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The empathy exams: essays
By Leslie Jamison. 2014
A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality…
to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others. Winner of the Gray Wolf Press Nonfiction Prize. 2014. The empathy exams -- Devil's bait -- La frontera -- Morphology of the hit -- Pain tours (I) : La plata perdida ; Sublime, revised ; Indigenous to the hood -- The immortal horizon -- In defense of saccharin(e) -- Fog count -- Pain tours (II) : Ex-votos ; Servicio supercompleto ; The broken heart of James Agee -- Lost boys -- Grand unified theory of female pain -- Judge's afterword / A conversation with Leslie Jamison. Uniform title: Essays.The dog's last walk: (and other pieces)
By Howard Jacobson. 2017
Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting…
in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivolous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal. As the much-loved newspaper ceases printing, this second collection of Jacobson's columns offers a selection of the witty and thunderous best. 2017. Uniform title: Independent (London, England)The corpses of the future
By Lynn Crosbie. 2017
A sustained, confessional new collection of poems that tells the story of Crosbie's father’s battle with frontotemporal dementia and blindness,…
following a stroke. The poems chronologically recount the poet’s conversations and time with her father, and capture his still-astonishing means of communicating. The book’s title is his sardonic remark. Crosbie considers dementia to be a symbolic language and as such, similar to poetry. The author’s attempts to understand her father’s distress, pain, fear, and brave love are assisted by her understanding of the “negative capability” required of readers of poetry. 2017.The elephant and my Jewish problem: selected stories and journals, 1957-1987
By Hugh Nissenson. 1988
Short stories and journal entries which describe the Jewish experience from the turn of the century to the aftermath of…
the Holocaust and the beginning of the state of Israel. 1988.The Hitler I knew: the memoirs of the Third Reich's press chief
By Otto Dietrich. 2010
When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler's press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction…
that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in twelve years of the closest association with Hitler. c2010. Uniform title: 12 Jahre mit Hitler.The house by the lake: one house, five families, and a hundred years of German history
By Thomas Harding. 2016
In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a…
lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been a holiday home for her and her family, but in the 1930s, she had been forced to flee to England as the Nazis swept to power. Nearly twenty years later, the house was government property and soon to be demolished. It was Harding's legacy, one that had been loved, abandoned, fought over -- a house his grandmother had desired until her death. Could it be saved? And should it? As Harding began to make inquiries, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades about the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, and a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all -- bar one -- had been forced out. The house had been the site of domestic bliss and of contentment, but also of terrible grief and tragedy. It had weathered storms, fires and abandonment; witnessed murders, had withstood the trauma of a world war, and the dividing of a nation. As the story of the house began to take shape, Harding realized that there was a chance to save it, but in doing so, he would have to resolve his own family's feelings towards their former homeland -- and a hatred handed down through the generations. 2016.The holy blood and the holy grail
By Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln. 1982
Three BBC filmmakers offer a controversial and unorthodox view of the life of Christ, based on cryptic documents discovered by…
a French priest in 1891. The authors infer that Jesus married Mary Magdalen and fathered children whose descendents became European royalty, and that the bloodline of Jesus, in the Merovingian dynasty of France, continues to the present. Bestseller 1982.The gospel according to Clarence Thomas: a libretto
By Ashis Gupta. 2007
Crafted as a long poem, a libretto for stage presentations, this book is less about Clarence Thomas than it is…
about the devastating reign of the Bush administration. The central idea of the book is: ‘War is an Evil product of Evil/Hypocritical Minds’. The ‘Chorus of the Homeless’ occupies a central role in the poem, performing a function much like the Chorus in Greek Tragedies, providing a reasonably objective commentary. In a sense, the central story is a tragedy too – George Bush is a tragic figure. And, towards the end, he is conceived as a tragic hero, a Samson-like figure who pulls down the temple over his head to crush the Philistines. 2007.The great shame: a story of the Irish in the Old World and the new
By Thomas Keneally. 1998
The text traces the three causes of the halving of the Irish population in the nineteenth century: the famine, the…
Irish emigrations to America and Canada, and the transportation of political activists to Australia. It is a quest for the author's Irish ancestors. 1998.The half-million: the Canadians in Britain, 1939-1946
By C. P Stacey, Barbara M Wilson. 1987
This social history of the Canadian soldier in Britain is based on soldiers' diaries and war censors' reports. Includes chapters…
on the relationship between Canadian soldiers and British women, and Canadian soldiers in trouble with the law. c1987.The gunpowder plot: terror & faith in 1605
By Antonia Fraser. 1996
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is one of the most commemorated events in English history. Yet this astonishing episode remains…
shrouded in mystery and the subject of passionate argument. The central aim of this book is to explain why there should have been a plot at all, and to understand why the courageous, idealistic, but terrifyingly misguided conspirators risked their lives for what they believed to be the cause of God and their country. 1996. Uniform title: Faith and treason: the story of the Gunpowder PlotThe Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918
By A. J. P Taylor. 1948
Dissolved in 1918, the Habsburg Empire "had a unique character, out of time and out of place". A.J.P. Taylor comments…
"No other family has left so deep a mark upon Europe; the Habsburgs were the greatest dynasty of modern history, and the history of central Europe revolves around them, not they round it". 1948.The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: an experiment in literary investigation
By Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit͡ìsyn. 1973
Drawn from reports, letters, witnesses, and the Nobel Prize winner's own 11-year incarceration at Archipelago. This is an intense portrayal…
of the history of the Soviet prison system. Bestseller. 1973. Uniform title: Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956.The Dunsmuirs: alone at the edge
By Rod Langley. 1991
Robbie Dunsmuir, exiled from Scotland, becomes an indentured labourer in the Nanaimo coalfields. He ruthlessly climbs his way to the…
top when he discovers a coal deposit on Vancouver Island. Some strong language. Followed by "The Dunsmuirs : a promise kept". c1991.The drowned and the saved
By Primo Levi. 1988
Primo Levi spent over a year in the Auschwitz concentration camp. This book is an attempt to make some sense…
of his experiences, and to try to understand how a nation could set up a system to butcher millions of people. Eventually he gave up the struggle to come to terms with it and committed suicide in 1987. 1988.The devils of Loudun (The collected Works Of Aldous Huxley Ser.)
By Aldous Huxley. 1952
A reconstruction of sensational occurrences at the Ursuline Convent in Loudun during the early 1600s. After a group of nuns…
were swept into a prolonged state of frenzy, they accused Urbain Grandier, Loudun's parson, of witchcraft. Huxley includes insights of modern psychology as well as his own speculations on good and evil. 1952.The dreadful judgement: the true story of the great fire of London 1666
By Neil Hanson. 2002
In 1666, a ten-month drought had turned London into a tinderbox, and when the spark ignited, there was no stopping…
it. Gales, dry timber and the riverside warehouses full of flammable goods ensured that five days later city was in ruins. This is the human story of that "dreadful judgement". Includes strong language. 2002.The dollar princesses: sagas of upward nobility, 1870-1914
By Ruth Brandon. 1980
A witty social history of the parade of American heiresses who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, captured…
aristocratic European husbands by their fortunes and their charms. Includes such foster princesses as Consuelo Vanderbilt, Nancy Shaw, Anna Gould, Winnaretta Singer, and many others. 1980.The decline and fall of Rome (The modern scholar)
By Thomas F Madden. 2008
The days of the French Revolution
By Christopher Hibbert. 1980
Overview of the violent upheaval in France from the convening of the Estates General in 1789 to Napoleon's rise to…
power in 1799. Emphasis is not on ideas, but on events and the personalities of Robespierre, Louis XVI, Mirabeau, Danton, and others. 1980.