They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy.Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.

    Baker reminds us, for instance, not to forget that it was thanks in great part to Churchill and England that Mussolini ascended to power so quickly, and that, before leading the United States against Nazi Germany, a young FDR spent much of his time lobbying for a restriction in the number of Jews admitted to Harvard. Conversely, Human Smoke also reminds us of those who had the foresight to anticipate the coming bloodshed and the courage to oppose the tide of history, as Gandhi demonstrated when he made his symbolic walk to the ocean -- for which he was immediately imprisoned by the British.Praised by critics and readers alike for his gifted writing and exquisitely observant eye, Baker offers a combination of sweeping narrative history and a series of finely delineated vignettes of the individuals and moments that shaped history that is guaranteed to spark new dialogue on the subject.

    Two white house maids, a remarkable mother and her daughter, reveal what it was really like upstairs, downstairs at the white house.

    Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face.Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family.Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond's ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

    The middle-class pair become victims of the same brutal violence that the poor and powerless suffer.

    "Bold and unhesitating".--Times Literary Supplement (London). 16 pages of photos.

    He must fight for his place against the bullies in his Depression-shadowed Bronx neighborhood and his own frail health. As a young man, he must start anew and define his own path of personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout father and everything he has been taught...

    Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors -- from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity.

    But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascending as a mature global city. It raises questions: What role does a mayor play in a city's temperament and self-confidence? Can a terrible mayor make a city better by forcing its citizens to engage? What place is there in our new decentralized, global, open-source world for an autocrat?Edward Keenan serves as senior editor and lead columnist at The Grid magazine in Toronto, Ontario. An eight-time finalist at the National Magazine Awards, he has written for and edited at Eye Weekly, Spacing magazine, and The Walrus.

    A professor's wife, Juliet, already feeling too far from the excitements of city life in her small Canadian college-town, obligingly journeys with husband David (and their two children) even further: to Kerala in southern India, for David's research sabbatical year.

    The conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged. One of the few survivors of the conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had used his positions in the Gestapo and the Abwehr (military intelligence) to further the anti-Nazi plot. Valkyrie, an abridgment of Gisevius's classic insider's account To the Bitter End, is an intimate memoir as riveting as it is exceptional.

    Our hero tells of his childhood: his passion for hunting, his love of the wild landscape of Romania, his ridiculous social snobbery. He leads us through his youth, and between fantastic and colourful stories of Bucharest in the late twenties and early thirties, he dissects his own complicated, at times agonizing, development as a moral creature. We are with him as the Nazis take over Austria; as his own anti-semitism - already such a mixture of belief, caprice, and compromise - is shaken to its core. And later on we meet him as a much older man, one haunted by his own protean character, by the beautiful but tragic web of memories and events that together form his history, and by the greatest love of his life, a beautiful Jewess.

    For two millennia the Jews, dispersed all over the world, prayed for a return to Zion. Until the nineteenth century, that dream seemed a fantasy, but then a secular Zionist movement was born and soon the initial trickle of Jewish immigrants to Palestine turned into a flood as Jews fled persecution in Europe. From these beginnings, Martin Gilbert traces the events and personalities that would lead to the sudden, dramatic declaration of Statehood in May 1948.From that point on, Israel's history has been dominated by conflict: Suez, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon and the Intifada. Using contemporary documents and eyewitness accounts, drawing on his own intimate knowledge of the country and its people, Martin Gilbert weaves together a seamless, page-turning history of a powerful and proud nation,with a new chapter to cover the last ten years, bringing the story right up to date: the continuing conflicts, and the ever-present avenues of hope.

    She is the descendant of a three-thousand-year-old tribe of Jews -- the oldest community in diaspora, a people largely unknown to the outside world. He is a singer in the royal court, a wealthy man known for his good looks and his charm. A decade later, she will become the first woman in her ghetto ever to have left her husband. Against the backdrop of two hundred years of history, CRY OF THE PEACOCK traces the story of a Jewish woman caught in the turmoil of twentieth-century Iran. Told in a series of wondrous linked tales that weave a rich and epic tapestry, it is a magical journey inside the Iranian nation and its people. For the first time in any Western language this story of Iranian Jews offers an insider's glimpse into one of the most critical parts of the world today.

    He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.