who resettles in Nigeria. The novel is a meditation where several generations of women riff on ideas of faith, expectation, identity, and independence. It's a poignant conversation between the dead and the living, the past and the present, and a young woman grappling to find her place in it all.

    It was the largest country in the world, stretching from the Black Sea on the eastern edge of Europe to the Bering Straits in the extreme east of Asia. Even by rail, it took over ten days to travel from one side of the country to the other. Its standing army of over 1.3 million men was the largest in the world, and the “Russian Steamroller” was regarded as one of the most potent military forces available to any ruler.At that point, Russia even seemed close to attaining one of its longest held and most significant ambitions: control over a warm water port in the Pacific. Russia had controlled the city of Vladivostok since 1860, and this had become its major port in the Pacific, but Vladivostok was bound by ice for much of the year, so Russia sought an ice-free port in the region. The collapse of the Manchu dynasty in China seemed to offer an opportunity, but it also brought Russia into conflict with an emerging power in the region: Japan.The overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the restoration of the rule of the Meiji emperor in 1868 had brought swift and fundamental change to Japan. Before 1868, Japan was largely agrarian and with a society run on traditional, feudal lines. Under the new emperor, a process of industrialization began that used ideas from the west to transform Japan by the early 1890s into a significant military power in the region. The Japanese Empire sought control over natural resources in the Korean peninsula, which brought them into conflict with China. This conflict erupted into war between China and Japan in 1894.The sudden and unexpected rise of Japanese influence in the region was opposed by Russia, Germany, and France, who threatened war with Japan unless the terms that ended the war were changed. Reluctantly, the Japanese agreed to withdraw from Manchuria, but they never forgot or forgave what they saw as the way in which the unwarranted European influence was used against them.Japanese suspicions were reinforced when Russia subsequently concluded a treaty of alliance with China and forced the tottering regime to grant a lease of the Liaodong peninsula to Russia. Russian troops occupied Port Arthur and began to build massive fortifications around the city. The port was linked to Russia by a new railroad that connected to the Trans-Siberian Railroad at the Chinese city of Harbin. Russia also insisted on the right to use its troops to defend the new railroad throughout its length in China. Although the terms by which Russia leased the port from China were temporary, it was clear that Port Arthur was intended to become Russia’s new warm-water port on the Pacific.To most observers, it seemed clear that Japan and Russia were destined to come into conflict in Korea and Manchuria. Both empires were set on expansion, and both saw these areas as important. However, Russia’s vastly larger population, army, and navy seemed to make it inevitable that Japan would lose if the conflict escalated into war. Few could have foreseen that when war came, it would reveal that Russian power was largely an illusion. That would be underscored by one of the war’s most famous events, a bizarre battle that involved a makeshift Russian fleet under the command of an irascible and unstable admiral sailing around the world to meet its fate.(source: Amazon)

    Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the president to give arms to any nation if it was in America’s national interest. With that, America was able to support Great Britain without declaring war on Nazi Germany or Italy and thereby officially embroiling the country in World War II. Roosevelt convinced Congress to send aid to Great Britain on the basis that the U.S. would be defending four essential freedoms, and in August 1941, Roosevelt went so far as to secretly meet British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Canada, after which the two issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of Allied goals in the war. It largely reiterated the kind of ideals put forth by Woodrow Wilson a generation earlier, but it also specified that an Allied victory would not lead to territorial expansion or punitive punishment, clearly hoping to avoid what happened at Versailles at the end of World War I. Neutrality was officially over, but war was not yet on for the Americans.Though Roosevelt could not have known it at the time, the Lend-Lease Act would quickly come to include an altogether different country than Britain. In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, 3 million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Nazi Germany and its allied states – notably Hungary and Romania – stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.Operation Barbarossa was the most fateful decision of World War II, and when it gave the Soviets common cause with the British (and subsequently the Americans), the purpose of the Lend-Lease Act changed in nature as well. The bulk of Germany’s formidable armed forces were committed to the offensive in the east, which relieved the pressure on the British and meant that a German attack on Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe was not going to happen, so keeping the Soviets in the war became the most essential goal of the supply program.Getting supplies to the Soviets to help them resist the German armies became a strategic imperative, and Iran’s geography of bordering the Persian Gulf to the south and Soviet territory to the north brought Iran to the front and center in the strategic supply effort. The German invasion devastated much of European Russia, but also devastated Ukraine and Belarus, other member “republics” in the Soviet Union, and the portions of the Soviet Union that bordered on Iran were Armenia, Azerbaijan and east of the Caspian, Turkmenistan.During the fighting, the Soviet Union suffered about 25 million killed, with recent estimates placing that huge total even higher. About half of those losses were military, and half civilians. Total German military killed in action or missing in World War II were about 5.2 million, and something like 75-80% of those German military losses were on the Eastern Front. Statistics can be only approximate because of the prolonged chaotic conditions and the immense destruction. The huge area fought over was also the principal arena of the Holocaust, and a literal decimation of the population of Poland.There were three routes available for sending aid to the Soviet Union. The first route used was the northern route for shipping, which rounded the top of Scandinavia, to the Arctic ports Murmansk and Archangel in the extreme north of the U.S.S.R. This was the shortest route, but it ran a gauntlet of German submarines, surface raiders and aircraft. Convoys assembled from ports in Britain, Canada, and Iceland, and then were shepherded by numerous naval escorts.(source: Amazon)

      Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right. A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.

    What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!” – Golda MeirIsrael’s Day of Independence, Yom Ha’atzmaut, is celebrated on the fifth day of the Hebrew calendar in the month of Iyar. It is immediately preceded by Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for the fallen Israeli soldiers who gave their lives for Israel’s establishment. Emphasis switches from the memorial celebration to the celebration of independence a few minutes after sundown.The day on which the state of Israel was signed into existence was May 14, 1948. Many important figures in Israeli history played a part in the establishment of the new state, and among the most iconic is the nation’s first female premier, Golda Meir. Known as the “uncrowned queen of Israel”[1] and “Mother Courage,”[2] Meir was an activist for many years, lobbying for a Jewish state in the Mandate of Palestine. She served in numerous capacities before her appointment as Prime Minister and remains one of the most revered Israeli leaders from the pre-state years through the long-sought dream of a Jewish nation.One of eight children from a poverty-stricken family, she was to become an immigrant to a new land twice in her life. Meir and her parents fled from Kyiv during Russia's antisemitic pogroms in 1905, about a decade after the Dreyfus Affair in France. She grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin before rising the ranks back in the Middle East. When it came to Israel and her role in its early years, she noted, "We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go."As in the days of the Biblical Hebrews’ migration out of Egypt under Pharaoh, finding a Jewish homeland meant the adjustment of national boundaries and the displacement of certain neighboring cultures. In the modern age, this has led to several major military conflicts and the need for an ongoing state of readiness within the Israeli military. Meir found herself at the helm of the Yom Kippur War, a time in which Israel was at its most vulnerable, under attack on multiple fronts against an Arab coalition that surrounded Israel on three sides.(source: Amazon)

    The violent premier of a film star’s lost noir masterpiece. A housekeeper’s final job for her late employer. An exhumation to retrieve a poetry manuscript. Ghosts haunting atomic test sites of the American west. The dangers facing podcasters, mud loggers, and rural veterinarians. Landlords and gods and rocks and monsters.Toadstones is a collection of short stories firmly in the tradition of the weird tale. They evoke the sensation of catching an unnerving movement out of the corner of your eye, of hearing a sudden and unidentifiable skittering in the walls, of dreaming about a strange city where you meet someone you would have sworn died long ago. Explore the uncanny shadows occluding what we thought was a mundane world in these sixteen (that’s twice eight, or four fours; are you tracking the numerology?) stories.Destined to be an underworld classic, these stories by everyone’s favorite anarchocommunist calling upon the aid of Hell will have you believing in the unbelievable—and thinking twice before you let another repair guy in your house.