To The Women: words to live by


Donna Ashworth - 2020
    

Sach Kahun Toh: An Autobiography


Neena Gupta - 2021
    It details the big milestones in her life, her unconventional pregnancy and single parenthood, and a successful second innings in Bollywood. A candid, self-deprecating portrait of the person behind the persona, it talks about her life's many choices, battling stereotypes, then and now, and how she may not be as unconventional as people think her to be.

The End: Hamburg 1943


Hans Erich Nossack - 1948
    It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable and moving memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country. "A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Waterloo: The Hundred Days


David G. Chandler - 1980
    Describes events following Napoleon's return from Elba leading up to the Battle of Waterloo, and provides a detailed chronicle of the Waterloo campaign, with maps providing a visual presentation of troop movements.

Rethinking the Holocaust


Yehuda Bauer - 2000
    Drawing on research he and other historians have done in recent years, he offers fresh opinions on such basic issues as how to define and explain the Holocaust; whether it can be compared with other genocides; how Jews reacted to the murder campaign against them; and what the relationship is between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.The Holocaust says something terribly important about humanity, says Bauer. He analyzes explanations of the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Goetz Aly, Daniel Goldhagen, John Weiss, and Saul Friedländer and then offers his own interpretation of how the Holocaust could occur. Providing fascinating narratives as examples, he deals with reactions of Jewish men and women during the Holocaust and tells of several attempts at rescue operations. He also explores Jewish theology of the Holocaust, arguing that our view of the Holocaust should not be clouded by mysticism: it was an action by humans against other humans and is therefore an explicable event that we can prevent from recurring.

Long Shots: Jay Wright, Villanova, and College Basketball’s Most Unlikely Champion


Dana O'Neil - 2017
    The shot and second national title in school history were the culmination of 15 years of Coach Jay Wright painstakingly building the unheralded program, through ups and downs, heartbreak and triumph. In Long Shots: Jay Wright, Villanova, and College Basketball’s Most Unlikely Champion, ESPN senior writer Dana O’Neil uses exclusive access to Coach Wright and Nova basketball to delve into the inner-workings of a championship program. In the spirit of A Season on the Brink, O’Neil not only explores behind-the-scenes of the historic 2015-2016 NCAA championship season but also the improbable path that the Nova program took to college basketball immortality. In overcoming a disappointing NCAA Tournament track record, the breakup of the Big East conference as we knew it, and Nova’s underdog status among traditional college hoops powerhouses, Jay Wright and his team provided the blueprint for how a “have-not” can prevail over the blue bloods the right way – the Villanova Basketball Way.

Travellers in the Third Reich


Julia Boyd - 2017
    How easy was it to know what was actually going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by the propaganda or predict the Holocaust?Travellers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, journalists, fascists, artists, tourists, even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler – one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes and its ultimate destruction.

Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem


Carolyn G. Heilbrun - 1995
    Here, Heilbrun illuminates the life and explores the many facets of Steinem's complex life, from her difficult childhood to the awakening that changed her into the most famous feminist in the world. Intimate and insightful, here is a biography that is as provocative as the woman who inspired it. Photos.

Bismarck and the German Empire


Erich Eyck - 1950
    But he was much more; he had an itellectual ascendancy over all the politicians of his day, and his superiority was acknowledged not only by his own people, but by all European statesmen.The unification of Germany, the defeat of Austria, the fall of the Second Empire, the defeat of France, the alliance of the German Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, the dismemberment of Denmark—these are his most obvious achievements; no less important was the transformation in the national consciousness of the German people, for which Bismarck was also responsible. Dr. Eyck has analyzed not only the personality but also the accomplishments of a statesman whose influence on Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century was more far-reaching than that of any other man in his time.This edition contains minor corrections and a new foreword by the author's son Frank Eyck, also a nineteenth-century historian, evaluating some of the important publications in the field since the book appeared and illuminating his father's attitude to Bismarck.

That Close: a memory of combat in Vietnam


Robert Driskill - 2017
    The memoir tells his story starting from the ambivalence he had about being drafted through the firefights and wounds he experienced in Vietnam to the estrangement he felt as he walked out of Walter Reed hospital into a civilian world not very interested in a faraway war. It also tells a tale of the commonplace courage of the twenty-year-old infantrymen of Charley Company, 5th of the 12th, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, and of the cowardice and character flaws of a Lieutenant more interested in his own glory and advancement than the well-being of his platoon. The good, the bad, and the ugly of a country and an army fighting a distant war for unclear purposes are all on display in this account focused on nine months of war in 1969.

Killing Hitler: The Plots, The Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death


Roger Moorhouse - 2006
    What historian Roger Moorhouse reveals in Killing Hitler is just how close–and how often–history came to taking a radically different path between Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and his ignominious suicide. Few leaders, in any century, can have been the target of so many assassination attempts, with such momentous consequences in the balance. Hitler’s almost fifty would-be assassins ranged from simple craftsmen to high-ranking soldiers, from the apolitical to the ideologically obsessed, from Polish Resistance fighters to patriotic Wehrmacht officers, and from enemy agents to his closest associates. And yet, up to now, their exploits have remained virtually unknown, buried in dusty official archives and obscure memoirs. This, then, for the first time in a single volume, is their story. A story of courage and ingenuity and, ultimately, failure, ranging from spectacular train derailments to the world’s first known suicide bomber, explaining along the way why the British at one time declared that assassinating Hitler would be “unsporting,” and why the ruthless murderer Joseph Stalin was unwilling to order his death. It is also the remarkable, terrible story of the survival of a tyrant against all the odds, an evil dictator whose repeated escapes from almost certain death convinced him that he was literally invincible–a conviction that had appalling consequences for millions.

A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders


Simon Farquhar - 2016
    In September 1970, two boys met in the playground on their first day at secondary school in North London. They formed what would be described at the Old Bailey thirty years later as ‘a unique and wicked bond’. Between 1982 and 1986, striking near lonely railway stations in London and the Home Counties, their partnership took them from rape to murder. Three police forces pooled their resources to catch them in the biggest criminal manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper Enquiry.A Dangerous Place is the first full-length account of the crimes of John Duffy and David Mulcahy. Told by the son of one of the police officers who led the enquiry, exhaustively researched and with unprecedented access, this is the story of two of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century and the times they operated in. It is the story of the women who died at their hands. It is the story of the women who survived them, and who had the courage to ensure justice was done. And it is the story of a father, told by a son.

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America


Peggy Pascoe - 2009
    Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Good Cop, Bad Daughter: Memoirs of an Unlikely Police Officer


Karen Lynch - 2014
    Lynch reflects on her difficult childhood with her bi-polar mother, and comes to realize her chaotic past unwittingly provided the perfect foundation for her chosen career.

The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism


Tina Rosenberg - 1995
    Here, she approaches a similar theme in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, telling a series of riveting human stories to illuminate the paradox that rabid anti-Communism at times resembles Communism. In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and the former East Germany, she talks to erstwhile dissidents now victimized because they are named in old police registers; to low-level agents accused of crimes that were not crimes when committed; and to high officials who now run things just like before. She convincingly suggests that the best antidote to Communism may be, not revenge, but "tolerance and the rule of law."