From the death of Archimedes at the hands of an irritated Roman soldier to the concoction of a superconducting witches' brew at the close of the twentieth century, the stories in Eurekas and Euphorias pour out, told with wit and relish by Walter Gratzer. Open this book at random and you may chance on the clumsy chemist named Sapper who broke a thermometer in a reaction vat and made the discovery that launched the modern dyestuff industry. Or the physicist who dissolved his gold Nobel Prize medal in acid to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. We meet mathematicians and physicists in prison cells, and even in a madhouse, making important advances in their field. And we witness the careers, sometimes tragic, sometimes carefree, of the great women scientists, from Hypatia of Alexandria, to Sophie Germain and Sonia Kovalevskaya, to Marie Curie and her relentless battle with the French Academy. A glorious parade unfolds to delight the reader, with stories to astonish, to instruct, and most especially, to entertain.

    This ideology, Professor Lipset observes, defines the limits of political debate in the United States and shapes our society.American Exceptionalism explains why socialism has never taken hold in the United States, why Americans are resistant to absolute quotas as a way to integrate blacks and other minorities, and why American religion and foreign policy have a moralistic, crusading streak.

    The New RabbiThe center of this compelling chronicle is Har Zion Temple on Philadelphia’s Main Line, which for the last seventy-five years has been one of the largest and most influential congregations in America. For thirty years Rabbi Gerald Wolpe has been its spiritual leader, a brilliant sermonizer of wide renown--but now he has announced his retirement. It is the start of a remarkable nationwide search process largely unknown to the lay world--and of much more. For at this dramatic moment Wolpe agrees to give extraordinary access to Fried, inviting him--and the reader—into the intense personal and professional life of the clergy and the complex behind-the-scenes life of a major Conservative congregation. These riveting pages bring us a unique view of Judaism in practice: from Har Zion’s strong-willed leaders and influential families to the young bar and bat mitzvahs just beginning their Jewish lives; from the three-days-a-year synagogue goers to the hard core of devout attendees. We are touched by their times of joy and times of grief, intrigued by congregational politics, moved by the search for faith. We witness the conflicts between generations about issues of belief, observance, and the pressures of secular life. We meet Wolpe’s vigorous-minded ailing wife and his sons, one of whom has become a celebrity rabbi in Los Angeles. And we follow the author’s own moving search for meaning as he reconnects with the religion of his youth. We also have a front-row seat at the usually clandestine process of choosing a new rabbi, as what was expected to be a simple one-year search for Rabbi Wolpe’s successor extends to two years and then three. Dozens of résumés are rejected, a parade of prospects come to interview, the chosen successor changes his mind at the last minute, and a confrontation erupts between the synagogue and the New York–based Conservative rabbis’ “union” that governs the process. As the time comes for Wolpe to depart, a venerated house of worship is being torn apart. And thrust onto the pulpit is Wolpe’s young assistant, Rabbi Jacob Herber, in his first job out of rabbinical school, facing the nearly impossible situation of taking over despite being technically ineligible for the position--and finding himself on trial with the congregation and at odds with his mentor. Rich in anecdote and scenes of wonderful immediacy, this is a riveting book about the search for personal faith, about the tension between secular concerns and ancient tradition in affluent America, and about what Wolpe himself has called “the retail business of religion.” Stephen Fried brings all these elements to vivid life with the passion and energy of a superbly gifted storyteller.

    In this first volume of a five-volume collection of parashat hashavua, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks explores these intersections as they relate to universal concerns of freedom, love, responsibility, identity and destiny. Rabbi Sacks fuses Jewish tradition, Western philosophy and literature to present a highly developed understanding of the human condition under God s sovereignty. Erudite and eloquent, Covenant & Conversation allows us to experience Rabbi Sacks sophisticated approach to life lived in an ongoing dialogue with the Torah. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, 2009.

    Steeped in fact, and meticulously researched, Clouds Across the Sunis the story of just one of these children. From Naples, Florida, New York City, and Washington D.C. to Israel and then the killing grounds of Vilnius, Poland (Lithuania) this story is one of great romance, discovery, redemption, and enlightenment as Jotto Wells unravels the intrigue surrounding a plan to take over the government of the United States."

    In unusually candid interviews conducted by former 60 Minutes producer Abigail Pogrebin, celebrities ranging from Sarah Jessica Parker to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from Larry King to Mike Nichols, reveal how resonant, crucial or incidental being Jewish is in their lives. The connections they have to their Jewish heritage range from hours in synagogue to bagels and lox; but every person speaks to the weight and pride of their Jewish history, the burdens and pleasures of observance, the moments they’ve felt most Jewish (or not). This book of vivid, personal conversations uncovers how being Jewish fits into a public life, and also how the author’s evolving religious identity was changed by what she heard.Dustin Hoffman, Steven Spielberg, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers, and Leonard Nimoy talk about their startling encounters with anti-Semitism. Kenneth Cole, Eliot Spitzer, and Ronald Perelman explore the challenges of intermarriage.Mike Wallace, Richard Dreyfuss, and Ruth Reichl express attitudes toward Israel that vary from unquestioning loyalty to complicated ambivalence. William Kristol scoffs at the notion that Jewish values are incompatible with Conservative politics.Alan Dershowitz, raised Orthodox, talks about why he gave up morning prayer. Shawn Green describes the pressure that comes with being baseball’s Jewish star.Natalie Portman questions the ostentatious bat mitzvahs of her hometown.Tony Kushner explains how being Jewish prepared him for being gay. Leon Wieseltier throws down the gauntlet to Jews who haven’t taken the trouble to study Judaism. These are just a few key moments from many poignant, often surprising, conversations with public figures whom most of us thought we already knew.“When my mother got her nose job, she wanted me to get one, too. She said I would be happier.”—Dustin Hoffman“It’s a heritage to be proud of. And then, too, it’s something that you can’t escape because the world won’t let you; so it’s a good thing you can be proud of it.” —Ruth Bader Ginsburg“My wife [Kate Capshaw] chose to do a full conversion before we were married in 1991, and she married me as a Jew. I think that, more than anything else, brought me back to Judaism.”—Steven Spielberg“As someone who was born in Israel, you’re put in a position of defending Israel because you know how much is at stake.”—Natalie Portman“Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving . . . if you’re not handsome and you’re not athletic and you’re not rich, there’s still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.”—Mike Nichols“I felt not only this enormous pride at being a Jew; I felt this enormous void at not being a better Jew.”—Ronald O. Perelman“American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.”—Leon Wieseltier“I thought if I had straight hair and a perfect nose, my whole career would be different.”—Sarah Jessica Parker“I’ve always rebelled a little when people say, ‘My Jewish values lead me to really care about the poor.’ I know some Christians who care about the poor, too.”—William Kristol“There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.”—William Shatner“‘Jew bastard’ was something I heard a lot.”—Leonard Nimoy. “I always liked shiksas.”—Larry King“It specifically says in the Torah that you can eat shrimp and bacon in a Chinese restaurant.”—Jason Alexander“Yom Kippur is something I do alone, with nobody else, because I believe that my relationship with God is mine and mine only.”—Diane von Furstenberg

    Anxious about the prognosis, lost in a blur of technical jargon, and fatigued from worry or pain, people who are ill are easily overwhelmed by treatment choices. Told through eight gripping clinical dramas, Second Opinions reveals the forces at play in making critical medical decisions. Dr. Jerome Groopman illuminates the world of medicine where knowledge is imperfect, no therapy is without risks, and no outcome is fully predictable. He portrays moments of astute diagnosis and misguided perception, of lifesaving triumphs and shattering failures.These real-life lessons prepare us to navigate the uncertain terrain of illness, and enable us to balance intuition and information, and thereby make the best possible decisions about our health and future.

    . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —ModiglianiAmedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso.Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.”In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic.And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another.Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .

    Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, and the author of such acclaimed bestsellers as Chutzpah, The Best Defense, and Reversal of Fortune, for the first time recounts his legal biography, describing his struggles academically at Yeshiva High School growning up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, his successes at Yale, clerking for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, his appointment to full professor at the Harvard at age 28, the youngest in the school's history. Dershowitz went on to work on many of the most celebrated cases in the land, from appealing (successfully) Claus Von Bulow's conviction for the murder of his wife Sunny, to the O.J. Simpson trial, to defending Mike Tyson, Leona Helmsley, Patty Hearst, and countless others.  He is currently part of the legal team advising Julian Assange.

    Living Inspired Akiva Tatz Ever wondered why there is no parking on Golders Green Road on Wednesday nights? Because Wednesday night is Coffee Lounge and Deluxe Desserts with..

    His ideas spread like wildfire across Europe, offering the scientific view that the natural world, including the soul of man, was a proper subject of study. The rediscovery of these ancient ideas sparked riots and heresy trials, caused major upheavals in the Catholic Church, and also set the stage for today's rift between reason and religion. In Aristotle's Children, Richard Rubenstein transports us back in history, rendering the controversies of the Middle Ages lively and accessible-and allowing us to understand the philosophical ideas that are fundamental to modern thought.

    Kahn sought the spiritual in his powerful forms, and encouraged his students to seek the essential nature of architecture. His Philadelphia-based practice was responsible for such masterpieces as the Richards Medical Research building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Yale Art Gallery extension in New Haven, Connecticut; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; the government complex at Dhaka, Bangladesh; and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.This title, in the same format as our highly successful Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students, contains a little-known essay by Kahn on his sources of inspiration, an interview with the architect on his working methods and his vision for the future of the profession, and writings on Kahn by Michael Bell and Lars Lerup, contributors to our title Stanley Saitowitz. Louis Kahn: Conversations with Students is the latest title in the series from the Rice University School of Architecture.

    But who are these people? What is their world really like? Sharon Traweek, a bold and original observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum.

    But in this fascinating book, Annemarie Schimmel shows that numbers have been filled with mystery and meaning since the earliest times, and across every society.In The Mystery of Numbers Annemarie Schimmel conducts an illuminating tour of the mysteries attributed to numbers over the centuries. She begins with an informative and often surprising introduction to the origins of number systems: pre-Roman Europeans, for example, may have had one based on twenty, not ten (as suggested by the English word "score" and the French word for 80, quatrevingt—four times twenty), while the Mayans had a system more sophisticated than our own. Schimmel also reveals how our fascination with numbers has led to a rich cross-fertilization of mathematical knowledge: "Arabic" numerals, for instance, were picked up by Europe from the Arabs, who had earlier adopted them from Indian sources ("Algorithm" and "algebra" are corruptions of the Arabic author and title names of a mathematical text prized in medieval Europe). But the heart of the book is an engrossing guide to the symbolism of numbers. Number symbolism, she shows, has deep roots in Western culture, from the philosophy of the Pythagoreans and Platonists, to the religious mysticism of the Cabala and the Islamic Brethren of Purity, to Kepler's belief that the laws of planetary motion should be mathematically elegant, to the unlucky thirteen. After exploring the sources of number symbolism, Schimmel examines individual numbers ranging from one to ten thousand, discussing the meanings they have had for Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions, with examples from Indian, Chinese, and Native American cultures as well. Two, for instance, has widely been seen as a number of contradiction and polarity, a number of discord and antithesis. And six, according to ancient and neo-platonic thinking, is the most perfect number because it is both the sum and the product of its parts (1+2+3=6 and 1x2x3=6). Using examples ranging from the Bible to the Mayans to Shakespeare, she shows how numbers have been considered feminine and masculine, holy and evil, lucky and unlucky.A highly respected scholar of Islamic culture, Annemarie Schimmel draws on her vast knowledge to paint a rich, cross-cultural portrait of the many meanings of numbers. Engaging and accessible, her account uncovers the roots of a phenomenon we all feel every Friday the thirteenth.

    Indeed, there is a direct line between the record-shattering investing performance of Buffett (and other value investors) and Graham’s life. In six books and dozens of papers, Graham—known as the "Dean of Wall Street"—left an extensive account of an investing system that, as Buffett can attest, actually works! This biography of Benjamin Graham, the first written with access to his posthumously published memoirs, explains Graham’s most essential wealth-creation concepts while telling the colorful story of his amazing business career and his multifaceted, unconventional personal life. The author distills the best from Graham’s extensive published works and draws from personal interviews he conducted with Warren Buffett, Charles Brandes, and many other top US and global value investors as well as Graham’s surviving children and friends, weaving Graham’s transformational ideas into the narrative of a momentous life and legacy. Warren Buffett once said, "No one ever became poor by reading Graham." By the same token, no one will ever become uninspired by reading Carlen’s lively account of Benjamin Graham’s fascinating life and time-tested techniques for generating wealth.