As a young army officer in the late nineteenth century serving in conflicts in India, South Africa, and the Sudan, his attitude toward the Empire was the Victorian paternalistic approach - at once responsible and superior.Conscious even then of his political career ahead, Churchill found himself reluctantly supporting British atrocities and held what many would regard today as prejudiced views, in that he felt that some nationalities were superior to others, his (some might say obsequious) relationship with America reflected that view. America was a former colony where the natives had become worthy to rule themselves, but - he felt - still had that tie to Britain. Thus he overlooked the frequently expressed American view that the Empire was a hangover from a bygone era of colonisation, and reflected poorly on Britain's ability to conduct herself as a political power in the current world order. This outmoded attitude was one of the reasons the British voters rejected him after a Second World War in which he had led the country brilliantly. His attitude remained decidedly old-fashioned in a world that was shaping up very differently. However, it would be a mistake to consider Churchill merely as an anachronistic soldier. He grasped the problems of the Cold War immediately, believing that immature nations prematurely given independence would be more likely to be sucked into the vortex of Communism. This view chimed with American foreign policy, and made the Americans rather more pragmatic about their demands for self-governance for Empire countries. This ground-breaking volume reveals the many facets of Churchill's personality: a visionary leader with a truly Victorian attitude toward the British Empire.

    An ex-U.S. Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison and rose to become the Slots King of Shanghai. "Dapper" Joe Farren--a Jewish boy who fled Vienna's ghetto--ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivalled Ziegfeld's.In 1940, Lucky Jack and Dapper Joe bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation, and war. They thought they ruled Shanghai, but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction left in their wake. Shanghai was their playground for a flickering few years, a city where for a fleeting moment even the wildest dreams could come true.

    Not a propitious time and place for a Jewish child to be born.One memory that has been etched indelibly in my mind is the sight of the Nazi army marching toward Russia. Our house was located on the main road leading to the Russian frontier. Day and night they marched - soldiers, trucks, tanks, and more soldiers, in a never ending line - an invincible force. I remember my father, holding me in his arms, saying to my mother, "Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Russians." One night, my father had a dream. In this dream he saw what he had to do: where to build the bunker, how to build it, and even its dimensions.He would build a bunker under a wooden storage shed behind the house. It would be covered with boards, on top of which would be placed soil and bits of straw which would render it invisible. In order to camouflage the entrance, he would construct a shallow box and fill it with earth and cover it with straw so that it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the earthen floor. Air would be supplied through a drain pipe buried in the earth. This was to be our Noah's Ark that would save us from the initial deluge. It took my father about three weeks to finish the job. When he was done, he took my mother and sister into the shed and asked them if they could find the trap door. When they could not, he was satisfied.My mother prepared dry biscuits, jars of jam made out of beets, some tinned goods such as sardines, some sugar and salt. We placed two buckets in the bunker. One bucket was filled with water, the other bucket was empty and would serve as the latrine. We also took down some blankets, a couple of pillows and some warm clothing. We were ready.For three long years, starting in 1941 when the Nazis started the deportations and mass killings, we hid in secret bunkers, dug in fields, under sheds, or constructed in barn lofts. It seems that the only way that a Jew could survive in wartime Poland was to become invisible. So we became invisible Jews.

    With no other family, except each other, they build a world that revolves around Sidonia's extraordinary talent with a needle and thread to create beautiful garments while Hanna serves as her dutiful model. As Sidonia becomes well-known in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut for her remarkable sewing talent, she continues to keep her inner secrets about her past hidden not only from her daughter but from everyone else. Determined to craft a life of pride, self-reliance and perseverance, Sidonia teaches her daughter to "stand up straight" in fashion and in life. Sidonia's Thread uses sewing metaphors to tell the tale of these two women as though stitched together like a handmade garment. Why did Sidonia keep these significant life secrets, and why was Hanna so afraid to ask about them? When Sidonia moves to elderly housing, Hanna steals some of her old letters and photographs hoping to find clues to her paternity, her mother's reclusive behavior, and her heritage. Combined with a trip to her mother's Hungarian homeland and a phone conversation with her father, Hanna's surprising discoveries inspire a revised view of her life with her mother, replacing her conflicting emotions toward her mother with true reverence.

    This is without a doubt one of the most fascinating testimonies of that dark period, thanks to the author's ability not only to recount what he endured, but also to reflect on his feelings back then, in the camps. Existential difficulties preceded the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, yet nothing could have been worse than the extermination camps.Moshe was 15 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, yet he passed the selection and survived. The Nazis sent the occupants of his barrack to their death, while he managed to slip out of their hands, and survived. He was sent to Buchenwald, worked in hard labor in the quarry, and survived. By joining a new work group, on the spur of the moment, he arrived at a labor camp in Magdeburg Germany, where he also managed to survive. There were 2,800 prisoners with him at Magdeburg, 400 remained when the Nazis dismantled the camp and returned its inhabitants to Buchenwald. Only 200 completed the journey, and when liberation day came only 40 survived, including the 17-year-old author.

    On what would have been my daughter's 29th birthday, Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher knocked on the door and told me my beautiful Becky was dead. Found buried in a shallow grave in a remote field, Becky had been brutally murdered.'When Becky Godden-Edwards was killed, her mother Karen awoke to a world where the truth was never guaranteed; where taxi driver Christopher Halliwell got away with murder and the police officer who found her daughter was punished instead. This is Karen's story. Despite unimaginable tragedy, her love for her daughter has been unbreakable: from her despair through Becky's troubled teenage years, to the agonising eight years when Becky was missing, and then the dramatic story of how a killer's confession led to a terrible discovery. The one constant has been Karen's determination to fight for Becky, tirelessly campaigning for the truth about what happened to be heard and for Halliwell to face the consequences of his evil actions. *The murders of Becky Godden-Edwards and Sian O'Callaghan will soon be the focus of major new ITV series A Confession starring Martin Freeman as Stephen Fulcher and Imelda Staunton as Karen Edwards*

    In September 1939, Bella was a carefree teenager living in Poland when the German army struck. She was rounded up with her friends and family and sent to a series of grim Jewish ghettos. After loved ones were separated and lost through the war years, Bella survived by changing her identity. Narrowly escaping death each time, she moved from place to place, odd job to odd job, new name to new name. After finding the birth certificate of a Catholic girl five years her senior, she became Sabina Mazurek. Then she went into the eye of the storm, Germany, where she believed she might be safest. "Sabina is her story. As in "Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank and "Night" by Elie Wiesel, Bella Kuligowska marshaled unexpected resources to manage as a teen during the horrors of World War II. Sabina offers a different perspective on how many Jews survived outside of the concentration camps, in more familiar yet infinitely hostile settings, with the help of others along the way.

    Until his death in 2005, he taught languages to ghetto kids, heads of industry and movie stars in a matter of days, succeeding even with people who considered themselves hopeless linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seemed to be a miracle worker with a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind.This unique understanding was gained under extreme circumstances. Stateless in Vichy France at the beginning of the Second World War, he was incarcerated and starved in a concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrenees. Forced into slave labour in a coal mine in Provence, he avoided being sent to Auschwitz by hiding within the confines of a deportation camp for six weeks.He escaped death to join the Secret Army of the Resistance. He was arrested and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyon, whom he deceived into releasing him, and was later re-arrested by the French Gestapo and tortured. He held out by entering a psychological state in which he no longer registered pain and after six hours of torture, his tormentors threw him into a cell and he survived to re-join the Resistance. After the Allies invaded France he joined the American forces, fought his way into Germany and was with the troops who liberated Dachau. He personally interrogated the camp’s hangman and oversaw his handwritten confession.At the end of the war he became a Nazi-hunter. Working for American Counter Intelligence he posed as a Nazi himself to infiltrate and expose underground networks of SS men dedicated to the return of a Fourth Reich.In spite of the fact that his entire family had been murdered in Auschwitz, and many close friends killed in combat, at the very end of the war he staged an elaborate gala evening in Munich which he called a Reconciliation Concert. Using German musicians, and in defiance of strict Allied non-fraternisation laws, he brought friend and foe together in the belief that there had to be a different and better future.Author Christopher Robbins has dug deep to explore and substantiate the details of the Michel Thomas story. He has authenticated every episode through camp records, Vichy documents, Resistance papers, US Army reports and hundreds of hours of interviews with this extraordinary man. The result is one of the most inspirational stories of the 20th century.

    But from Pearl Harbor on, he often wrote passionate accounts of America's wars based on his own firsthand experience. Vietnam was no exception.Thomas E. Barden's Steinbeck in Vietnam offers for the first time a complete collection of the dispatches Steinbeck wrote as a war correspondent for Newsday. Rejected by the military because of his reputation as a subversive, and reticent to document the war officially for the Johnson administration, Steinbeck saw in Newsday a unique opportunity to put his skills to use. Between December 1966 and May 1967, the sixty-four-year-old Steinbeck toured the major combat areas of South Vietnam and traveled to the north of Thailand and into Laos, documenting his experiences in a series of columns titled Letters to Alicia, in reference to Newsday publisher Harry F. Guggenheim's deceased wife. His columns were controversial, coming at a time when opposition to the conflict was growing and even ardent supporters were beginning to question its course. As he dared to go into the field, rode in helicopter gunships, and even fired artillery pieces, many detractors called him a warmonger and worse. Readers today might be surprised that the celebrated author would risk his literary reputation to document such a divisive war, particularly at the end of his career.Drawing on four primary-source archives--the Steinbeck collection at Princeton, the Papers of Harry F. Guggenheim at the Library of Congress, the Pierpont Morgan Library's Steinbeck holdings, and the archives of Newsday--Barden's collection brings together the last published writings of this American author of enduring national and international stature. In addition to offering a definitive edition of these essays, Barden includes extensive notes as well as an introduction that provides background on the essays themselves, the military situation, the social context of the 1960s, and Steinbeck's personal and political attitudes at the time.

    Fascinating!" —Ann Rule, New York Times Bestselling Author"While Ted Bundy might be the greatest evil enigma ever, author Rebecca Morris strips away the layers of the greatest mystery of his life—what was his connection to the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr? This is an astonishing achievement, the missing piece that readers of crime have long sought. Bravo for Morris!" —Gregg Olsen, New York Times Bestselling AuthorAt age three he was using knives to frighten his teenage aunt. By fourteen he was a thief, animal abuser, and peeping tom who liked to pull little girls into the woods to scare them.Ted Bundy killed at least thirty-five girls and women, and possibly hundreds. Was his first victim eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr who disappeared from their Tacoma, Washington, neighborhood in 1961?Her body was never found and there were no clues, just two tenacious detectives who spent the rest of their lives trying to solve the case.Was Bundy telling the truth when he told a hypothetical story about killing Ann and dumping her into a muddy pit?With new information about Ted Bundy's childhood, interviews with those who knew him best, and the memories of the Burr family, Ted and Ann is the story of one the 20th century's most fascinating cold cases.Rebecca Morris is an award-winning journalist who has worked in radio and television news in New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington. A native Oregonian, her reporting has appeared in The Seattle Times, The Oregonian, People, Entertainment Weekly, New York Newsday, American Theatre, and many other publications. She lives in Seattle.