After its “discovery” by Captain Cook in the late 18th Century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its position as the crossroads of the Pacific.  The arrival of the first missionaries marked the beginning of the struggle between a native culture with its ancient gods, sexual libertinism and rites of human sacrifice, and the rigid values of the Calvinists.   While Hawaii’s royal rulers adopted Christianity, they also fought to preserve their ancient ways.   But the success of the ruthless American sugar barons sealed their fate and in 1893, the American Marines overthrew Lili’uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii.James L. Haley's Captive Paradise is the story of King Kamehameha I, The Conqueror, who unified the islands through terror and bloodshed, but whose dynasty succumbed to inbreeding; of Gilded Age tycoons like Claus Spreckels who brilliantly outmaneuvered his competitors; of firebrand Lorrin Thurston, who was determined that Hawaii be ruled by whites; of President McKinley, who presided over the eventual annexation of the islands. Not since James Michener’s classic novel Hawaii has there been such a vibrant and compelling portrait of an extraordinary place and its people.

    One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the tangled history that binds the two sides of his family. For generations, the men of the al-Raqb family have served as watchmen of the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, built at the site where the infant Moses was taken from the Nile. Joseph learns of his ancestor Ali, a Muslim orphan who nearly a thousand years earlier was entrusted as the first watchman of the synagogue and became enchanted by its legendary--perhaps magical--Ezra Scroll. The story of Joseph's family is entwined with that of the British twin sisters Agnes and Margaret, who in 1897 depart their hallowed Cambridge halls on a mission to rescue sacred texts that have begun to disappear from the synagogue.The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is a moving page-turner of a novel from acclaimed storyteller Michael David Lukas. This tightly woven multigenerational tale illuminates the tensions that have torn communities apart and the unlikely forces--potent magic, forbidden love--that boldly attempt to bridge that divide.Praise for The Last Watchman of Old Cairo"A beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is both a coming-of-age story and a family history, a wide-ranging book about fathers and sons, religion, magic, love, and the essence of storytelling. This book is a joy."--Rabih Alameddine, author of the National Book Award finalist An Unnecessary Woman

    Ever since it was first published in 1740 in Amsterdam, it has enjoyed great renown and was eventually adopted as a basic text for ethical study. Throughout the long history of its publication, Mesillat Yesharim fell prey to many printers' errors. A breakthrough in its restoration occurred with the remarkable discovery by Ofeq Institute of a manuscript of an earlier version in the form of a dialogue, in the author's own hand. With this discovery and the aid of the first edition, Mesillat Yesharim was restored to its original state. Over the last decade, Ofeq Institute has published both versions of Mesillat Yesharim, the Dialogue and the Thematic, in Hebrew, twin editions. For although the two versions share the same content, they each supplement elements missing in the other. Of pivotal importance are the added chapters at the beginning of the Dialogue Version. These shed light on the profound nature of the work as a whole. It has now become common practice to study the two versions together, for the Dialogue Version reveals the brilliance of Mesillat Yesharim for all who seek to deepen their understanding of it. Ofeq has now published a new Hebrew-English edition of both versions in one volume utilizing an innovative facing-column format. With its completely new translation, invaluable commentary, Introduction and Epilogue (Bein Hamesilot), and extensive cross-referencing, this new edition allows the brilliance of the original to shine through. Available in two bindings: Hebrew-bound, i.e. right-to-left as with a standard Hebrew book, and English-bound, i.e. left-to-right as with a standard English book.

    There, one man and his five brilliant sons made their fortune as court agents to a royal prince. It would take Napoleon’s earth-shattering quest to conquer Europe to scatter the five brothers to the four winds, but when the dust of war settled, there was a Rothschild brother and a Rothschild bank in five cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples, and Vienna. The era of haute finance had begun, and the legend of a banking dynasty more powerful than any royal family in history was established. In this book, you will follow the progress of the Rothschild family through the centuries. Their ranks included not only bankers and financiers but doctors, scientists, bomb experts, and collectors who amassed not only some of the finest art collections in Europe, but also one of the finest bug collections. Find out for yourself how the Rothschilds prevented wars, crowned and uncrowned kings, helped win the battle of Waterloo, looked down their noses at Nazis, and established a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

    They kept up their intrigues and opium smuggling while helping to rescue 18,000 Jews from Hitler's Europe, and though they soon faced the tsunami that was communism, their legacy remains today.

    Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered patients brought to the emergency room. But this night of turmoil and death takes a horrifyingly personal turn. His wife's body is found among the dead, with massive injuries, the police coldly announce, typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers. As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari is torn between cherished memories of their years together and the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a life far removed from the comfortable, assimilated existence they shared. From the graphic, beautifully rendered description of the bombing that opens the novel to the searing conclusion, The Attack portrays the reality of terrorism and its incalculable spiritual costs. Intense and humane, devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemics, it probes deep inside the Muslim world and gives readers a profound understanding of what seems impossible to understand.

    In doing so they took control of their lives -- and those of other people -- and made the world do their will.Extremely accomplished, well-educated, and unusually literate, courtesans exerted an incredible influence as leaders of society. They were not received at court, but inhabited their own parallel world -- the demimonde -- complete with its own hierarchies, etiquette, and protocol. They were queens of fashion, linguists, musicians, accomplished at political intrigue, and, of course, possessors of great erotic gifts. Even to be seen in public with one of the great courtesans was a much-envied achievement.

    By the end of the war, all but a few hundred of them had died in bombing raids or, more commonly, in death camps. This is the real-life story of some of the few of them - a young mother, a scholar and his countess lover, a black-market jeweler, a fashion designer, a Zionist, an opera-loving merchant, a teen-age orphan - who resourcefully, boldly, defiantly, luckily survived. In hiding or in masquerade, by their wits and sometimes with the aid of conscience-stricken German gentiles, they survived. They survived the constant threat of discovery by the Nazi authorities or by the sinister handful of turncoat Jewish "catchers" who would send them to the gas chambers. They survived to tell this tale, which reads like a thriller and triumphs like a miracle.

    It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit after Shabbat services on his way to bring tobacco to his dying grandfather, long before Oscar and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves first hosed down with DDT then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of diverse cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Massoud Hayoun, the Jewish Arab journalist that Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family’s story.To reclaim a cosmopolitan, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a world before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that until now could be witnessed only in the films his family treasured but that are now nearly lost amid the flood of culture.When We Were Arabs, a stunning debut that showcases the gorgeous prose of writer Massoud Hayoun, tells the stories of Oscar and Daida, bringing their worlds alive in vivid poetic prose, and in so doing shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines between us over which we do battle.

    With cinematic power and beauty, bestselling author David Laskin limns his own genealogy to tell the spellbinding tale of the three drastically different paths that his family members took across the span of 150 years. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Laskin’s great-great-grandfather, a Torah scribe named Shimon Dov HaKohen, raised six children with his wife, Beyle, in a yeshiva town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. The pious couple expected their sons and daughters to carry the family tradition into future generations. But the social and political upheavals of the twentieth century decreed otherwise. The HaKohen family split off into three branches. One branch emigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; one branch went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; and the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the Holocaust. In tracing the roots of his own family, Laskin captures the epic sweep of twentieth-century history. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is an eloquent masterwork of true grandeur—a deeply personal, dramatic, and universal account of a people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.

    This cult represents Masonic and Jewish bankers who finagled a monopoly over government credit which allows them to charge interest on funds they create out of nothing. Naturally they want to protect this prize by translating it into a political and cultural monopoly. This takes the form of a totalitarian world government dedicated to Lucifer, who represents their defiance of God. Thus, the people who hold our purse strings are conspiring against us. To distract and control us, they have used a vast occult network (Freemasonry) to infiltrate most organizations, especially government, intelligence agencies, education and the mass media. We are being re-engineered to serve the Illuminati. They undermine institutions like marriage and religion, and promote depravity, dysfunction, corruption and division. They have orchestrated two world wars and are planning a third. Henry Makow describes this conspiracy and shows how human history is unfolding according to Illuminati plan.

    Thoughtful and inspiring, it offers a rare vision of hope that will redefine what we think about our neighbors, our future, and ourselves.In this timely, provocative, and uplifting journey, the bestselling author of Walking the Bible searches for the man at the heart of the world's three monotheistic religions -- and today's deadliest conflicts.At a moment when the world is asking, "Can the religions get along?" one figure stands out as the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One man holds the key to our deepest fears -- and our possible reconciliation. Abraham.Bruce Feiler set out on a personal quest to better understand our common patriarch. Traveling in war zones, climbing through caves and ancient shrines, and sitting down with the world's leading religious minds, Feiler uncovers fascinating, little-known details of the man who defines faith for half the world.Both immediate and timeless, Abraham is a powerful, universal story, the first-ever interfaith portrait of the man God chose to be his partner. Thoughtful and inspiring, it offers a rare vision of hope that will redefine what we think about our neighbors, our future, and ourselves.

    "Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic." -- Oscar Wilde

    Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, it advanced in three centuries from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at its height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched the empire's aid. In its last three hundred years the empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. In this striking evocation of the empire's power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In doing so, he also offers a long look back to the origins of problems that plague present-day Kosovars and Serbs.

    But it is far more than that. In this book, social historian and TV presenter Ruth Goodman tells the story of how the development of the coal-fired domestic range fundamentally changed not just our domestic comforts, but our world. The revolution began as far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when London began the switch from wood to coal as its domestic fuel – a full 200 years before any other city. It would be this domestic demand for more coal that would lead to the expansion of mining, engineering, construction and industry: the Domestic Revolution kick-started, pushed and fuelled the Industrial Revolution.There were other radical shifts. Coal cooking was to change not just how we cooked but what we cooked (causing major swings in diet), how we washed (first our laundry and then our bodies) and how we decorated (spurring the wallpaper industry). It also defined the nature of women’s and men’s working lives, pushing women more firmly into the domestic sphere. It transformed our landscape and environment (by the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, London’s air was as polluted as that of modern Beijing). Even tea drinking can be brought back to coal in the home, with all its ramifications for the shape of the empire and modern world economics.Taken together, these shifts in our day-to-day practices started something big, something unprecedented, something that was exported across the globe and helped create the world we live in today.