Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family


David Kaczynski - 2016
    But as the couple pored over the Unabomber's seventy-eight page manifesto, David couldn't rule out the possibility. It slowly became clear to them that Ted was likely responsible for mailing the seventeen bombs that killed three people, and injured many more. Wanting to prevent further violence, David made the agonizing decision to turn his brother in to the FBI.Every Last Tie is David's highly personal, and powerful, memoir of his family, as well as a meditation on the possibilities for reconciliation and maintaining family bonds. Seen through David's eyes, Ted was a brilliant, yet troubled, young mathematician, and a loving older brother. Their parents were supportive, and emphasized to their sons the importance of education and empathy. But as Ted grew older he became more and more withdrawn, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and he often sent angry letters to his family from his isolated cabin in rural Montana.During Ted's trial David worked hard to save Ted from the death penalty, and since then he has been a leading activist in the anti–death penalty movement. The book concludes with an afterword by psychiatry professor, and forensic psychiatrist, James L. Knoll IV, who discusses the current challenges facing the mental health system in the United States, as well as the link between mental illness and violence.

Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon


Buzz Aldrin - 2009
    The event remains one of mankind’s greatest achievements and was witnessed by the largest worldwide television audience in history. In the years since, millions more have had their Earth-centric perspective unalterably changed by the iconic photograph of Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon, the blackness of space behind him and his fellow explorer and the Eagle reflected in his visor. Describing the alien world he was walking upon, he uttered the words “magnificent desolation.” And as the astronauts later sat in the Eagle, waiting to begin their journey back home, knowing that they were doomed unless every system and part on board worked flawlessly, it was Aldrin who responded to Mission Control’s clearance to take off with the quip, “Roger. Understand. We’re number one on the runway.”The flight of Apollo 11 made Aldrin one of the most famous persons on our planet, yet few people know the rest of this true American hero’s story. In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin not only gives us a harrowing first-person account of the lunar landing that came within seconds of failure and the ultimate insider’s view of life as one of the superstars of America’s space program, he also opens up with remarkable candor about his more personal trials–and eventual triumphs–back on Earth. From the glory of being part of the mission that fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to reach the moon before the decade was out, Aldrin returned home to an Air Force career stripped of purpose or direction, other than as a public relations tool that NASA put to relentless use in a seemingly nonstop world tour. The twin demons of depression and alcoholism emerged–the first of which Aldrin confronted early and publicly, and the second of which he met with denial until it nearly killed him. He burned through two marriages, his Air Force career came to an inglorious end, and he found himself selling cars for a living when he wasn’t drunkenly wrecking them. Redemption came when he finally embraced sobriety, gained the love of a woman, Lois, who would become the great joy of his life, and dedicated himself to being a tireless advocate for the future of space exploration–not only as a scientific endeavor but also as a thriving commercial enterprise.These days Buzz Aldrin is enjoying life with an enthusiasm that reminds us how far it is possible for a person to travel, literally and figuratively. As an adventure story, a searing memoir of self-destruction and self-renewal, and as a visionary rallying cry to once again set our course for Mars and beyond, Magnificent Desolation is the thoroughly human story of a genuine hero.

The Guiltless


Hermann Broch - 1950
    Broch's characters—an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name (Broch mostly refers to him as A.); a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, the lady's maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta to gentleman A., and metes out her own justice against the "empty wickedness" of her betters—are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of "wakeful somnolence." These men and women may mention the "imbecile Hitler," yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. In Broch's mind this kind of ethical perversity and political apathy paved the way for Nazism.Broch believed that writing can purify, and by revealing Germany's underlying guilt he hoped to purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui?very human failings—evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous.About the Translator:Ralph Manheim translated Hourglass by Danilo Kis and numerous works by Gunter Grass, including The Tin Drum. He has edited and translated novels and plays by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, and Erich Maria Remarque.

By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture At the Dawn of the Atomic Age


Paul S. Boyer - 1985
    Paul Boyer argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima. The book is based on a wide range of sources, including cartoons, opinion polls, radio programs, movies, literature, song lyrics, slang, and interviews with leading opinion-makers of the time. Through these materials, Boyer shows the surprising and profoundly disturbing ways in which the bomb quickly and totally penetrated the fabric of American life, from the chillingly prophetic forecasts of observers like Lewis Mumford to the Hollywood starlet who launched her career as the 'anatomic bomb.' In a new preface, Boyer discusses recent changes in nuclear politics and attitudes toward the nuclear age.

India an Introduction


Khushwant Singh - 1990
    Khushwant Singh tells the story of the land and its people from the earliest time to the present day. In broad, vivid sweeps he encapsulates the saga of the upheavals of a sub-continent over five millennia, and how their interplay over the centuries has molded the India of today. More, Khushwant Singh offers perceptive insights into everything Indian that may catch one's eye or arouse curiosity: its ethnic diversity, religions, customs, philosophy, art and culture, political currents, and the galaxy of men and women who have helped shape its intricately inlaid mosaic. He is also an enlightening guide to much else: India's extensive and varied architectural splendors, its art and classical literature. Khushwant Singh's own fascination with the subject is contagious, showing through on every page, and in every sidelight that he recounts. India: An Introduction holds strong appeal for just about anyone who has more than a passing interest in the country, Indians as well as those who are drawn to it from farther afield. And for a traveller, it is that rare companion: erudite, intelligent, lively

QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults


Van Badham - 2021
    In this daring investigation, Van exposes some of the internet’s most extreme communities to understand conspiracy cults from the inside. QAnon and On is the story of the modern internet, the farscape of political belief and a disinformation pipeline built between the two that poses an ongoing threat to democracy itself. Shocking and mesmerising in equal measure, this book will open our eyes to the dangers of partisan belief.

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State


Lisa McGirr - 2015
    Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House.This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny.The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe


Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks - 1993
    Merry Wiesner has updated and expanded her prize-winning study; she has added new sections on topics such as sexuality, masculinity, the impact of colonialism, and women's role as consumers. Other themes investigated include the female life cycle, literacy, women's economic role, artistic creation, female piety--and witchcraft--and the relationship between gender and power. Accessible, engrossing, and lively, this book will be of central importance for those interested in gender history, early modern Europe, and comparative history.

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 2021
    Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred years and spanning the entire country. At road's end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story--as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community's most important issues, down to today.In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black church has always been more than a sanctuary; it's been a place to nourish the deepest human needs and dreams of the African-American community. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meeting houses were subject to surveillance, and often destruction. So it continued, long after slavery's formal eradication; church burnings and church bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and others have always been a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the struggle for equality for the African-American community. The past often isn't even past--Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church 193 years after the church was first burned down by whites following a thwarted slave rebellion.But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the vital center of the civil rights movement, and produced many of its leaders, from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on, but at the same time there have always been churches and sects that eschewed a more activist stance, even eschewed worldly political engagement altogether. That tension can be felt all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of today. Still and all, as a source of strength and a force for change, the Black church is at the center of the action at every stage of the American story, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

The Nazi War on Cancer


Robert N. Proctor - 1999
     Several hours before the Germans launched the deadliest campaign in military history in 1941, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the minister of popular enlightenment and propaganda, were discussing the timing of their imminent invasion of the Soviet Union. According to Goebbels' journals, the two worked on Hitler's speech, and marveled at the ways in which they were planning to defeat communism and change the map of Europe. But that night, Hitler and Goebbels also discussed the recent advances in cancer research made by Nazi doctors in their pursuit of a "sanitary utopia." As science historian Robert N. Proctor exposes in his provocative new book The Nazi War on Cancer, the Nazi medical establishment was years ahead of the rest of the world in public health reform and research. Proctor is far from being a revisionist historian, and recognizes the extreme sensitivity of his subject matter. In fact, he is a cautious and elegant writer who frequently reminds readers of his earlier book, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, in which he documents the horrors of Nazi medical experiments. In this book, however, he finds that some Nazi scientific research was actually path-breaking and may have developed some of the era's most successful cancer prevention programs. As Proctor is careful to distinguish, The Nazi War on Cancer is not a book that champions Nazi medical practices; rather, it is "abookabout fascism, and a book about science," as the author seeks to understand how "fascism suppressed certain kinds of science&[and] how fascist ideals fostered research directions and lifestyle fashions that look strikingly like those we today might embrace." Until now, historians' focus on Nazi medical research has traditionally concentrated on political and racial ideology, because "little might appear to be gained by pointing to Nazi success in fighting food dyes, tobacco, or occupational dust." But the extraordinary work conducted during the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras was undeniable — German medicine and public health was the envy of the world at that time. In what is perhaps one of Proctor's most astounding revelations, evidence of the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was published as early as 1929 by Nazi physician Fritz Lickint, though cigarette incriminating studies didn't appear in England and the United States until 1950. Hitler was a virulent anti-smoker, and his regime launched one of the most aggressive anti-tobacco campaigns of the twentieth century. By 1938, smoking was banned in many offices, hospitals and rest homes, and "no-smoking" cars were established on all German trains by the following year. According to one propaganda poster, Hitler attributed his "performance at work" to his ability to resist both nicotine and alcohol. Diet was also important to the Nazis, and public health officials strongly promoted the consumption whole-grain breads, vegetables, and fruits, and other foods that were low in fat, high in fiber, and free of artificial colorings and preservatives. Germans were also encouraged to consult their physicians regularly for early cancer detection, and women were taught how to perform breast self-examinations as early as 1936. As one poster caption read: "Every automobile gets a regular checkup; that is obvious. Shouldn't the much more complicated machine of the human body also get regular checkups?" Why were Nazis so concerned with cancer prevention? Proctor notes that cancer "expressed larger cultural idioms" and became "a metaphor for all that was seen as wrong with society." Because of this, the German body "belonged" to the Führer, and good health was considered a citizen's duty. Because Nazi public health workers attributed improper diet as a major contributor to cancer, the effort to become the master race could only be achieved through healthy living. As one Hitler Youth manual asserted, "Nutrition is not a private matter!" It is far from Proctor's intention to express the simplistic and irresponsible sentiment that "good can come from evil" by bringing readers' attention to the progress made by Nazi scientists. Instead, this brave and sophisticated account brilliantly evokes the nuances of ethical paradoxes, as Proctor successfully points out our "need to better understand how the routine practice of science can so easily coexist with the routine exercise of cruelty." —Kera Bolonik

One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery


Karyn L. Freedman - 2014
    Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an apartment in Paris to a French courtroom, then from a trauma center in Toronto to a rape clinic in Africa. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault and when many women are still ashamed to come forward, Freedman’s book is a moving and essential look at how survivors cope and persevere.At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman’s personal experience with the latest philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized. Using her background as a philosopher, she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on recent theories of posttraumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequences of sexual violence for love and relationships, and she illustrates the steep personal cost of sexual violence and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman’s book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide—and must be addressed.One Hour in Paris is essential reading for survivors of sexual violence; an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims; and a powerful book for anyone interested in issues of gender and social justice.

The Book of Skulls


Faye Dowling - 2011
    Since its 1970 s renaissance in the iconic album designs of bands such as the Grateful Dead, the skull has found its way into the visual vocabulary of urban life, adorning T-Shirts, badges and rock memorabilia as the ultimate symbol of anarchy and rebellion. Repurposed and recast by artists, illustrators and designers, it has become one of the most iconic cultural symbols of our time. In response to this cultural phenomenon, The Book of Skulls presents a cool visual guide to the skull, charting its rebirth through music and street fashion to become today s ultimate anti-establishment icon. From Black Sabbath to Cypress Hill, skater punk graffiti to Gothic tattoos, from high-couture to Hello Kitty and Dali to Damien Hirst, this book is the ultimate collection of cool and iconic skull motifs. Drawing together artwork from music, fashion, street art and graphic design The Book of Skulls is a celebration of one of today s most iconic cultural symbols.

Slim to None: A Journey Through the Wasteland of Anorexia Treatment


Jennifer Hendricks - 2003
    fought to be cured of anorexia nervosa. But as the diary she kept shows, a widespread lack of understanding about eating disorders and scattergun treatment programs make the battle almost insurmountable . . . a sorrow to read."--The New York Times"Patients' voices can all too easily be forgotten in the world of mental health care, but Jenny's voice rings strong. Through this earnest and captivating exposure, her father succeeds in keeping her story alive."--David B. Herzog, M.D., president and founder of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center

For Adam's Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England


Allegra Di Bonaventura - 2013
    Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England’s history, but it was hugely impactful on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges.

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s


Donald Worster - 1979
    Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms.Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecologicalissues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have beenproposed, such as the Buffalo Commons, where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies thatonce existed.