Best of
20th-Century

2021

Last Port of Call


Jean Grainger - 2021
    She would rather spend her days in the library of the grand Georgian house that she sees as her home than playing on the streets with other children.Her mother, Rose, is the reserved and ladylike housekeeper at the Cliff House. The local women envy her grace and poise while the men admire her beauty. She behaves not as a servant should, but as someone who belongs at the ancestral home of eccentric loner Henry Devereaux.Nobody ever visits the Cliff House, but Harp, Rose and Henry have a happy life together, each accepting the idiosyncrasies of the others.The day Titanic sails from Queenstown, taking with it the hopes and dreams of so many, Harp’s life too is devastated. The small port town is shaken to its foundations at the loss of the unsinkable ship, but the revelation of a long-held secret means that Harp and Rose have a much more pressing issue to solve, one that could destroy them if they cannot find a solution.Unexpectedly, fate takes a hand, and mother and daughter find themselves thrown a lifeline, one that inextricably links them to the stories of men, women and children for whom Queenstown was the last-ever sight of Ireland as they sailed away to new lands and new lives.Last Port of Call is the first book in The Queenstown Series.

The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz


Ellie Midwood - 2021
    Freedom.”Millions of people walked through Auschwitz’s gates, but she was the first woman who escaped. This powerful novel tells the inspiring true story of Mala Zimetbaum, whose heroism will never be forgotten, and whose fate altered the course of history…Nobody leaves Auschwitz alive.Mala, inmate 19880, understood that the moment she stepped off the cattle train into the depths of hell. As an interpreter for the SS, she uses her position to save as many lives as she can, smuggling scraps of bread to those desperate with hunger.Edward, inmate 531, is a camp veteran and a political prisoner. Though he looks like everyone else, with a shaved head and striped uniform, he’s a fighter in the underground Resistance. And he has an escape plan.They are locked up for no other sin than simply existing. But when they meet, the dark shadow of Auschwitz is lit by a glimmer of hope. Edward makes Mala believe in the impossible. That despite being surrounded by electric wire, machine guns topping endless watchtowers and searchlights roaming the ground, they will leave this death camp.A promise is made––they will escape together or they will die together. What follows is one of the greatest love stories in history…Based on a true story, The Girl Who Escaped Auschwitz shows that, in darkness, love can be your light…

The Girls in the Attic


Marius Gabriel - 2021
    So when he is sent home wounded, only to discover that his mother is sheltering two young Jewish women in their home, he is outraged.His mother’s act of mercy is a gross betrayal of everything Max stands for. He has dedicated his life to Nazism, fighting to atone for the shame of his anti-Hitler father’s imprisonment. It’s his duty to turn the sisters over to the Gestapo. But he hesitates, and the longer Max fails to do his duty, the harder it becomes.When Allied bombers fill the skies of Germany, Max is forced to abandon all dogma and face the brutality of war in order to defend precious lives. But what will it cost him?

The Girl from the Island


Lorna Cook - 2021
    But when forced to take in a German soldier, they are shocked to find a familiar face on their doorstep – a childhood friend who has now become their enemy.2016: Two generations later, Lucy returns to Guernsey after the death of a distant cousin. As she prepares the old family house for sale, Lucy discovers a box of handwritten notes, one word standing out: resistance. Lucy’s search for the author will uncover the story of a forgotten sister who vanished from the island one night, never to be seen again.

Not Without My Sister


Marion Kummerow - 2021
    Two sisters seek to overcome impossible odds to be reunited, in this utterly devastating and unforgettable novel about sisterhood, courage and survival.All they had left was each other. Until the Nazis tore them apart.After years of hiding from the Nazis, Rachel Epstein and her little sister Mindel are captured by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. The only ray of light for either girl is that they are together.But on arrival they are separated. As she’s seventeen and deemed an adult, Rachel is sent to work in a brutal factory whilst four-year-old Mindel is sent into the so-called “star” camp for Jewish prisoners. All on her own, Rachel knows her sister will have no chance of survival—unless she can find someone to take care of her.Working in the windowless, airless factory—filling munitions casings with chemicals that burn her fingers and make her eyes sting—the only thing that keeps Rachel going is the thought of her little sister. Because if there’s even a chance Mindel is alive, Rachel knows she must try to save her.But, separated by barbed wire, and treated brutally by SS guards who do not even see them as human beings, can either of the orphaned sisters ever dare to hope that they’ll find their way back to each other? And to freedom?A completely heartbreaking, utterly gripping tale of courage, loss and overcoming impossible odds, perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Ragged Edge of Night and The Orphan’s Tale.

When I Last Saw You


Bette Lee Crosby - 2021
    She is hard-pressed to do so because there is no one. No children. No family. At least none to speak of. At one time, she had two sisters and six brothers, but the lot of them were scattered to the four winds, with no one knowing where the others went. In the hope of finding at least one of her siblings, Margaret hires a detective and sets off on a journey to uncover the truth of why the family broke apart as it did. WEST VIRGINIA, 1901 – When Eliza Hobbs gives birth to her sixth child, her husband is not there to welcome his daughter into the world. No surprise, because Martin is seldom there. He works in Charleston and returns to Coal Creek only when he has a mind to. Yes, he sends money on occasion, but seldom enough to make ends meet. Although Eliza believes each new child a blessing, he sees them as yet another responsibility on his already overloaded shoulders. When he discovers another child is on the way, he demands she get rid of it. he stops returning home and there is no more money. Left with the children, a mountainside patch of land, and a house in sorry need of repair, Eliza seeks help and turns to someone powerful enough to hold sway over Martin and force him into providing for his family. Pushed to the brink, Martin does something unforgivable and the family is forever torn apart.Now, after all these years, will Margaret be the one to find the pieces of her broken family?

The Balloonatics: A Tale of the Great War


Andrew Wareham - 2021
    On his watch.It is early 1915 and he had been looking forward to joining the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. Now he must accept a posting to obscurity or volunteer for hazardous duty. To save his career, he joins the Blimps of the Royal Naval Air Service – he becomes a Balloonatic.Sat in a flimsy cockpit under 70,000 cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen with a crew of one, a Lewis Gun, and a single bomb, he potters out every day to chase submarines in the English Channel. Occasionally, he catches one.Onshore, he juggles the demands of Josephine, a young English rose, and Charlie, much more of a hothouse flower, while he decides just what his future shall be.

The Slow March of Light


Heather B. Moore - 2021
    Aware of the many whose families have been divided, Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help East Germans escape across the Berlin Wall and into the West.Bob Inama, a soldier in the US Army, is stationed in West Germany. He’s glad to be fluent in German, especially after meeting Luisa Voigt at a church social. As they spend time together, they form a close connection. But when Bob receives classified orders to leave for undercover work immediately, he doesn’t get the chance to say goodbye.With a fake identity, Bob’s special assignment is to be a spy embedded in East Germany, identifying possible targets for the US military. But Soviet and East German spies, the secret police, and Stasi informants are everywhere, and the danger of being caught and sent to a brutal East German prison lurks on every corner.Best-selling author Heather B. Moore masterfully alternates the stories of Bob and Luisa, capturing the human drama unique to Cold War Germany was well as the courage and the resilience of the human spirit.

When the Nightingale Sings


Suzanne Kelman - 2021
    Based on a true story, this powerful novel about wartime courage and extraordinary friendship, tells how two women changed the fate of the Second World War and the course of history.When an impossibly shy young woman named Judy Morgan finishes her studies in Physics at Cambridge University, it is with dreams of changing the world for the better.Meanwhile, a beautiful, young Jewish woman decides to flee her beloved Austria, changing her name to Hedy Lamarr, and risking everything to get to America, as far away from the Nazi threat as possible.A powerful friendship is formed when the two women meet in pre-war London—with Judy’s passion for science a perfect match for Hedy’s brilliant talent for invention. So when the world is gripped by a war that nobody could have imagined in their worst nightmares, both Hedy and Judy know they must act now.As their lives repeatedly collide, in Cambridge, California, Pearl Harbor and beyond—throwing both their lives into danger and tragedy—Judy and Hedy both find themselves seeking ways to end the war.But neither of them will know that one of them is on a path of tragedy. A path that could change the outcome of the war, but also threaten their friendship forever…Fans of The Ragged Edge of Night, My Name is Eva and Beneath a Scarlet Sky, will love this unforgettable story about love, courage and devastation set in World War Two Britain, Hollywood and Pearl Harbor. Based on two true stories of amazing ‘hidden women’ who changed the world, this novel shows the power of friendship in the darkest hours of history.

The Girl on the Platform


Ellie Midwood - 2021
    In the face of evil, she vowed to live by the truth--or die by it."Be brave. Don't run. Fight." With her eyes tightly shut, tears rolling from under her dark lashes, she felt his lips gently touch her burning cheek. The train on the platform whistled, and he disappeared into the steam.Nineteen-year-old Libby moves to Berlin to escape her suffocating family--but instead of offering freedom, the city is under siege by the Nazis. Jewish books are burned, storefronts smashed and every day innocent people vanish into thin air. Libby cannot--will not--turn a blind eye.When Libby meets Harro, she knows there's more to him than his dazzling smile and cornflower-blue eyes. The whip marks on his back, scars from the SS, tell his true story: he is a resistance fighter.Libby and Harro fall madly in love, devoted to each other and to tearing down Hitler's regime. Knowing they can make the greatest difference from the inside, Harro works for the Air Ministry, infiltrating government secrets.Together, they smuggle classified documents and hold clandestine meetings in the middle of the night, with blackout curtains and a single candle burning. Under the cover of darkness, they distribute leaflets, exposing the Nazis' hideous lies.In the frostbitten winter of 1942, Libby is certain the Gestapo is stalking them--their every move watched, their phone calls recorded. In the end, they must decide what is more important: to be free or to be brave? To survive or to stand up for the truth?Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Alice Network and The Lilac Girls will be utterly gripped by this heartbreaking page-turner. Based on a true story, this beautiful novel shows that even when our freedom is stolen, we still have a choice...Readers love Ellie Midwood: "AMAZING read! I loved this so much!... Sensational... One of the most inspiring love stories of all time... HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMEND. 100% 5 STARS!!" Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Light in the Window


Marion Kummerow - 2021
    But when she’s mistaken for his daughter in the aftermath of the blast, Margarete knows she can make a bid for freedom…Issued with temporary papers—and with the freedom of not being seen as Jewish—a few hours are all she needs to escape to relative safety. That is, until her former employer’s son, SS officer Wilhelm Huber, tracks her down.But strangely he doesn’t reveal her true identity right away. Instead he insists she comes and lives with him in Paris, and seems determined to keep her hidden. His only proviso: she must continue to pretend to be his sister. Because whoever would suspect a Nazi girl of secretly being a Jew?His plan seems impossible, and Margarete is terrified they might be found out, not to mention worried about what Wilhelm might want in return. But as the Nazis start rounding up Jews in Paris and the Résistance steps up its activities, putting everyone who opposes the regime in peril, she realizes staying hidden in plain sight may be her only chance of survival…Can Margarete trust a Nazi officer with the only things she has left though… her safety, her life, even her heart?

The River


Helen Bryan - 2021
    From the ancestral blood and sweat of its settlers—the immigrants, the slaves, the Cherokee—a new generation strives for prosperity in the united township of Grafton.Across the unfolding decades, childhood friends, mothers and daughters, wives and lovers will have their bonds tested. New hopes and dreams lie beyond the river, and as allegiances are challenged, a harmonious community finds itself grappling with inevitable cultural change—change that creates a vast, opportune, and unpredictable new beginning for generations yet to come.

Resistance Girl: A True Survival Story of a Brave Jewish Girl During WW2


Hassia Knaani - 2021
    Jewish historical fiction

The Mobster's Daughter


Rachel Scott McDaniel - 2021
    Hired as a musician for KDKA radio, Kate plays everything from sponsors’ jingles to complex sonatas. As long as the whispers around the broadcasting room refer to her as “Killjoy Kate” and not “Catarina the crime boss's daughter,” then her life is safe from danger.Or so she thinks.When anonymous, violent threats surface, Kate's wary of accepting protection from the handsome private investigator, Detective Jennings. His save-the-world attitude is as charming as his manners, but no one, especially him, can know the gruesome realities of her birth. The 1924 Pittsburgh underworld is as complicated as it is elusive, and though the dealings of the Salvastanos have dwindled, Rhett Jennings is certain the man responsible for his father's death is still at large. But his personal hunt for justice must be set aside when his day job requires him to investigate threats directed at a young radio broadcaster with enamoring brown eyes and secretive behavior.When danger surrounds them, will the truth of Kate's past become the key to their survival?

The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed


Wendy Lower - 2021
    The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter’s rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And — only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower’s brilliant ten-year investigation of this image — the shins of another child, slipping from the woman’s lap.Wendy Lower’s forensic and archival detective work — in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States — recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance — are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.

Philip : the final portrait : Elizabeth, their marriage and their dynasty


Gyles Brandreth - 2021
    It is an extraordinary story, told with unique insight and authority by an author who knew the prince for more than forty years.Philip - elusive, complex, controversial, challenging, often humorous, sometimes irascible - is the man Elizabeth II once described as her 'constant strength and guide'. Who was he? What was he really like? What is the truth about those 'gaffes' and the rumours of affairs? This is the final portrait of an unexpected and often much-misunderstood figure. It is also the portrait of a remarkable marriage that endured for more than seventy years.Philip and Elizabeth were both royal by birth, both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, but, in temperament and upbringing, they were two very different people. The Queen's childhood was loving and secure, the Duke's was turbulent; his grandfather assassinated, his father arrested, his family exiled, his parents separated when he was only ten. Elizabeth and Philip met as cousins in the 1930s. They married in 1947, aged twenty-one and twenty-six.Philip: The Final Portrait tells the story of two contrasting lives, assesses the Duke of Edinburgh's character and achievement, and explores the nature of his relationships with his wife, his children and their families - and with the press and public and those at court who were suspicious of him in the early days. This is a powerful, revealing and, ultimately, moving account of a long life and a remarkable royal partnership.

The Shut-Away Sisters


Suzanne Goldring - 2021
    A long and brutal war. A heroic sacrifice…London, 1915. As German bombs rain down on the East End of London and hungry children queue for rations in the blistering cold, fifteen-year-old Florrie is forced to grow up fast. With her father fighting in the muddy trenches, Florrie turns to her older sister Edith for comfort. But the war has changed Edith. She has grown quiet, with dark shadows under her eyes, and has started leaving the house at night in secret. When Florrie follows her sister through the dark and winding streets of London, she is shocked by what she discovers. But she knows she must keep her sister’s secret for the sake of their family, even if she herself must pay the ultimate price…Years later Kate, running from her broken relationship, is sorting through her dead aunt Florrie’s house, which she shared with her sister Edith. As she sits on the threadbare carpets, looking at photos of Florrie during the war, she notices the change in her aunt – from carefree young girl with a hopeful smile to a hollow-cheeked young woman, with dark sad eyes.Determined to put her family’s ghosts to rest, Kate must unearth the secret past of her two aunts. Why is there a hidden locked room in the little house they shared? What is the story behind the abandoned wedding dress wrapped in tissue and tied up with a ribbon? And when Kate discovers the tragic secrets that have bound her family together, will she ever be able to move on?

The Woman at the Gates


Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger - 2021
    Her sister lifted her other little boy into the back of the truck. Under the threatening gaze of the Germans, Antonia looked back at the village one last time before the flap dropped and locked them all in total darkness.Before Antonia and her sister's family were surrounded by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, she was a fighter rather than a victim. Her resistance group - made up of the young men and women she’d grown up with - risked everything to free their country from those who had turned it into a bloody battleground. By her side was the brilliant Dr. Viktor Gruber - the man she was to have married and help start an independent government with. His love and his intellect shone like a light even when dark and violent conflicts engulfed them.Antonia does not know whether Viktor or the others have been caught or executed. Inside the camp, rumors are that the war is coming to an end. But she cannot wait to be saved. Her precious nephews will die without proper food. Her sister is ill. And her brother-in-law is somewhere out of reach. The Nazis need every able slave to push back the Red Tide, but Antonia also knows she and the others could be killed for any reason, at any moment.Outside the gates lies salvation and promises she must fulfill - for her country and the people she has loved. But Antonia's first priority is to find a way to get her family to safety, even if means putting her own life at risk. The Nazis may have taken nearly everything from her - her country, her dreams, her passions - but they will never take away her fierce courage…Inspired by the author's research into her family's journeys from Ukraine to the United States, The Woman at the Gates is a heartbreaking, inspiring and unforgettable story of the faith, courage and determination shown by those who survived the darkest days of the war. Fans of Mandy Robotham, Kate Quinn and Pam Jenoff will be gripped from the very first page until the final, heart-stopping conclusion, and if you enjoyed Mark Sullivan's The Last Green Valley or Beneath a Scarlet Sky, you will not want to miss this action-packed epic!

The Man Who Lived Underground


Richard Wright - 2021
    Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes--or is permitted to escape--from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other ("I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration"), is published in full, in the form that he intended.

The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II


Judith Mackrell - 2021
    Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine's official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a "society girl columnist" turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.

Secrets My Father Kept


Rachel Givney - 2021
    As the Führer edges towards an invasion of Poland, total war looms in Europe.However in Krakow, seventeen-year-old Marie Karska’s primary concern is the unexplained disappearance of her mother fifteen years ago, and her father Dominik’s unbreakable silence on the matter. Even his wife’s name is a secret he guards closely.Dominik, a well-respected and innovative doctor at the local hospital, has devoted his life to caring for his only daughter. Yet a black fear haunts him - over the questionable act he committed to keep Marie safe. And with German troops now marching to the border, he needs to find her a husband. One who will protect her when he no longer can…But Marie has already met the man she wants to marry: her childhood friend Ben. She’s determined that his Jewish faith won’t stand in the way of their future together. And nor will her father’s refusal to explain the past stop her from unpicking his darkest secret. . .

The Light of Luna Park


Addison Armstrong - 2021
    A daughter’s search for answers.New York City, 1926. Nurse Althea Anderson’s heart is near breaking when she witnesses another premature baby die at Bellevue Hospital. So when she reads an article detailing the amazing survival rates of babies treated in incubators in an exhibit at Luna Park, Coney Island, it feels like the miracle she has been searching for. But the doctors at Bellevue dismiss Althea and this unconventional medicine, forcing her to make a choice between a baby’s life and the doctors’ wishes that will change everything.Twenty-five years later, Stella Wright is falling apart. Her mother has just passed, she quit a job she loves, and her marriage is struggling. Then she discovers a letter that brings into question everything she knew about her mother, and everything she knows about herself.The Light of Luna Park is a tale of courage and an ode to the sacrificial love of mothers.

To Balance on Bridges


Rhiannon Giddens - 2021
    Journey with the inimitable folk musician and MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient as the celebrated artist examines the multitude of influences and identities that have led her to a life "nestled in the nexus" - defined and further made whole by the sum of her parts.Blending songs and stories from shared and personal histories, To Balance on Bridges finds Giddens in continued pursuit of truth in all its raw and underexposed forms. Performing tracks from several of her acclaimed albums, Giddens leads listeners through a multitude of musical styles, lyrical patterns, and instrumentation confronting questions on race, culture, appropriation, and class with searing precision. Hear an indelible artist reflect vividly on her own path as she, in turn, sheds light on our deeply connected journey ahead.

Sisters at War


Clare Flynn - 2021
    The pressures of war threaten to tear apart two sisters traumatised by their mother's murder by their father.With her new husband Will, a merchant seaman, deployed on dangerous Atlantic convoy missions, Hannah needs her younger sister Judith more than ever. But when Mussolini declares war on Britain, Judith's Italian sweetheart, Paolo is imprisoned as an enemy alien, and Judith's loyalties are divided.Each sister wants only to be with the man she loves but, as the war progresses, tensions between them boil over, and they face an impossible decision.A heart-wrenching page-turner about the everyday bravery of ordinary people during wartime. From heavily blitzed Liverpool to the terrors of the North Atlantic and the scorched plains of Australia, Sisters at War will bring tears to your eyes and joy to your heart.

Days of Steel Rain: The Epic Story of a WWII Vengeance Ship in the Year of the Kamikaze


Brent E. Jones - 2021
    At its center lies U.S. Navy Captain George Dyer, who vowed to return to action after suffering a horrific wound. He accepted the ship's command in 1944, knowing it would be his last chance to avenge his injuries and salvage his career. Yet with the nation's resources and personnel stretched thin by the war, he found that just getting the ship into action would prove to be a battle.Tensions among the crew flared from the start. Astoria's sailors and Marines were a collection of replacements, retreads, and older men. Some were broken by previous traumatic combat, most had no desire to be in the war, yet all found themselves fighting an enemy more afraid of surrender than death.The reluctant ship was called to respond to challenges that its men never could have anticipated. From a typhoon where the ocean was enemy to daring rescue missions in the Philippines, a gallant turn at Iwo Jima, and the ultimate crucible against the Kamikaze at Okinawa, they endured the worst of the final year of the war at sea.Days of Steel Rain brings to life more than a decade of research and firsthand interviews, depicting with unprecedented insight the singular drama of a captain grappling with a prospective mutiny amidst some of the most brutal fighting of World War II. Throughout, Brent Jones fills the narrative with secret diaries, memoirs, letters, interpersonal conflicts, and the innermost thoughts of the Astoria men. Days of Steel Rain weaves an intimate, unforgettable portrait of leadership, heroism, endurance, and redemption.

Where Madness Lies


Sylvia True - 2021
    Engrossing and devastating, this brave novel reminds us of the power of human connection and the inherent goodness of most people.” – Heidi Pitlor, author of The Daylight Marriage and Impersonation.Germany, 1934. Rigmor, a young Jewish woman is a patient at Sonnenstein, a premier psychiatric institution known for their curative treatments. But with the tide of eugenics and the Nazis’ rise to power, Rigmor is swept up in a campaign to rid Germany of the mentally ill.USA, 1984. Sabine, battling crippling panic and depression commits herself to McLean Hospital, but in doing so she has unwittingly agreed to give up her baby.Linking these two generations of women is Inga, who did everything in her power to help her sister, Rigmor. Now with her granddaughter, Sabine, Inga is given a second chance to free someone she loves from oppressive forces, both within and without.This is a story about hope and redemption, about what we pass on, both genetically and culturally. It is about the high price of repression, and how one woman, who lost nearly everything, must be willing to reveal the failures of the past in order to save future generations.With chilling echoes of our time, Where Madness Lies is based on a true story of the author’s own family.

Letters to Myself from the End of the World


Emily Stimpson Chapman - 2021
    

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II


Mari K. Eder - 2021
    These women who did extraordinary things didn't expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they've gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen—in and out of uniform.Young Hilda Eisen was captured twice by the Nazis and twice escaped, going on to fight with the Resistance in Poland. Determined to survive, she and her husband later emigrated to the U.S. where they became entrepreneurs and successful business leaders. Ola Mildred Rexroat was the only Native American woman pilot to serve with the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II.  She persisted against all odds—to earn her silver wings and fly, helping train other pilots and gunners. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters and opera buffs who smuggled Jews out of Germany, often wearing their jewelry and furs, to help with their finances. They served as sponsors for refugees, and established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. Alice Marble was a grand-slam winning tennis star who found her own path to serve during the war—she was an editor with Wonder Woman comics, played tennis exhibitions for the troops, and  undertook a dangerous undercover mission to expose Nazi theft. After the war she was instrumental in desegregating women's professional tennis. Others also stepped out of line—as cartographers, spies, combat nurses, and troop commanders.Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told—and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Pippo and Clara


Diana Rosie - 2021
    Two siblings divided by fate.Italy, 1938. Mussolini is in power and war is not far away . . .Clara and Pippo are just children: quiet, thoughtful Clara is the older sister, Pippo the younger brother is forever chatting. The family has only recently arrived in the city carrying their few possessions.When Mamma goes missing early one morning, both Clara and Pippo go in search of her. Clara turns right; Pippo, left.As a result of the choices they make that morning, their lives will be changed forever.Diana Rosie’s Pippo and Clara tells the story of a family and a country divided. But will Clara and Pippo – and their mother – find each other again?

Francis Bacon: Revelations


Mark Stevens - 2021
    . . . [and] the iconoclastic charm of the artist keeps the pages turning ." -The Washington Post "A definitive life of Francis Bacon. . . . Stevens and Swan are vivid scene setters. . . . Francis Bacon does justice to the contradictions of both the man and the art." -The Boston Globe A decade in the making: the first comprehensive look at the life and art of Francis Bacon, one of the iconic painters of the twentieth century--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master. Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life--from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images so unrelievedly awful that people fled the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992.Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. He moved among the worlds of London's Soho and East End, the literary salons of London and Paris, and the homosexual life of Tangier. Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon's childhood in Ireland (he earned his father's lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career--never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In all, Francis Bacon: Revelations gives us a more complete and nuanced--and more international--portrait than ever before of this singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his equally eruptive, extraordinary art. Bacon was not just an influential artist, he helped remake the twentieth-century figure.

Battles in the Desert


José Emilio Pacheco - 2021
    The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.

Darjeeling Inheritance


Liz Harris - 2021
    She learns that her beloved father died a couple of days earlier and that he left her his estate. She learns also that it was his wish that she marry Andrew McAllister, the good-looking younger son from a neighbouring plantation. Unwilling to commit to a wedding for which she doesn’t feel ready, Charlotte pleads with Dan Fitzgerald, the assistant manager of Sundar, to teach her how to run the plantation while she gets to know Andrew. Although reluctant as he knew that a woman would never be accepted as manager by the local merchants and workers, Dan agrees. Charlotte’s chaperone on the journey from England, Ada Eastman, who during the long voyage, has become a friend, has journeyed to Darjeeling to marry Harry Banning, the owner of a neighbouring tea garden. When Ada marries Harry, she’s determined to be a loyal and faithful wife. And to be a good friend to Charlotte. And nothing, but nothing, was going to stand in the way of that.

Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States


Jonathan I. LevyJonathan I. Levy - 2021
    Working from the beginning of U.S. history to the present, he found that capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages, separated by dramatic cataclysms that each forced a major turn in how the economy operated. In an ambitious, single-volume history of the United States, he reveals how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life.The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era, the founding of the United States, and up to the outbreak of t he Civil War, a period of history where economic growth and output was the result of the spread of trade, but also largely dependent on enslaved labor and severely limited by what could be drawn from the land beyond subsistence farming. The Age of Capital traces the impact of the first major leap in economic development following the Civil War: the Industrial Revolution, when capitalists set physical capital down in factories to produce commercial goods, fueled by labor moving into cities. But, investments in the new industrial economy led to great volatility, most dramatically with the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929. The Great Depression immediately sparked the Age of Control, when the government took on a more active role in the economy, first trying to jumpstart it and then funding military production in World War II. Skepticism of government intervention in the Cold War combined with recession and stagflation during the 1970s led to a crisis of industrial capitalism, and the withdrawal of political will for regulation. In the Age of Chaos that followed, the combination of deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.Today, in the aftermath of the Age of Chaos and in the midst of severe political discord, the nature of capitalism in United States once again is at a crossroads. In Ages of American Capitalism, Jonathan Levy proves that, contrary to political dogma, capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history--and it's likely changing again right now.

Sisters of Freedom


Mary-Anne O'Connor - 2021
    meticulously researched, thought-provoking and utterly compelling.' - Bette r Reading Sydney, Christmas, 1901. Federation has been achieved but Australian women are yet to gain the right to vote in their new nation's elections and have a say in the laws that govern them.Bolshy, boisterous Frankie Merriweather is a fervent advocate for women's rights, determined to dedicate herself to the cause, never marrying or becoming a mother. She can't understand her artistic sister Ivy, who wants a life of ease and beauty with her soon-to-be fiance, law student Patrick Earle.Meanwhile, their married sister Aggie volunteers in an orphanage, decrying the inequality of Australia's social classes ... and longing to hold a baby in her arms.When an accident takes Ivy, wounded and ill, into the violent and lawless zone of the Hawkesbury River, a year of change begins. Ivy's burgeoning friendship with her saviour Riley Logan, a smuggler, and his sister, the poverty-stricken but valiant Fiona, will alter the lives of all three women forever.A passionate tale of three sisters as they strive for freedom and independence and follow their hearts to unexpected places, from a master storyteller. For readers of Fiona McIntosh, Nicole Alexander and Natasha Lester.

Last Night with Tokyo Rose


Alexa Kang - 2021
    But in 1941, his country is not a friendly place for a Nisei. Being a son of Japanese immigrants, he’s never American enough. As Japan and the United States edge to the brink of war, the truth is all too clear. America has no place for someone like him. In search of his place in the world, he leaves his hometown of Seattle and sets out to sea.In Manila, he meets Fumiko, a Nisei from Los Angeles with a heartbreaking past who captures his heart. His soulmate who tread the same path of prejudice he walked at home. Together, they begin a new life in this burgeoning city under American colonial rule where they are no longer shunned.The Pearl Harbor attack destroys their dreams. Their dual identity now forces them to take a side. Their survival hinges on whether they stand with the land of the rising sun or the land of the free.Stranded in occupied territory, Tom must decide where his loyalty lies. Should he swear his allegiance to Imperial Japan, the instigator of war and violence? Or America, the country that deserted him when the world's darkest hour begins?What happens if his choice diverges from his one true love?

The Chernobyl Disaster: A History from Beginning to End


Hourly History - 2021
    It not only caused widespread radioactive contamination, but even more importantly, it claimed many lives and caused panic worldwide about the safety of nuclear power. In short, it changed the face of nuclear energy globally.Discover the real story of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the infamous disaster that bears its name, as well as its long aftermath.Discover a plethora of topics such asBackground of the Chernobyl DisasterApril 25-26: The Failed Safety TestApril 26-27: The Crisis UnfoldsClean Up and RemediationThe World RespondsInvestigations into the Chernobyl DisasterAnd much more!

What They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust Secrets


Mel Laytner - 2021
    . . or thought you knew?Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As he uncovered documents the Nazis didn’t burn, however, another man emerged―a black market ringleader and wily camp survivor who made his own luck. The tattered papers also shed light on painful secrets his father took to his grave.Melding the intimacy of personal memoir with the rigors of investigative journalism, What They Didn’t Burn is a heartwarming, inspiring story of resilience and redemption. A story of how desperate survivors turned hopeful refugees rebuilt their shattered lives in America, all the while struggling with the lingering trauma that has impacted their children to this day.

A Cowboy of Legend


Linda Broday - 2021
    He was prepared for life in the Wild West, but he hadn't counted on Grace Legend...Grace has always fought hard for what she believes in, and after her best friend is killed at the hands of her drunk and angry husband, that includes keeping alcohol out of her town. When the owner of the new saloon turns out to be a kind and considerate man, she can't help but wonder if they could have a future together...if they weren't on opposite sides of every issue."Resonate[s] with honesty and love...Linda Broday's best."--Fresh Fiction for The Cowboy Who Came Calling

A Soldier's Quartet


Colin Baldwin - 2021
    The letter resonates with Conrad and he commits to researching its backstory.Months later, Conrad makes contact with the fallen soldier’s family. He falls deeper into their history and other untold stories from this era, including the fate of young Tasmanian soldiers who also fought on the Western Front.A Soldier’s Quartet is inspired by true events, a story of perseverance and happenstance that transcends time and reaches across continents. It presents the human faces behind uniforms and battle plans, conveys love and hope set against various landscapes.Conrad’s discovery of the letter brings the past into the present as he reflects on his own life and loss.

A Song for Her Enemies


Sherri Stewart - 2021
    But the devil is listening. After Nazi soldiers close the opera and destroy Tamar Kaplan’s dream of becoming a professional singer, she joins the Dutch Resistance, her fair coloring concealing her Jewish heritage. Tamar partners with Dr. Daniel Feldman, and they risk their lives to help escaping refugees. When they are forced to flee themselves, violinist Neelie Visser takes them into hiding.Tamar’s love for Daniel flowers in hardship, but she struggles with the paradox that a loving God would allow the atrocities around her. When Tamar resists the advances of a Third Reich officer, he exacts his revenge by betraying the secrets hidden behind the walls of Neelie’s house. From a prison hospital to a Nazi celebration to a concentration camp, will the three of them survive to tell the world the secrets behind barbed wire? A Song for Her Enemies is the story of a talented young opera singer and the bittersweet love that grows amid the tyranny and fear of World War II. Set against the backdrop of neighbors willing to risk their lives in the German-occupied, war-torn Netherlands, A Song for Her Enemies is an inspiring and beautiful novel celebrating the resilience of the human spirit and the determination of Christians in the face of persecution. It is a novel for everyone seeking to understand the pain of the past and be inspired to embrace hope for the future.

Resistance


Mara Timon - 2021
    One mission. Enemies everywhere.May 1944. When spy Elisabeth de Mornay, code name Cécile, notices a coded transmission from an agent in the field does not bear his usual signature, she suspects his cover has been blown– something that is happening with increasing frequency. With the situation in Occupied France worsening and growing fears that the Resistance has been compromised, Cécile is ordered behind enemy lines.Having rendezvoused with her fellow agents, Léonie and Dominique, together they have one mission: help the Resistance destabilise German operations to pave the way for the Normandy landings.But the life of a spy is never straightforward, and the in-fighting within the Resistance makes knowing who to trust ever more difficult. With their lives on the line, all three women will have to make decisions that could cost them everything - for not all their enemies are German.

Late City


Robert Olen Butler - 2021
    As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus. Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realize that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the U.S., Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam's at almost every turn.As he contemplates his relationships-with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son-Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Letters to Michael


Charles Phillipson - 2021
    Before Michael started school in 1944 Charles had already made him a book of playful drawings of the alphabet to encourage his reading. From early 1945 to the autumn of 1947 a sequence of 150 illustrated letters followed, creating a series which would, ‘like the Pied Piper’s irresistible sounds’, draw Michael into a world of reading.In these letters Charles captures the delight to be found in the mundane detail of everyday life, seen through the lens of his own quirky imagination: passengers on the morning train hidden behind their newspapers; clouds sketched as if they are players on a stage; the fun to be had on a revolving office chair; numerals that morph into animals; the different ways in which men carry their umbrellas; a walk on a very windy day; the sun rising over chimney-pots; the postman on his bicycle; carrying home a Christmas tree. Jotted on a sheet torn from a pad of office paper, and often sketched in haste in tea or lunch breaks, each letter was embellished with a hand-drawn stamp which made the young Michael feel as if he was receiving ‘real’ letters. And real letters they are – love-letters, even – for through their affectionate words, mischievous drawings and gentle encouragement of Michael’s own literary and artistic explorations, a father’s love for his son shines out.Charles Phillipson grew up in a green suburb of Manchester where much of his time was spent with pen, pencil or brush in hand, exploring the surrounding countryside. After leaving school at 14, he attended evening classes at the city’s School of Art – L. S. Lowry was a fellow student – and developed his drawing and lettering skills as a printer’s apprentice. Some years later he became head of the publicity department of a large chain-making company, where he used his humour and love of language to create instruction manuals and advertising for their products.In 1937 Charles married Marjorie and they moved to a village just south of Manchester. For a short time, life seemed idyllic but then tragedy struck when Charles was diagnosed with progressive and untreatable multiple sclerosis. The war, with its barrage balloons and communal air-raid shelter in the garden, followed – as did Michael – and the letters began soon after. Charles was made redundant in 1955 and from then on received only a small disability pension but, despite the inexorable progress of his disease, he never stopped painting and drawing, and he illustrated a number of educational children’s books.Now these letters, saved by Marjorie who recognized their unique quality, and treasured by Michael after his father’s death in 1974, have been gathered together in a handsome cloth-bound hardback edition. Letters to Michael presents a touching portrait of the relationship between a father and his son and captures a bygone age when people still wrote letters using pen and paper.

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith


Daniel Silliman - 2021
    But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology. In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels—Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack—Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination. Reading Evangelicals ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in—one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this—every bit as much as politics or theology—became a locus of evangelical identity.

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain’s Economy from Boom to Bust and Back Again


Duncan Weldon - 2021
    

Three Tales from Vienna: A Novel


Ray Kingfisher - 2021
    But this is more than a tale of three ordinary Jewish sisters; this is also three tales of one great city, of how the changes brought about by union with Hitler’s Germany would prove to have a devastating effect on the character of Vienna as well as the Rosenthal family.Tale One – Calm Waters, Ordinary Lives – is set before the union with Germany, when the three sisters enjoy a typical carefree existence, each searching for love and fulfilment in her own individual manner, each doing her best to ignore the looming cloud of their country’s aggressive neighbor.Covering Vienna’s most tumultuous years, Tale Two – A Bitter North Wind – sees the sisters’ lives torn apart by the brutal National Socialist regime, forcing each of them to deal with persecution in strikingly different ways.In the post-war setting of Tale Three – Salvage and Legacy – each sister must pick up the pieces of a life all but destroyed. Alicia, Giselle, and Klara are torn between honoring their parents and beloved brother, Hugo, or carving out a future where their own offspring are shielded from the effects of the persecution they lived through. But can family ties survive the memories of their ordeals? And do children of survivors inherit some of the pain and suffering their parents endured?

Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain


Jeremy Paxman - 2021
    Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, religion, politics, empire and trade. It powered the industrial revolution, turned Britain into the first urban nation and is the industry that made almost all others possible.In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike.Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists – but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners – the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head.Almost all traces of coal-mining have vanished from Britain but with this brilliant history, Black Gold demonstrates just how much we owe to the black stuff.

Princess Mary: The First Modern Princess


Elisabeth Basford - 2021
    She has long deserved a full study and in Elisabeth Basford, she has found a dedicated and sympathetic biographer, who has done her full justice' - Hugo Vickers. Princess Diana is seen as the first member of the British royal family to tear up the rulebook, and the Duchess of Cambridge is modernising the monarchy in strides. But before them was another who paved the way. Princess Mary was born in 1897. Despite her Victorian beginnings, she strove to make a princess’s life meaningful, using her position to help those less fortunate and defying gender conventions in the process. As the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, she would live to see not only two of her brothers ascend the throne but also her niece Queen Elizabeth II. She was one of the hardest-working members of the royal family, known for her no-nonsense approach and her determination in the face of adversity. During the First World War she came into her own, launching an appeal to furnish every British troop and sailor with a Christmas gift, and training as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital. From her dedication to the war effort, to her role as the family peacemaker during the Abdication Crisis, Mary was the princess who redefined the title for the modern age. In the first biography in decades, Elisabeth Basford offers a fresh appraisal of Mary’s full and fascinating life.

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship


Derek Scally - 2021
    Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology--East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish.He travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines, and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have held on, to survivors and campaigners, to writers, historians, psychologists, and many more. And he has probing and revealing encounters with Vatican officials, priests, and religious along the way.The Best Catholics in the World is the remarkable result of his three-year journey. With wit, wisdom, and compassion, Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland.

For Malice and Mercy


Gary W. Toyn - 2021
    When America enters the war, the FBI arrests the Meyers as spies, then strips them of their citizenship, rights, and livelihood. They are banished to a German/Japanese internment camp, but then violently targeted by Hitler loyalists. Deportation back to war-torn Germany seems their only hope of survival. Their son Hank enlists in the US Army Air Corps, hoping his pay can save the family’s home. After his B-17 is shot down, his ability to speak fluent German helps him evade capture. When the Gestapo is on his trail, he’s pursued as a spy and faces certain death if they can catch him. His life depends on the daring plan of two unlikely collaborators. This meticulously researched novel reveals untold stories of legalized hatred and the cost of unjustified suspicion. For Malice and Mercy has great relevance for our day, weaving a spellbinding saga of treachery, survival, and unmerited forgiveness.

The Romanov Rescue


Tom Kratman - 2021
    As WWI comes to a close, a German general, an escaped prisoner of war, and the crew of an airship converge to effect THE ROMANOV RESCUE. Can there be a world without communism?Mankind's history is bound up in the fabric of fate, a strong cloth, tough and closely woven.   It is the beginning of 1918, the last year of the greatest war in human history to date. All the belligerents stagger on their feet. Starvation is an ever present reality, while disease waits in the wings. In Russia, no longer a belligerent but, instead, rapidly descending into civil war and chaos, a lone family—father, mother, four beautiful young girls, and a brave but sickly boy—await their own fate, shivering and hungry in the dark, hoping and praying for salvation.  Their relatives in England have turned their backs. The guards set over them do little but torment them. They look Heavenward, but God doesn't answer. They know they're a threat to the new regime, a threat that will, in time, be eliminated. But even the strongest fabric has flaws. An escaped prisoner of war, caught, injured, and punished, but still highly capable, might be one. An airship, returned and at loose ends after a failed mission to Africa might be another. A German general, taking a wrong turn on his nightly walk and suddenly coming face-to-face with the reality of the monster rising in the east, would be a third. Follow, then, as the general gives the orders, the prisoner of war raises the men from among his fellows, and the airship launches itself forward, to contest fate, to tear the fabric of time, and to effect The Romanov Rescue. About the Carrera series: “[I]nterplanetary warfare with . . . [a] visceral story of bravery and sacrifice . . . fans of the military SF of John Ringo and David Weber should enjoy this SF action adventure.”—Library Journal “Kratman's dystopia is a brisk page turner full of startling twists . . . [Kratman is] a professional military man . . . up to speed on military and geopolitical conceits.”—Best-selling author of America Alone Mark Steyn on Tom Kratman’s uncompromising military SF thriller Caliphate “Kratman raises disquieting questions on what it might take to win the war on terror . . . realistic action sequences, strong characterizations, and thoughts on the philosophy of war.”—Publishers Weekly   About Tom Kratman: “[Baen publisher] Toni [Weisskopf] and I disagree about everything except about how good his books are.”—John Birmingham

Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching


Jarvis R. Givens - 2021
    African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage.There is perhaps no better exemplar of this heritage than Carter G. Woodson—groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged: Woodson’s first teachers were his formerly enslaved uncles; he himself taught for nearly thirty years; and he spent his life partnering with educators to transform the lives of Black students. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today.

The Comfort Bearer


Cathy L. Patrenos - 2021
    She is taken to Manchuria by trickery from her home in occupied Korea and forced to become a comfort woman, a sex slave for members of the Imperial Japanese Army.Taken from comfort station to comfort station, Soon Ja suffers terribly. She desperately tries to deal with the daily physical and mental torment of her unbearable situation. She struggles to survive by any means possible, which includes retaliating against her captors by spying on behalf of anti-Japanese resistance fighters. This gives her a renewed purpose that quickly fades once the resistance is defeated. As the war progresses and years pass, Soon Ja’s will to survive waxes and wanes as she surmounts one intolerable situation after another, bringing her the strength and courage that would shape the rest of her life.A compelling story of strength, perseverance, and the will to survive.

King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King


Daniel de Visé - 2021
    No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues."--President Barack Obama"He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced."--Eric ClaptonRiley "Blues Boy" King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister's guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge.King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)--in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago's Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color.Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King's inner circle--family, band members, retainers, managers, and more--and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby "Blue" Bland simply called "the man."

Why the New Deal Matters


Eric Rauchway - 2021
    With timeless prose and timely arguments, Why the New Deal Matters powerfully connects that era to our own.”—Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University The greatest peaceable expression of common purpose in U.S. history, the New Deal altered Americans' relationship with politics, economics, and one another in ways that continue to resonate today. No matter where you look in America, there is likely a building or bridge built through New Deal initiatives. If you have taken out a small business loan backed by the federal government or drawn unemployment insurance, you can thank the New Deal. While certainly flawed in many aspects—the New Deal was implemented by a Democratic Party still beholden to the segregationist South for its majorities in Congress and the Electoral College—the New Deal functioned as a bulwark of American democracy in hard times. This book looks at how this legacy, both for good and ill, informs the current debates around governmental responses to crises.

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home


Alexander Wolff - 2021
    Always bookish, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. Fleeing Germany in 1933, a day after the Reichstag fire, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, sought refuge in France, Italy, and ultimately New York, where in a small Greenwich Village apartment they founded Pantheon Books. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt's taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck, and the story of a half-brother Niko never knew.With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.

Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War


Ian Ona Johnson - 2021
    The Luftwaffe bombed towns and cities across the country, and fifty divisions of the Wehrmacht crossed the border. Yet only two decades earlier, at the end of World War One, Germany had been an utterly and abjectly defeated military power. Foreign troops occupied its industrial heartland and the Treaty of Versailles reduced the vaunted German army of World War One to a fraction of its size, banning it from developing new military technologies. When Hitler came to power in 1933, these strictures were still in effect. By 1939, however, he had at his disposal a fighting force of 4.2 million men, armed with the most advanced weapons in the world. How could this nearly miraculous turnaround have happened?The answer lies in Russia. Beginning in the years immediately after World War One and continuing for more than a decade, the German military and the Soviet Union--despite having been mortal enemies--entered into a partnership designed to overturn the order in Europe. Centering on economic and military cooperation, the arrangement led to the establishment of a network of military bases and industrial facilities on Soviet soil. Through their alliance, which continued for over a decade, Germany gained the space to rebuild its army. In return, the Soviet Union received vital military, technological and economic assistance. Both became, once again, military powers capable of a mass destruction that was eventually directed against one another.Drawing from archives in five countries, including new collections of declassified Russian documents, The Faustian Bargain offers the definitive exploration of a shadowy but fateful alliance.

On Being German: A Personal Journey Into the German Experience


Doris Pena-Cruz - 2021
    In my younger years I avoided that subject, be it in literature or in entertainment, whenever I possibly could. That was not easy. Television was full of programs in which Germans looked stupid and heinous. My own children watched these things with glee; I fled into another room. Since I have always read a lot, I was at least aware of the avalanche of books that were published about the Holocaust. Still, I kept my blinkers on. I firmly told myself that it was not my business, since I was just a child during that time. Sooner or later such an attitude will have to come to an end. It did for me after I fled a difficult marriage and finally began to examine my life. This was a slow process, aided by a patient psychiatrist. Now, years later, I want to write about my life and about the conflicted feelings such a search will cause in a woman of German nationality.

Hannah Arendt


Samantha Rose Hill - 2021
    Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After World War II, Arendt became one of the most prominent—and controversial—public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems, and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.

The Salt Fields: A Novella


Stacy D. Flood - 2021
    In the cramped car, Minister finds himself in close quarters with three passengers also joining the exodus from the South—people seeking a new life, whose motives, declared or otherwise, will change Minister's life with devastating consequences.

Blue Postcards


Douglas Bruton - 2021
    This was years back, in the blue mists of memory.Now it’s the 1950s and Henri is the last tailor on the street. With meticulous precision he takes the measurements of men and notes them down in his leather-bound ledger. He draws on the cloth with a blue chalk, cuts the pieces and sews them together. When the suit is done, Henri adds a finishing touch: a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers somewhere, for luck. One day, the renowned French artist Yves Klein walks into the shop, and orders a suit.Set in Paris, this atmospheric tale delicately intertwines three connected narratives and timelines, interspersed with observations of the colour blue. It is a meditation on truth and lies, memory and time and thought. It is a leap of the imagination, a leap into the void.

Magic in Manhattan Collection: Spellbound / Starcrossed / Wonderstruck


Allie Therin - 2021
    When an amulet with the power to control the tides is shipped to New York, he must intercept it before it can be used to devastating effects. This time, in order to succeed, he needs a powerful psychometric…and the only one available has sworn off his abilities altogether.Rory Brodigan’s gift comes with great risk. To protect himself, he’s become a recluse, redirecting his magic to find counterfeit antiques. But with the city’s fate hanging in the balance, he can’t force himself to say no.As Arthur coaxes him out of seclusion, a magical and emotional bond begins to form. One that proves impossible to break—even when Arthur sacrifices himself to keep Rory safe and Rory must risk everything to save him. Starcrossed Arthur’s continued quest to contain supernatural relics that pose a threat to the world  captured Rory’s imagination—and his heart. Butwhen a group of ruthless paranormals throw the city into chaos, the two men’s strained relationship leaves Rory vulnerable to a monster from Arthur’s past.With dark forces determined to tear them apart, Rory and Arthur will have to draw on every last bit of magic up their sleeves. And in the end, it’s the connection they’ve formed without magic that will be tested like never before. Wonderstruck Arthur's search to to destroy the powerful supernatural relic that threatens Manhattan has been fruitless . All it has done is keep him from the man he loves. But he’ll do anything to keep Rory safe and free, even if that means leaving him behind.Rory is  determined to gain power over his own magic. He can take care of himself—and maybe even Arthur, too, if Arthur will let him. An auction at the Paris world’s fair offers the perfect opportunity to destroy the relic, if a group of power-hungry supernaturals don’t destroy Rory and Arthur first.As the magical world converges on Paris, Arthur and Rory have to decide who they can trust. Guessing wrong could spell destruction for their bond—and for the world as they know it

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser


Susan Bernofsky - 2021
    A tragic and intimate portrait.”—Amy Sillman “Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days.”—Eileen Myles The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest—social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten—prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him “a clairvoyant of the small.” His revolutionary use of short prose forms had an enormous influence on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his “extreme artistic delight.”

My Mistress' Eyes are Raven Black


Terry Roberts - 2021
    New York Harbor's immigration and public health authorities are slowly recovering from the war years when a young, pregnant Irish woman disappears from the Isolation Hospital on Ellis Island.Stephen Robbins, a specialist in finding missing persons, is assigned the case. Yet when he arrives at the isolation hospital, he discovers an inexplicable string of deaths and disappearances among immigrant patients...and a staff that seems to be hiding a chilling secret. Stephen finds an ally in Lucy Paul, an undercover nurse who is also investigating the mysterious incidents. Together, they begin to unearth a horrifying conspiracy masked beneath the hospital’s charitable exterior. As Stephen and Lucy get closer to the truth and each other, they are swept directly into the danger haunting Ellis Island and become the next targets themselves.Amidst growing racial tensions in the wake of World War I, My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black explores the disturbing lengths to which people will go to protect racial purity and condemn those they fear.

Relax Baby Be Cool: The Artistry and Audacity Of Serge Gainsbourg


Jeremy Allen - 2021
    Although Gainsbourg’s music has been discovered by new generations, his life has rarely been illuminated and contextualized with such style and insight." - BECK Why has Serge Gainsbourg crossed over to the English-speaking world when so many of his contemporaries have remained largely confined to the Francosphere? What is it about this unshaven provocateur that so appeals to us? And who was the real Serge Gainsbourg anyway? Was he the sensitive seducer and songwriting colossus of the 60s and 70s? Was he Lucien Ginsburg, the son of Russian Jewish refugees who had to wear a yellow star during the Nazi Occupation of Paris? Or was he Gainsbarre, the deplorable, attention-seeking drunk who shamelessly propositioned Whitney Houston on live TV? Gainsbourg’s cult has only grown since his death in 1991, and Histoire de Melody Nelson is now regarded as a classic in France and internationally. The 1971 album had only sold eighty thousand copies by 1986 when it finally went gold fifteen years after its release; its canonical elevation is a remarkable story, and there are many more remarkable stories attached to all of Gainsbourg’s genre-defying, transgressive long-players. In Relax Baby Be Cool, writer Jeremy Allen takes each studio album in turn while exploring themes pertinent to Gainsbourg’s life and music: performance, provocation, theft, dandyism, avant-gardism, muses, Nazis, film and TV, Surrealism, vice, posterity, and fame. French pop music is more popular than it’s been since the mid-90s, when the French touch was breaking. Gainsbourg’s influence has also been huge on alternative music: from Pulp to Massive Attack, De La Soul to Danger Mouse, Black Grape to Kylie, David Guetta to Die Antwoord, Air to Iggy Pop. This book is full of new interviews from people who knew him, but also younger artists who discovered him after his death. Contributors include Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jacqueline Ginsburg (Gainsbourg’s sister), Anna Karina, Mike Patton, Etienne Daho, Sly Dunbar, Alan Hawkshaw, Jean-Claude Vannier, Tony Frank, Mick Harvey, Bertrand Burgalat, Acid Arab, Jehnny Beth, Alan Chamfort, Metronomy, David Holmes, Blonde Redhead, Nicolas Godin of Air, Russell Mael of Sparks, Will Oldham, and many more.

By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution


David Talbot - 2021
    In many ways, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first, striving to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white, non-male, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders.Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the twentieth century radical movement: Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective, the first underground feminist abortion clinic; Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda; Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the Gay Pride movement; Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s politics of stardom. Margaret and David Talbot reveal the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.  America is still absorbing—and reacting against—the revolutionary forces of this tumultuous period. The change these leaders enacted demanded much of American society and the human imagination. By the Light of Burning Dreams is an immersive and compelling chronicle of seven lighting rods of change and the generation that engraved itself in American narrative—and set the stage for those today, fighting to bend forward the arc of history. By the Light of Burning Dreams includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.

The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream


Jason Vuic - 2021
    That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" hawked billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded home site that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others--sprawling communities with no downtowns, little industry, and millions of residential lots. In The Swamp Peddlers, Jason Vuic tells the raucous tale of the sale of residential lots in postwar Florida. Initially selling cheap homes to retirees with disposable income, by the mid-1950s developers realized that they could make more money selling parcels of land on installment to their customers. These "swamp peddlers" completely transformed the landscape and demographics of Florida, devastating the state environmentally by felling forests, draining wetlands, digging canals, and chopping up at least one million acres into grid-like subdivisions crisscrossed by thousands of miles of roads. Generations of northerners moved to Florida cheaply, but at a huge price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; poorly-regulated development begat environmental destruction, culminating in the perfect storm of the 21st-century subprime mortgage crisis.

Klara and the Sun / Never Let Me Go


Kazuo Ishiguro - 2021
    She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.In Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love? Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Somewhere Apart: Selected Lyrics 1977-1997


Robyn Hitchcock - 2021
    Selected and arranged by the author, and with an introduction by acclaimed novelist and music writer Bill Flanagan, Somewhere Apart presents the lyrics of Robyn Hitchcock for the first time in a beautiful cloth-bound Tiny Ghost edition.

From Warsaw with Love: Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance


John Pomfret - 2021
    As the United States cobbles together a coalition to undo Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, six US officers are trapped in Iraq with intelligence that could ruin Operation Desert Storm if it is obtained by the brutal Iraqi dictator. Desperate, the CIA asks Poland, a longtime Cold War foe famed for its excellent spies, for help. Just months after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Solidarity government in Warsaw sends a veteran ex-Communist spy who’d battled the West for decades to rescue the six Americans.John Pomfret’s gripping account of the 1990 cliffhanger in Iraq is just the beginning of the tale about intelligence cooperation between Poland and the United States, cooperation that one CIA director would later describe as “one of the two foremost intelligence relationships that the United States has ever had.” Pomfret uncovers new details about the CIA’s black site program that held suspected terrorists in Poland after 9/11 as well as the role of Polish spies in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In the tradition of the most memorable works on espionage, Pomfret’s book tells a distressing and disquieting tale of moral ambiguity in which right and wrong, black and white, are not conveniently distinguishable. As the United States teeters on the edge of a new cold war with Russia and China, Pomfret explores how these little-known events serve as a reminder of the importance of alliances in a dangerous world.

Keeping Secrets


Bina Bernard - 2021
    Hannah Stone, now a successful New York City journalist, was smuggled out of Poland as a child with her parents after surviving the Holocaust. They remade themselves in America, harboring the deep scars of stories never told. Now in her thirties, Hannah learns a family secret that sends her back to where she came from, on the investigative journey of her life.   Replayed in cinematic flashbacks, of the family’s immigrant experience and war years on the run, alternating with the contemporary family drama in the U.S. and Communist Poland, Keeping Secrets hinges on the mystery of a sister who was left behind.   In this sweeping, suspenseful debut, Keeping Secrets reveals the agonizing choices World War II thrust upon so many, examining the enormous price of guilt and the very heart of identity.

When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance


Michael S. Neiberg - 2021
    Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response--a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners' strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US-Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo-American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe P�tain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US-French relations for decades.Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision-making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, Shadow of Liberty gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.

Pancho Villa: A Life from Beginning to End (History of Mexico)


Hourly History - 2021
    

The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling


Ann McCutchan - 2021
    Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote, hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. There, Rawlings purchased a commercial orange grove and discovered a fascinating world out of which to write—and a dialect of the poor, swampland community that the literary world had yet to hear. She employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life this unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail, a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Her accomplishments came at a price: a failed first marriage, financial instability, a contentious libel suit, alcoholism, and physical and emotional upheaval.With intimate access to Rawlings’s correspondence and revealing early writings, Ann McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries—including her legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and friends Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym


Paula Byrne - 2021
    Miss Pym in her diaries. Sandra in seduction mode. Pymska at her most sophisticated.English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only fifteen years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel she had been dropped. She was deemed old-fashioned, telling stories of little English villages, unrequited love and the social dramas of vicars or academics.This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing. It gallops through her love affairs and lifelong relationships. It opens a door to the quick-draw humour which lives in her every written line. It shows how, with a little help from her most ardent fans and friends including Philip Larkin, her work eventually resurfaced, meeting new readers and bringing her sudden astounding, resounding love and acclaim – in the last years of her life.

Walk in My Combat Boots: True Stories from the Battlefront


James Patterson - 2021
    Written with Matt Eversmann, the real-life hero of Black Hawk Down, James Patterson brings us true stories of life on the battlefront

Civil Rights Movement: A History from Beginning to End


Hourly History - 2021
    

The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915


Jon Grinspan - 2021
    Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century's end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans' voting rates crashed and never fully recovered.This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today.The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America's unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation's politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system's enduring capacity to reinvent itself.

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States


Alex Wellerstein - 2021
    The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive?  Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.

Mission France: The True History of the Women of SOE


Kate Vigurs - 2021
    The organization’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known—Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Noor Inayat Khan—others have had their stories largely overlooked. Kate Vigurs interweaves for the first time the stories of all thirty-nine female agents. Tracing their journeys from early recruitment to work undertaken in the field, to evasion from, or capture by, the Gestapo, Vigurs shows just how greatly missions varied. Some agents were more adept at parachuting. Some agents’ missions lasted for years, others’ less than a few hours. Some survived, others were murdered. By placing the women in the context of their work with the SOE and the wider war, this history reveals the true extent of the differences in their abilities and attitudes while underlining how they nonetheless shared a common mission and, ultimately, deserve recognition both collectively and individually.

Under a Dark Angel's Eye


Patricia Highsmith - 2021
    Get ready to run' CARMEN MARIA MACHADO'Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed' MEGAN ABBOTTINTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADOPatricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century fiction writers, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, reveals Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.Includes two newly discovered stories. This is the only volume of Highsmith's stories to select from a lifetime of short-story writing.

Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall


Bob Stanley - 2021
    This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group - or more precisely, their world. 'To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired & inspiring, profound & provocative, beautiful & bonkers Book of Revelations.'DAVID PEACE'Mind blowing . . . there is so much to enjoy in this brilliant book.'TIM BURGESS'A container sized treasure trove . . . I strongly advise you to buy it.'MAXINE PEAKE'The most wonderful, unashamedly intellectual, pretentious, ridiculous, exciting hymn to this incredible group.'ANDY MILLER, BACKLISTEDOver a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation.Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding; the Fall's worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldn't want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work.Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall's wonderful and frightening world.

Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints


Teffi - 2021
    At times she had to warn her readers that "those seeking laughter should not turn on me and tear me to pieces if, instead, they find tears - the pearls of my soul." The stories on other-worldly themes in this collection are some of Teffi's finest and most profound, displaying her acute psychological sensitivity beneath her characteristic wit and surface brilliance.Spanning nearly forty years, from stories Teffi wrote in Moscow to those from her perspective as an emigr� in Paris, Other Worlds gathers together those stories that share the theme of religious experience, both Russian Orthodox Christianity and Russian folk belief, with its often poetic understanding of spiritual matters. In an early story, "A Quiet Backwater," a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of the different birds, insects, and animals, as well as the Feast of the Holy Spirit, a day on which "no one dares to trouble the earth." The story "Wild Evening" is about the fear of the unknown; "The Kind that Walk," a penetrating study of anti-semitism, and of xenophobia more generally; and "Baba-Yaga," about the archetypal Russian witch and her longing for wildness and freedom. Teffi traces the persistent influence of the ancient Slavic gods in legends, superstitions, and customs, and the deep connection of the supernatural to everyday life in the Russian provinces. In "Volya," the final autobiographical story, the power and pain of Baba Yaga is Teffi's own.

P. G. Wodehouse Volume 2: The Blandings Collection


P.G. Wodehouse - 2021
    In this volume, Stephen Fry lends his voice to the Blandings stories. This collection contains: Summer LightningHeavy WeatherBlandings Castle and ElsewhereLord Emsworth and OthersUncle Fred in the Spring Time Stephen FryStephen Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director and all-round national treasure. Whilst at university, Fry became involved with the Cambridge Footlights, where he met his long-time collaborator and friend, Hugh Laurie. As half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. Fry’s acting roles include Blackadder, Kingdom, Bones, V for Vendetta, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and The Hobbit trilogy. He has written and presented several documentary series and as a proudly out gay man, the award-winning Out There, documenting the lives of lesbian, bisexual gay and transgender people around the world is part of his 30-year advocacy of the rights of the LGBT community. Fry has written four novels: The Liar, The Hippopotamus (made in to a feature film in 2018), Making History and The Stars’ Tennis Balls. Translated into many languages, they have never been out of print. The most recently published works are Mythos, Heroes and Troy, a trilogy retelling the Greeks myths from the Creation to the aftermath of the Trojan War.Length: 45 hours and 27 minutesPublic Domain (P)2021 Audible, Ltd

Cristero War: A History from Beginning to End (History of Mexico)


Hourly History - 2021
    

Fiery Girls


Heather Wardell - 2021
    One historic strike. And the fire that changed America.In 1909, shy sixteen-year-old Rosie Lehrer is sent to New York City to earn money for her family’s emigration from Russia. She will, but she also longs to make her mark on the world before her parents arrive and marry her to a suitable Jewish man. Could she somehow become one of the passionate and articulate “fiery girls” of her garment workers’ union?Maria Cirrito, spoiled and confident at sixteen, lands at Ellis Island a few weeks later. She’s supposed to spend four years earning American wages then return home to Italy with her new-found wealth to make her family’s lives better. But the boy she loves has promised, with only a little coaxing, to follow her to America and marry her. So she plans to stay forever. With him.Rosie and Maria meet and become friends during the “Uprising of the 20,000” garment workers’ strike, and they’re working together at the Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911 when a discarded cigarette sets the factory ablaze. 146 people die that day, and even those who survive will be changed forever.Carefully researched and full of historic detail, “Fiery Girls” is a novel of hope: for a better life, for turning tragedy into progress, and for becoming who you’re meant to be.

Foxes for Christmas


Ben Aaronovitch - 2021
    Curl up with your favourite seasonal beverage and enjoy this story of hope, brandy and foxes.

The Lyrics of Syd Barrett


Rob Chapman - 2021
    If his guitar gave the early Pink Floyd a distinctive hallucinatory sound, his often obscure and surreal lyrics were perhaps even more intoxicating. The complete lyrics of Syd Barrett – 52 songs written for Pink Floyd and during his subsequent solo career – are presented together for the first time, along with rare photos and artwork, to form this beautifully illustrated book. Compiled in collaboration with the Syd Barrett estate, and featuring a foreword from former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner and a comprehensive introduction by biographer Rob Chapman, The Lyrics of Syd Barrett delves deep into one of rock’n’roll’s most imaginative and searing minds.

Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing


Alex J. Kay - 2021
    Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme. Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Empire of Destruction considers Europe’s Jews alongside all the other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.

What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule


Max Siollun - 2021
    Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today still have Empire nostalgia and view the colonial period through rose-tinted glasses.Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: an unromanticised history, arguing compellingly that colonialism had few benevolent intentions, but many unjust outcomes. It may have ended slavery and human sacrifice, but it was accompanied by extreme violence; ethnic and religious identity were cynically exploited to maintain control, while the forceful remoulding of longstanding legal and social practices permanently altered the culture and internal politics of indigenous communities. The aftershocks of this colonial meddling are still being felt decades after independence. Popular narratives often suggest that the economic and political turmoil are homegrown, but the reality is that Britain created many of Nigeria’s crises, and has left them behind for Nigerians to resolve.This is a definitive, head-on confrontation with Nigeria’s experience under British rule, showing how it forever changed the country—perhaps cataclysmically.

Ever Fallen in Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes


Pete Shelley - 2021
    A fascinating insight."- JOHN MAHER, Buzzcocks"Pete and Buzzcocks were there right from the beginning."- BERNARD SUMNER, Joy Division & New Order"A true gentleman and a great artist and songwriter."- PETER HOOK, Joy Division & New OrderWhen Pete Shelley, lead singer of legendary punk band Buzzcocks, passed away in 2018 we lost the chance to hear one of music's brightest stars tell his story.Or so it seemed.Now, recordings have surfaced of a series of remarkable interviews in which Pete tells the story of his life, his band and his place at the beating heart of the punk explosion in fascinating detail.Recorded over a series of late-night calls with a close friend, the tapes hear Pete talk song-by-song through Buzzcocks releases to reveal the personal memories behind the music and the inspiration for masterpieces such as 'Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)' and 'What Do I Get?'.Published for the first time and with the blessing of Pete's estate, Ever Fallen In Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes is a tribute to a founding member of punk and a chance to hear one of music's true visionaries tell his own story at last."Shot through with self-doubt and mild regret, Pete Shelley's lovesick pop classics have a bittersweet charm that will forever speak to the young romantic"- JOHN COOPER CLARKE"Buzzcocks were the blue touchpaper for my love of music. Pure pop met punk and the result was perfection."-TIM BURGESS, The Charlatans

Nothing but the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Lofts, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar


Thulani Davis - 2021
    

Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II


Marilyn Yalom - 2021
    Marilyn Yalom experienced World War II from afar, safely protected in her home in Washington, DC. But over the course of her life, she came to be close friends with many less lucky, who grew up under bombardment across Europe-in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. With Innocent Witnesses, Yalom collects the stories from these accomplished luminaries and brings us voices of a vanishing generation, the last to remember World War II.Memory is notoriously fickle: it forgets most of the past, holds on to bits and pieces, and colors the truth according to unconscious wishes. But in the circle of safety Marilyn Yalom created for her friends, childhood memories return in all their startling vividness. This powerful collage of testimonies offers us a greater understanding of what it is to be human, not just then but also today. With this book, her final and most personal work of cultural history, Yalom considers the lasting impact of such young experiences-and asks whether we will now force a new generation of children to spend their lives reconciling with such memories.

The Diplomat's Wife


Michael Ridpath - 2021
    But when she marries an ambitious diplomat, she must leave her ideals behind and live within the confines of embassy life in Paris and Nazi Berlin. Then one of Hugh's old comrades reappears, asking her to report on her philandering husband, and her loyalties are torn.1979: Emma's grandson, Phil, dreams of a gap-year tour of Cold War Europe, but is nowhere near being able to fund it. So when his beloved grandmother determines to make one last trip to the places she lived as a young diplomatic wife, and to try to solve a mystery that has haunted her since the war, he jumps at the chance to accompany her. But their journey takes them to darker, more dangerous places than either of them could ever have imagined...'Thoroughly engaging. Prewar Europe has rarely been evoked with the skill that Ridpath displays here.' Financial Times

The 1960s & 70s: Run, River / Slouching Towards Bethlehem / Play It As It Lays / A Book of Common Prayer / The White Album


Joan Didion - 2021
    Using autobiographical elements to stunning literary effect, she has captured the anarchic convulsions and anxious contradictions of the waning American Century and the coming new millennium with incomparable clarity and force. Now, Library of America inaugurates a definitive three-volume edition of Didion’s collected writings with the landmark works of the 1960s and 1970s, books that established her as one of the most original and influential literary figures of our time.Didion’s darkly nostalgic debut novel Run River (1963) is set among the ranch families of her native Sacramento Valley, their prosperity and pioneer traditions threatened by suburban sprawl and the changing values of a postwar world. A riveting chronicle of passion, infidelity, and betrayal in the twenty-year marriage of Lily Knight and Everett McClellan, it eloquently evokes one woman’s alienation amid the landscapes of a disappearing California.A major milestone in the rise of the New Journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) gathers Didion’s kaleidoscopic essays of the mid-1960s: masterpieces whose subjects include an aging John Wayne, a Los Angeles Maoist, the Las Vegas wedding industry, and the acid-tripping counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The collection showcases Didion’s signature literary persona—“a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing, always in control” (Joyce Carol Oates)—while introducing a style of reportage that transformed the expectations of generations of readers and writers.In Play It As It Lays (1970) model and actress Maria Wyeth, her brief career fading, finds herself adrift in a sun-drenched, air-conditioned, and utterly benumbed world in which pills, fast cars, and casual sex have replaced human connection. The pared-down, impressionistic prose frames a harrowing story of a Hollywood life gone wrong.Well-meaning norteamericana Charlotte Douglas arrives in the lush, dangerously chaotic Central American republic of Boca Grande, in Didion’s third novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977), hoping to trace the whereabouts of her daughter Marin, an affluent teenager turned Marxist-revolutionary terrorist. “Immaculate of history, innocent of politics,” Douglas is swept up in intrigues and violence beyond her ability to comprehend, as Didion dissects the menacing realities of imperialism and revolution.In The White Album (1979) Didion continues her intense, intimate, clear-eyed investigations of a California coming apart at the seams. In trips to shopping malls and to the Getty Museum; visits with Nancy Reagan, The Doors, and the Black Panthers; accounts of the prosecution of the Manson Family—all counterpointed with her own dark moods and obsessions—she offers a brilliant mosaic of a time that continues to shape our own and a monument of superlative literary nonfiction.

The Pursuit of Love: With Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing


Nancy Mitford - 2021
    The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest books ever written' India Knight, The TimesNancy Mitford's brilliantly witty, irreverent stories of the upper classes in pre-war London and Paris conjure up a world of glamour, gossip and decadence. In The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing, her extraordinary heroines deal with armies of eccentric relatives, the excitement of love and passion, and the thrills of the social Season. But beneath the perfectly timed comic dialogue, these novels are also bittersweet reminders of the brevity of life and love.With an Introduction by Philip Hensher'A kind of perfection' Olivia Laing, Guardian'Peerless ... beneath the surface of Mitford's wit, there is something infinitely more melancholy at work' Zoe Heller

Michael Jordan


Mª Isabel Sánchez Vegara - 2021
    One day, he came home crying...he’d been rejected from the basketball team at school. With his mother’s message of “go out and earn it” ringing in his ears, Michael practiced all summer. Soon he was the star of the team, going from school, to college, to the Olympics. After six titles, more than 1,000 games, and exactly 32,292 points, MJ had become a sports legend, who encouraged kids to “make it happen!” This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the baller’s life.Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling series of books and educational games that explore the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. This empowering series offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. Boxed gift sets allow you to collect a selection of the books by theme. Paper dolls, learning cards, matching games, and other fun learning tools provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

Why Labelle Matters


Adele Bertei - 2021
    After a decade on the Chitlin Circuit, however, they were ready to write their own material, change their name, and deliver--as Labelle--an electrifyingly celestial sound and styling that reached a crescendo with a legendary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to celebrate the release of Nightbirds and its most well-known track, "Lady Marmalade." In Why Labelle Matters, Adele Bertei tells the story of the group that sang the opening aria of Afrofuturism and proclaimed a new theology of musical liberation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people across the globe.With sumptuous and galactic costumes, genre-bending lyrics, and stratospheric vocals, Labelle's out-of-this-world performances changed the course of pop music and made them the first Black group to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. Why Labelle Matters, informed by interviews with members of the group as well as Bertei's own experience as a groundbreaking musician, is the first cultural assessment of this transformative act.

A Sign of Contradiction


Karol Wojtyła - 2021
    

The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television


Caetlin Anne Benson-Allott - 2021
    Think of the last time you watched a movie: the chair you sat in, the snacks you ate, the people around you, maybe the beer or joint you consumed to help you unwind--all this stuff shaped your experience of media and its influence on you. The material culture around film and television changes how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts of the mediums. Focusing on material cultures of film and television reception, The Stuff of Spectatorship argues that the things we share space with and consume as we consume television and film influence the meaning we gather from them. This book examines the roles that six different material cultures have played in film and television culture since the 1970s--including video marketing, branded merchandise, drugs and alcohol, and even gun violence--and shows how objects considered peripheral to film and television culture are in fact central to its past and future.