Professor Elie Wiesel was instrumental in my translating and researching my mother’s journals. My awakening to the dark period in the chapter of the Jewish history happened between 1971-1974 at CCNY, when our paths crossed while I was taking his classes at the department of Jewish studies. It was in his classes that the things that bewildered me as a child growing up in communist Poland in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath started to make sense. I asked my mother to commit to paper the painful memories, she buried deep inside her. She and the next generations have an obligation to bear witness, to be this history's keepers.
The famous Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil." Not monsters, but ordinary people were able to follow Hitler’s murderess ideology. Ordinary Men clearly shows how men and women from all walks of life were capable of becoming cold-blooded killers. Ordinary Men were the Nazi mobile gas units and death squads responsible for the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Poland & Ukraine.
When determination, vision, and the necessity to survive forced a small country, Israel, perform miracles. No matter the difficulties and challenges, from draining the swamps and turning the desert green, the vision for a better tomorrow, to be free and self-determined people made this country and her citizens rise above fear and embrace hope.
In 1934, eleven-year-old Shimon Peres emigrated to the land of Israel from his native Poland, leaving behind an extended family who would later be murdered in the Holocaust. Few back then would have predicted that this young man would eventually become one of the towering figures of the twentieth century. Peres would indeed go on to serve the new state as prime minister, president, foreign minister, and the head of several other ministries. He was central to the establishment of the Israeli Defense Forces and the defense industry that would provide the young state with a robust deterrent power. He…
Remembering the heroes, Witold Pilecki got himself arrested. After two and half years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, he escaped. He witnessed the brutality, the mass gassing of Europe’s Jews, thousands each day. He was among the first to set off the alarms that Auschwitz was the epicenter of the Nazis' plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER
“Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe
The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage…
This book is an excellent account of the disaster that the communist regime brought on its people. I grew up under communism and, together with my family, experienced a parallel disaster. Government controlled media, stores that were always empty, rationed medicine, and the daily trading for food on the illegal black market. The Communist Party Leaders had access to everything, and the people had nothing.
I see very clearly how life is so much different from the way I grew up and how my daughters were able to grow up in America. I feel very fortunate to have been able to come to this country after waiting in line for five years.
A groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine: winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2011
'A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
'A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to…
I came to America as a young teenager, and my interest in learning America’s history stayed with me till today. David McCullough is an amazing storyteller; using firsthand accounts, letters, and diaries, his books become powerful.
After a hazardous journey, Americans, politicians, architects, artists, doctors, and writers, traveled to the city of lights, Paris. They learn a new culture, achieve success, and return home to greatly alter American history. This, in a sense, is my story as well. I have always had that strong attitude of being grateful, of being able to exist in a free world.
The Greater Journey focuses on the period between 1830 and 1900, when hundreds of Americans--many of them future household names like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Samuel Morse, John Singer Sargent and Harriet Beecher Stowe--migrated to Paris. McCullough shows first how the City of Light affected each of them in turn, and how they later moved back to America to help shape American art, medicine, writing, science, and politics in profound ways.The Greater Journey is filled with wonderful descriptions of the old Paris before it was re-made by Haussmann's grand boulevards, and of the city's great places, especially the Louvre,…
Memory is Our Home is a thirty-year account that reveals the vibrant life of my family and of Eastern European, twentieth-century Jewish history and culture. The firsthand accounts link together Jewish life during the interwar years, Poland under the Nazi’s murderess grip, and the fate of Jews surviving throughout Russia and Uzbekistan during WWII.
My mother survived against all odds, and in the midst of all the tragedy, she even experienced love. What followed was a shocking repatriation home to Poland, to the “vast graveyard” and Jewish life under a new kind of oppression, communism. Interwoven with my mother’s journals are stories she told me throughout my life and my own recollections from life in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath into the late 1960s.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
