In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

A New York Times Notable Book * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael Chabon In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

Since 2000, America s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the nation s capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. At "God s Harvard" they are groomed to become tomorrow s elite. Diplomas in hand, they are dispatched to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, where they will lead the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image. "

Toward a Meaningful Life is a spiritual road map for living based on the teachings of one of the foremost religious leaders of our time: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as "the Rebbe," Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order. Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds fresh perspectives on every aspect of their lives--from birth to death, youth to old a≥ marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government. We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe's teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest. At the threshold of a new world where matter and spirit converge, the Rebbe proposes spiritual principles that unite people as opposed to the materialism that divides them. In doing so, he continues to lead us toward personal and universal redemption, toward a meaningful life, and toward God.

Now available in trade paper! New York Times bestselling author Kathie Lee Gifford reveals heartwarming, entertaining conversations between people and personalities who both agree and disagree about who Jesus is, his role throughout history, and his presence in our lives today. For decades Kathie Lee has had deep conversations about her faith with anyone who is interested in talking about it. What she discovered early on is most people are very willing to talk about Jesus: atheists, agnostics, Scientologists, Jews, broken-hearted Catholics, confused Baptists, Pentecostals, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. While some of the people Kathie Lee has spoken with do not share her belief that Jesus is the Messiah--as prophesied for centuries by prophets in the Hebrew scriptures--they nonetheless have a universal fascination with Him. This singular man who lived more than two thousand years ago, and never traveled more than one hundred miles from where He was born, managed to change the entire world. Even the way we delineate history (BC/AD) comes from His short thirty-three years of life. In The Jesus I Know, Kathie Lee shares cherished conversations that she's had with others who find Jesus to be an ancient historical figure who somehow continues to be an undeniably magnetic, relevant presence in the modern world. Those conversations include actors like Kristin Chenoweth and Cynthia Garrett, with stories of Craig Ferguson and Kevin Costner, newsmakers and news personalities like Kris Jenner, Megyn Kelly, Jason Kennedy, and Janice Dean, performers like Chynna Phillips Baldwin, Brian Welch, Jimmie Allen, and Jimmy Wayne, hitmakers like Louis York and David Pomeranz, as well as those coming from other faith traditions. Using Kathie Lee's favorite Scripture passages as scaffolding, these thought-provoking exchanges will bring His teachings to life before your very eyes.

In the second of two volumes of this magnificently illustrated cultural history--the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews--Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people, spanning from their expulsion from Spain in the Inquisition across six hundred years to the present day. It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the centuries and the continents--from the Iberian Peninsula and the collapse of "the golden age" to the shtetls of Russia to the dusty streets of infant Hollywood. Its voices ring loud and clear, from the philosophical musings of Spinoza to the poetry written on slips of paper in concentraion camps. Within these pages, the Enlightenment unfolds, a great diaspora transforms a country, a Viennese psychaiatrist forever changes the conception of the human mind. And a great story unfolds. Not--as often imagined--of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians, from the Soviets to America. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

Lev Shestov's By Faith Alone confronts Eastern and Western European conceptions of faith through Russian literature, ancient and medieval philosophy, and Christian theology. Written from 1910-1914, this first English-language translation brings together important early writings on the medieval church and Martin Luther. Shestov reconciles the Greek notion of rational truth with Biblical revelation by drawing on a wide range of ancient, medieval, philosophical and theological sources from Plato to Hegel, Tertullian to Saint Augustine , and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to William of Ockam. He argues that rational truth has skewed Christian belief by determining knowledge and truth in ways that prize the mind over the world. This approach marks a turning point in the evolution of Shestov's existential thought. It establishes a basic division that became central to Shestov's later work, between Athens as reason and Jerusalem as faith. By Faith Alone provides a crucial piece of the puzzle in the genesis of Shestov's later and better-known writings on medieval philosophy.