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A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America
By Jacqueline Jones. 2013
In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who…
refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled--yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.Shortly after assuming office in early 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt made the bold decision to take the United States off…
the gold standard. This was only the first act in his quest to use monetary policy as a political tool. In The Money Makers, the distinguished historian Eric Rauchway shows how FDR and his brilliant team of advisers--John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and Cordell Hull--paved the way for economic recovery. By responding decisively to the Great Depression at home, they warded off indigenous fascist movements and ensured an Allied victory in World War II, laying the foundation for decades of global peace and prosperity.Capturing not only the contentious debates among these headstrong figures but also the spirit of innovation that united them, Rauchway argues that we have forgotten their accomplishments. One result is that our modern preference for monetary stability over economic growth has led to stagnation and rising inequality. By uncovering the origins of midcentury economic success, Rauchway shows how we can recapture prosperity for our own age.Now a New Showtime Original Series Showtime's dramatic series Masters of Sex, starring Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan, is based…
on this real-life story of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Before Sex and the City and ViagraTM, America relied on Masters and Johnson to teach us everything we needed to know about what goes on in the bedroom. Convincing hundreds of men and women to shed their clothes and copulate, the pair were the nation’s top experts on love and intimacy. Highlighting interviews with the notoriously private Masters and the ambitious Johnson, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier shows how this unusual team changed the way we all thought about, talked about, and engaged in sex while they simultaneously tried to make sense of their own relationship. Entertaining, revealing, and beautifully told, Masters of Sex sheds light on the eternal mysteries of desire, intimacy, and the American psyche.The Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran
By Nazila Fathi. 1979
As a nine-year-old Tehrani schoolgirl during the Iranian Revolution, Nazila Fathi watched her country change before her eyes. The revolutionaries--most…
of them poor, uneducated, and radicalized--seized jobs, housing, and positions of power, transforming Iranian society practically overnight. But this socioeconomic revolution had an unintended effect. As Fathi shows, the forces unleashed in 1979 inadvertently created a robust Iranian middle class, one that today hungers for more personal freedoms and a renewed relationship with the outside world. And unless an international confrontation allows Iranian leaders to justify an internal crackdown, this internal pressure for reform will soon set the country on a more stable track. In The Lonely War, Fathi describes Iran’s awakening alongside her own, revealing how moderates are retaking the country--and how foreign powers can aid their progress.Cambridge Classical Studies: M. I. Finley
By Daniel Jew, Robin Osborne, Michael Scott. 2016
M. I. Finley (1912-86) was the most famous ancient historian of his generation. He was admired by his peers, and…
was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy. His unmistakable voice was familiar to tens of thousands of radio listeners, his polemical reviews and other journalism were found all over the broadsheets and weeklies, and his scholarly as well as his popular works sold in very large numbers as Penguin paperbacks. Yet this was also a man dismissed from his job at Rutgers University when he refused to answer the question of whether he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. This pioneering volume assesses Finley's achievements and analyses the nature of the impact of this charismatic individual and the means by which he changed the world of ancient history.Nobody's Son: A Memoir
By Mark Slouka. 2016
“There comes a time in your life when the past decides to run you down,” Mark Slouka writes in this…
heartbreaking and soul-searching memoir about one man's attempt to reckon with the past. Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.Intellectuals and Society
By Thomas Sowell. 2011
Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist
By Elliot Aronson. 2010
How does a boy from a financially and intellectually impoverished background grow up to become a Harvard researcher, win international…
acclaim for his groundbreaking work, and catch fire as a pioneering psychologist? As the only person in the history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its highest honors--for distinguished research, teaching, and writing-- Elliot Aronson is living proof that humans are capable of capturing the power of the situation and conquering the prison of personality. A personal and compelling look into Aronson’s profound contributions to the field of social psychology, Not by Chance Alone is a lifelong story of human potential and the power of social change.Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World
By Christine Mathieu, Yang Erche Namu. 2003
Leaving Mother Lake is the extraordinary story of Yang Erche Namu - a girl growing up in the borderlands between…
Tibet and China, who left her remarkable childhood behind for the bright lights of Shanghai and singing stardom. Namu's home is in an area so primitive that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards arrived and left because there was nothing to destroy. When Namu was a small child, her mother tried to give her away three times because she would not stop crying. Each time she was returned. As she grew up, she clashed repeatedly with her equally fierce mother until the arrival of a Chinese official, looking for talented singers. Namu was selected for a singing competition in the nearest city - eight hours away - which, to her astonishment, she won. She realised she had a taste for the outside world and, despite her mother's protestations, she decided to run away Leaving Mother Lake is the lyrical story of the girl who grew out of her rural beginnings, battling against the odds to achieve extraordinary success.Martin Luther King
By Godfrey Hodgson. 2009
Martin Luther King left an indelible mark on 20th-century American history through his leadership of the non-violent civil rights campaigns…
of the 1950s and 1960s. The election of Barack Obama as America's first black president in November 2008 has spawned a renewed interest in King's role as an agent and prophet of political change in the United States. Writing with verve and clarity but also with acute insight, Godfrey Hodgson traces King's life and career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist milieu in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.Martin Luther King is a rounded and fascinating portrait of a Christian prophet and the most brilliant orator of his age, the central message of whose life and ministry was that Americans would never be fully free until they accepted that black and white Americans must be equal.The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
By Timothy Snyder. 2008
Wilhelm Von Habsburg wore the uniform of the Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit…
of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a saber, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself. In this exhilarating narrative history, prize-winning historian Timothy D. Snyder offers an indelible portrait of an aristocrat whose life personifies the wrenching upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, as the rule of empire gave way to the new politics of nationalism. Coming of age during the First World War, Wilhelm repudiated his family to fight alongside Ukrainian peasants in hopes that he would become their king. When this dream collapsed he became, by turns, an ally of German imperialists, a notorious French lover, an angry Austrian monarchist, a calm opponent of Hitler, and a British spy against Stalin. Played out in Europe’s glittering capitals and bloody battlefields, in extravagant ski resorts and dank prison cells, The Red Prince captures an extraordinary moment in the history of Europe, in which the old order of the past was giving way to an undefined future-and in which everything, including identity itself, seemed up for grabs.Wolf: The Lives of Jack London
By James L. Haley. 2010
If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement
By Andrew Young, Vincent Harding, Dorothy F. Cotton. 2012
"Nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said at the end of…
a Citizenship Education Program (CEP), an adult grassroots training program directed by Dorothy Cotton. This program, called the best-kept secret of the twentieth century's civil rights movement, was critical in preparing legions of disenfranchised people across the South to work with existing systems of local government to gain access to services and resources they were entitled to as citizens. They learned to demonstrate peacefully against injustice, even when they were met with violence and hatred. The CEP was born out of the work of the Tennessee Highlander Folk School and was fully developed and expanded by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King until that fateful day in Memphis in April 1968. Cotton was checked into the Lorraine Motel at that time as well, but she'd left to do the work of the CEP before the assassin's bullet was fired. If Your Back's Not Bent recounts the accomplishments and the drama of this training that was largely ignored by the media, which had focused its attention on marches and demonstrations. This book describes who participated and how they were transformed--men and women alike--from victims to active citizens, and how they transformed their communities and ultimately the country into a place of greater freedom and justice for all. Cotton, the only woman in Dr. King's inner circle of leadership, for the first time offers her account of the movement, correcting the historical impression that "we only marched and sang." She shows how the CEP was key to the movement's success, and how the lessons of the program can serve our democracy now. People, and therefore systems, can indeed change "if your back's not bent."Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama
By Peniel E. Joseph. 2010
The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism…
of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights, acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s-particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act-to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama.Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements.Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world.Gandhi: An Illustrated Biography
By Pramod Kapoor. 2017
Rarely seen images and rigorous research provides fascinating insight into one of the most revered figures in modern Indian history.…
Gandhi is an intimate history of the evolution of a mischievous, fun-loving boy into the Mahatma. From his schooling and early marriage in Kathiawar to his first brushes with the grandeur of London; from his chance employment for a legal case in South Africa to a train ride in Pietermaritzburg that led to his first fight for equality; from a relatively unsuccessful lawyer to a globally celebrated crusader for human rights-Gandhi was that rare rebel who redefined the meaning of mass resistance for generation to come. The chronological text and rarely seen photographs bring out his unique complexities for a new generation of readers.Letters to Poseidon
By Cees Nooteboom. 2012
It is said that during his abortive campaign to invade Britannia, the infamous Roman emperor Caligula ordered his legions into…
the surf to attack Poseidon and claim seashells as trophies of war. Cees Nooteboom is considerably more thoughtful in his relationship with the god of the sea. As autumn falls each year, Nooteboom writes Poseidon a letter requesting permission to return to his home in Minorca the following spring.Of course, it would be the height of discourtesy if Nooteboom's letters were no more than a series of demands. So Cees takes the opportunity to seek the wisdom of the trident-wielding deity, and to offer the god updates about his own life and thoughts.At once playful and poignant, beautiful and at times slightly bizarre, this masterful exploration of humankind's relationship with the sea uses the minutiae of everyday life to illuminate the broadest questions of human existence, all couched in the lapidary prose of one of Europe's outstanding stylists.Mind Of Steel And Clay: Camille Claudel
By Emma May Price, Enrique Laso. 2014
Mind of Steel and Clay: Camille Claudel is a diary. Through the guilt-ridden words of Edouard Faret, Director of the…
psychiatric hospital of Montdevergues, we are drawn into to the life of an exceptional woman, Camille Claudel.In the 19th century, Camille was an unrivalled sculptress and both the student and lover of Auguste Rodin. She wanted to make a name for herself in a world of men, to achieve the fame and prestige that her work deserved, but this never came to pass.In 1913, after the death of her adored father, her family committed her by force to an asylum. There she would stay, locked up against her will for 30 years until her death, despite the doctors and others who argued in defence of her sanity.Mind of Steel and Clay: Camille Claudel tells the tragic tale of an extraordinary woman, an artistic genius whose fate was sealed with misfortune.For the first time ever, the dark, unknown years of Camille's confinement, an era shrouded in mystery, are revealed and explored in great depth.Through his diary, the Medical Director of the psychiatric hospital describes the years of confinement of the sculptress Camille Claudel. This bloody, ruthless account is teamed with the hardship of the Vichy France regime in World War II, yet is dappled with moments of inspiring hope; art, passion, guilt, madness and genius are at the forefront of this short novel.Perhaps Enrique Laso's most acclaimed and profound novel to date, the author's admiration for Camille shines through, whilst on countless occasions he shares in her rage against the injustice of a world in which the cruel and deplorable are allowed to win.Hitler's Warrior: The Life and Wars of SS Colonel Jochen Peiper
By Danny S. Parker. 2014
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
By Resendez. 2007
In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a…
hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the three hundred men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived--three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever seen before. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.Last to Die: A Defeated Empire, a Forgotten Mission, and the Last American Killed in World War II
By Stephen Harding. 2015
On August 18, 1945, US Army sergeant Anthony J. Marchione bled to death in the clear, bright sky above Tokyo.…
Marchione, a gunner in the US Air Forces, died like so many before him in World War II--quietly, cradled in the arms of a buddy. Though tragic, Marchione’s death would have been no more notable than any other had he not had the dubious distinction of being the last American killed in World War II combat. Based on official American and Japanese histories, personal memoirs, and the author’s exclusive interviews with many of the story’s key participants, Last to Die is a rousing tale of air combat, bravery, cowardice, hubris, and determination, all set during the turbulent and confusing final days of World War II.