June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad. Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp - the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
9780358172031
|
Hardcover
Defying the Nazis
By Joukowsky, Artemis
Official companion to the Ken Burns film premiering September 20, 2016, on PBS tells the little-known story of the Sharps, an otherwise ordinary couple whose faith and commitment to social justice inspired them to undertake dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn Europe, saving the lives of countless refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War II.In 1939, Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian Association: they were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the mounting refugee crisis. Armed with only $40,000, the Sharps quickly learned the art of spy craft and covertly sheltered political dissidents and Jews, and helped them escape the Nazis. After narrowly avoiding the Gestapo themselves, the Sharps returned to Europe in 1940 as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee and continued their relief efforts in Vichy France. This compulsively readable true story offers readers a rare glimpse at high-stakes international relief efforts during WWII. Defying the Nazis is a fascinating portrait of resistance as told through the story of one courageous couple.
Beacon
|
9780807071823
|
Print book
Reckoning
By Hirshman, Linda
The first history - incisive, witty, fascinating - of the fight against sexual harassment, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Sisters in LawIn Reckoning, Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social change movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first stories of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s; to the fulcrum of Clinton/Lewinsky, when a forgiving Gloria Steinem "swerved" so that, according to Hirshman, "for two decades most liberal men in the Democratic party didn't take feminists seriously." Legal liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus. And then came Harvey Weinstein and the reckoning. Hirshman tells the full story of the legal cases that have quietly prepared the way for the takedown of the abusers and harassers of the workplace, and holds up African American women as having taken some of the most important stands against sexual harassment over the past fifty years. Finally, Reckoning shines fascinating light on how our watershed #MeToo moment has come from pioneering women in the new media.Reckoning is a movement-defining, revelatory, essential social history.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
9781328566447
|
Hardcover
Heartland
By Smarsh, Sarah
An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest.During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness. Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess. "Sarah Smarsh - tough-minded and rough-hewn - draws us into the real lives of her family, barely making it out there on the American plains. There's not a false note. Smarsh, as a writer, is Authentic with a capital A ... This is just what the world needs to hear" (George Hodgman, author of Bettyville) .
Scribner Book Company
|
9781501133091
|
Hardcover
The Last Palace
By Crown.,
A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa's greatest houses - and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador's residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence's forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe's, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism - and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen's own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.
Crown
|
9780451495785
|
Hardcover
Hype
By Shapiro, Nina
An engaging and informative look at the real science behind our most common beliefs and assumptions in the health sphere There is a lot of misinformation thrown around these days, especially online. Headlines tell us to do this, not that---all in the name of living longer, better, thinner,younger. In Hype, Dr. Nina Shapiro distinguishes between the falsehoods and the evidence-backed truth. In her work at Harvard and UCLA, with more than twenty years of experience in both clinical andacademic medicine, she helps patients make important health decisions everyday. She's bringing those lessons to life here with a blend of science and personal stories to discuss her dramatic new definition of "a healthy life."Hype covers everything from exercise to supplements, diets to detoxes, alternative medicine to vaccines, and medical testing to media coverage. Shapiro tackles popular misconceptions such as toxic sugar and the importance of drinking eight glasses of water a day. She provides simple solutions anyone can implement,such as worrying less about buying products labeled organic or natural, and more about skipping vaccines, buying into weight-loss fads, and thinking you can treat cancer through diet alone. This book is as much for single individuals in the prime of their lives as it is for parents with young children and the elderly.Hype provides answers to many of our most pressing questions, such as:*Are online doctor ratings valuable and what conditions can you diagnose online?*What's the link between snoring and ADHD?*What does "Doctor Recommended" and "Clinically Proven" mean?*Do "superfoods" really exist?*Which vitamins can increase your risk for cancer?*Do vaccines introduce toxins into the body?*What's the best antiaging trick of the day that's not hype?*Can logging "ten thousand steps a day" really have an impact on your health?Never has there been a greater need for this reassuring and scientifically backed reality check.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250149305
|
Hardcover
Be Free or Die
By Lineberry, Cate
"Be Free or Die makes you want to stand up and cheer. Cate Lineberry has done us all a great service by telling this incredibly moving, thrilling, and important story about an American hero who deserves to be remembered, and admired." -- Candice Millard, author of Hero of the EmpireFacing death rather than enslavement -- a story of one man's triumphant choice and ultimate rise to national heroIt was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a twenty-three-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces. To be unsuccessful was a death sentence for all. Smalls' courageous and ingenious act freed him and his family from slavery and immediately made him a Union hero while simultaneously challenging much of the country's view of what African Americans were willing to do to gain their freedom. After his escape, Smalls served in numerous naval campaigns off Charleston as a civilian boat pilot and eventually became the first black captain of an Army ship. In a particularly poignant moment Smalls even bought the home that he and his mother had once served in as house slaves.Be Free or Die is a compelling narrative that illuminates Robert Smalls' amazing journey from slave to Union hero and ultimately United States Congressman. This captivating tale of a valuable figure in American history gives fascinating insight into the country's first efforts to help newly freed slaves while also illustrating the many struggles and achievements of African Americans during the Civil War.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250101860
|
Hardcover
Undocumented America
By Karla, Cornejo Villavicencio,
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation. Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio has lived the American Dream. Raised on her father's deliveryman income, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted into Harvard.
SPIEGEL & GRAU
|
9780399592683
|
A Nation Forged by Crisis
By Sexton, Jay
A concise new history of the United States revealing that crises--not unlike those of the present day--have determined our nation's course from the startIn A Nation Forged by Crisis, historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party. A necessary corrective to conventional narratives of American history, A Nation Forged by Crisis argues that we can only prepare for our unpredictable future by first acknowledging the contingencies of our collective past.
Basic Books
|
9781541617230
|
Hardcover
The Nine
By Strauss, Gwen
"." -- "A , story of resilience, friendship and survival. The story of Women's resistance during World War II needs to be told and The Nine accomplishes this in spades." -- Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of Cilka's JourneyThe Nine follows the true story of the author's great aunt Hlne Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris.The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments.
X Troop
By Garrett, Leah
June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad. Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp - the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war.
Defying the Nazis
By Joukowsky, Artemis
Official companion to the Ken Burns film premiering September 20, 2016, on PBS tells the little-known story of the Sharps, an otherwise ordinary couple whose faith and commitment to social justice inspired them to undertake dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn Europe, saving the lives of countless refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War II.In 1939, Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian Association: they were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the mounting refugee crisis. Armed with only $40,000, the Sharps quickly learned the art of spy craft and covertly sheltered political dissidents and Jews, and helped them escape the Nazis. After narrowly avoiding the Gestapo themselves, the Sharps returned to Europe in 1940 as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee and continued their relief efforts in Vichy France. This compulsively readable true story offers readers a rare glimpse at high-stakes international relief efforts during WWII. Defying the Nazis is a fascinating portrait of resistance as told through the story of one courageous couple.
Reckoning
By Hirshman, Linda
The first history - incisive, witty, fascinating - of the fight against sexual harassment, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Sisters in LawIn Reckoning, Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social change movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first stories of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s; to the fulcrum of Clinton/Lewinsky, when a forgiving Gloria Steinem "swerved" so that, according to Hirshman, "for two decades most liberal men in the Democratic party didn't take feminists seriously." Legal liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus. And then came Harvey Weinstein and the reckoning. Hirshman tells the full story of the legal cases that have quietly prepared the way for the takedown of the abusers and harassers of the workplace, and holds up African American women as having taken some of the most important stands against sexual harassment over the past fifty years. Finally, Reckoning shines fascinating light on how our watershed #MeToo moment has come from pioneering women in the new media.Reckoning is a movement-defining, revelatory, essential social history.
Heartland
By Smarsh, Sarah
An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest.During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness. Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess. "Sarah Smarsh - tough-minded and rough-hewn - draws us into the real lives of her family, barely making it out there on the American plains. There's not a false note. Smarsh, as a writer, is Authentic with a capital A ... This is just what the world needs to hear" (George Hodgman, author of Bettyville) .
The Last Palace
By Crown.,
A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa's greatest houses - and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador's residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence's forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe's, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism - and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen's own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.
Hype
By Shapiro, Nina
An engaging and informative look at the real science behind our most common beliefs and assumptions in the health sphere There is a lot of misinformation thrown around these days, especially online. Headlines tell us to do this, not that---all in the name of living longer, better, thinner,younger. In Hype, Dr. Nina Shapiro distinguishes between the falsehoods and the evidence-backed truth. In her work at Harvard and UCLA, with more than twenty years of experience in both clinical andacademic medicine, she helps patients make important health decisions everyday. She's bringing those lessons to life here with a blend of science and personal stories to discuss her dramatic new definition of "a healthy life."Hype covers everything from exercise to supplements, diets to detoxes, alternative medicine to vaccines, and medical testing to media coverage. Shapiro tackles popular misconceptions such as toxic sugar and the importance of drinking eight glasses of water a day. She provides simple solutions anyone can implement,such as worrying less about buying products labeled organic or natural, and more about skipping vaccines, buying into weight-loss fads, and thinking you can treat cancer through diet alone. This book is as much for single individuals in the prime of their lives as it is for parents with young children and the elderly.Hype provides answers to many of our most pressing questions, such as:*Are online doctor ratings valuable and what conditions can you diagnose online?*What's the link between snoring and ADHD?*What does "Doctor Recommended" and "Clinically Proven" mean?*Do "superfoods" really exist?*Which vitamins can increase your risk for cancer?*Do vaccines introduce toxins into the body?*What's the best antiaging trick of the day that's not hype?*Can logging "ten thousand steps a day" really have an impact on your health?Never has there been a greater need for this reassuring and scientifically backed reality check.
Be Free or Die
By Lineberry, Cate
"Be Free or Die makes you want to stand up and cheer. Cate Lineberry has done us all a great service by telling this incredibly moving, thrilling, and important story about an American hero who deserves to be remembered, and admired." -- Candice Millard, author of Hero of the EmpireFacing death rather than enslavement -- a story of one man's triumphant choice and ultimate rise to national heroIt was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a twenty-three-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces. To be unsuccessful was a death sentence for all. Smalls' courageous and ingenious act freed him and his family from slavery and immediately made him a Union hero while simultaneously challenging much of the country's view of what African Americans were willing to do to gain their freedom. After his escape, Smalls served in numerous naval campaigns off Charleston as a civilian boat pilot and eventually became the first black captain of an Army ship. In a particularly poignant moment Smalls even bought the home that he and his mother had once served in as house slaves.Be Free or Die is a compelling narrative that illuminates Robert Smalls' amazing journey from slave to Union hero and ultimately United States Congressman. This captivating tale of a valuable figure in American history gives fascinating insight into the country's first efforts to help newly freed slaves while also illustrating the many struggles and achievements of African Americans during the Civil War.
Undocumented America
By Karla, Cornejo Villavicencio,
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation. Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio has lived the American Dream. Raised on her father's deliveryman income, she later became one of the first undocumented students admitted into Harvard.
A Nation Forged by Crisis
By Sexton, Jay
A concise new history of the United States revealing that crises--not unlike those of the present day--have determined our nation's course from the startIn A Nation Forged by Crisis, historian Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress, but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British and American economies; that a necessary precondition for the Civil War was the absence, for the first time in decades, of foreign threats; and that we cannot understand the New Deal without examining the role of European immigrants and their offspring in transforming the Democratic Party. A necessary corrective to conventional narratives of American history, A Nation Forged by Crisis argues that we can only prepare for our unpredictable future by first acknowledging the contingencies of our collective past.
The Nine
By Strauss, Gwen
"." -- "A , story of resilience, friendship and survival. The story of Women's resistance during World War II needs to be told and The Nine accomplishes this in spades." -- Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of Cilka's JourneyThe Nine follows the true story of the author's great aunt Hlne Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris.The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments.