about Dr Karl, the universe and everything, and discover how air-conditioning is sexist, how you can kill a spinning hard drive by shouting at it and how space junk is threatening our future capabilities for space travel. Could there be life on one of Saturn's moons? How much power could you collect from all the lightning on Earth? Why do books have book-smell? Why is 10 per cent of the Earth's land area prone to sinkholes? Why are some people chronically late? What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? Why do most people hardly remember anything from the first half-a-dozen years of their life? How close are we to the Artificial Uterus? Why do some songs turn into "earworms" and stick inside your brain? Why does your hotel room access card get wiped so easily? And is your home WiFi really spying on you?

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.

One evening in late October 1958, the deepest coal mine in North America "bumped"-its rock floors heaved up and smashed into rock ceilings. Most of the men on the shift perished. But nineteen men were trapped alive a mile below the earth's surface, struggling to survive without food, water, light, or fresh air. Almost a week passed without rescue. Hopes of finding life dwindled; then a miracle happened: Rescuers stumbled across a broken pipe that led to the cave of survivors. In the media circus that followed, the survivors' endurance was mythologized and twisted, and the state of Georgia's tourism ploy-inviting the survivors to recuperate on a Georgia beach-turned racist and pitted the miners against each other. Using long-lost stories and interviews with survivors, Greene has reconstructed an extraordinary drama of their struggle and miraculous rescue.

Passionate, profound and funny, Berman is inspiring people from all walks of life to get off the sidelines and fight the good fight--and win. This unique book--part manifesto from a leader, part humorous activist memoir from a soccer mom--offers a wryly honest, behind-the-scenes, ultimately uplifting look at the state of the planet. For almost 20 years, Tzeporah Berman has been one of our most influential environmentalists. A founder of ForestEthics and PowerUp Canada, she was instrumental in shaping the tactics and concerns of the modern environmental movement. In her early 20s she faced nearly one thousand criminal charges and 6 years in prison for her role organizing blockades in Canada's rainforest. She later transformed her tactics and sat down with CEOs and political leaders to reshape their policies and practices. In her new role at Greenpeace International she is fighting the problem of our time: climate change. This Crazy Time is an impassioned plea for a better world.

Random pages have underlining or check marks, bottom front corner folded. No crease to spine. 1974 Dell, 4 1/4 By 7",

"Soon after he started filming "The Last of England" (which had much autobiographical content) in 1986, Derek Jarman started work on this book, which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. He writes of his childhood and his kleptomaniac father, the process through which he came to terms with his homosexuality, his early work as a painter and designer, and his debut as a film director. Serious themes are followed thoughout, as Jarman writes of what he regards as the corruption of the cinema industry, the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and the down side of Thatcher's Britain.