Lawyer and columnist Dershowitz, author of Reversal of Fortune looks back over his life experiences, specific cases, and historic causes to reflect on his generation of Jews in the US - the changes they've seen, the changes they've created and the changes that must still take place.

    Depicting her personal life in extraordinary detail -- her student days at Oxford, her Communist activities, her early affairs, and her enduring marriage to John Bayley -- he also deftly interprets her philosophical works and twenty-six novels with brilliant clarity and insight. Murdoch emerges as a writer who in her early years imagined herself as the heir to George Eliot but later found a kinship with Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, his obsessions with sadomasochism, and his philosophical fascination with moral anarchy. Relying on ninety-five hitherto unseen diaries, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of letters, Conradi has written a riveting biography that is as much an absorbing history of literary England from 1940 to the present as it is a vivid depiction of one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.

    The meeting -- which lasted ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense disagreement.An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-siécle Vienna, Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible, larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.

    Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound.

    But few know the palace intrigue behind their long-standing triangular relationship. Going behind the headlines, documentaries and mini-series, PRINCE ANDREW exposes for the first time the unknown details of the Epstein scandal behind secretive palace gates and how it impacted on the power struggle between Andrew and his older brother Prince Charles.Rife with machinations and plots, it paints a rare and riveting, insider picture of vice and rarified daily life at the royal court. It is an unbelievable story how a boy from Coney Island befriended the world's foremost royal family. PRINCE ANDREW casts a truly eye-watering light on one of the dirtiest stories of our time, giving the reader much-needed forensic insight into all the facts, allegations and counter-allegations.

    This book and soon-to-be-released private tapes are sure to bring the extent of Bruce's influence into sharp focus. Photo insert.

    In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis, ascended to prominent, dangerous roles, and were very lucky to survive. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate determination and rare talent, they emerged as leading voices of modern literature and biology, each receiving the Nobel Prize in their respective fields. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished and unknown material gathered over several years of research, Brave Genius tells the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into extraordinarily creative and engaged individuals. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events--of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.

    . . the myth of Ayn Rand gives way to a full-sized portrait in contrasting colors, appealing and appalling, potent and paradoxical. . . . it takes a special kind of nerve to write such a book."--Norman Cousins, author of Head First and The Healing HeartAyn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century-its popular impact ranked second only to the Bible in a major poll. Millions know Rand as one of this century's great thinkers, writers, and philosophers, yet much about the private Ayn Rand remains shrouded in mystery.Who was Ayn Rand?My Years with Ayn Rand charts the course of the clandestine, tempestuous relationship between the enigmatic author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and Nathaniel Branden-her young disciple and future pioneer of the self-esteem movement. In this book, discover the real Ayn Rand through the eyes of the man who became her soul mate and shared her passions and philosophical ideals.Their tragic and tumultuous love story began with a letter written by Branden as an admiring teenage fan and Anded, more than twenty years later, with accusations of betrayal and bitter recriminations. My Years with Ayn Rand paints an unforgettable portrait of Ayn Rand-whose ideas, even today, can generate a maelstrom of controversy.

    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.

    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.

    Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought & restored it to its true place as an active & creative force thru which knowledge of the world is achieved.

    What emerges is the study of a man caught in conflicts between family loyalties and his own passionate nature, between the call to political action and devotion to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten poor whites. Exploring Camus's impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, his underground activities during the Occupation in Paris, the intrigues of the French literati who embraced him after the publication of his first novel, L'Etranger, Todd uncovers the solitary private man behind the mask of his celebrity. He shows us a writer isolated by his own success, crippled by the charms of women he could not resist, debilitated by the tuberculosis that did not kill him. The auto accident that did adds only to the ironies in the life of this international giant of twentieth-century literature.

    Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This biography shows the extent to which Smith's great works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of one of the most ambitious projects of the Euruopean Enlightenment, a grand “Science of Man" that would encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on Smith’s death in 1790.Nick Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s intellectual ancestry and shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith’s ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume.

    Haunted by the crimes in which he'd participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--& obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion & justice, silence & truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?In this important book, 53 distinguished men & women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors & victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China & Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past. Often surprising, always thought provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion & responsibility.

    Evans), Ian Kershaw's Hitler is a new, distilled, one-volume masterpiece that will become the standard work. From Hitler's origins as a failed artist in fin-de-siecle Vienna to the terrifying last days in his Berlin bunker, Kershaw's richly illustrated biography is a mesmerizing portrait of how Hitler attained, exercised, and retained power. Drawing on previously untapped sources, such as Goebbels's diaries, Kershaw addresses crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust, and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively.