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I would trace the genesis of Hitler’s Monsters to three distinct influences. The first was my childhood love of Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age comics––Batman, Superman, Captain America, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four––which, as illustrated by the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,are replete with themes of Nazi occultism and border science.The second was a conversation with my thesis advisor early in graduate school, when he noted that he was advising a dissertation on German occultism (Science for the Soul). The third influence was observing the mid-2000s resurgence in rightwing populism across Europe and North America, seemingly fueled by recourse to esoteric and supernatural thinking. The rest, as they say, is history.
Corinna Treitel’s Science for the Souldid for the occult what Goodrick-Clarke’sOccult Roots of Nazismdid for Ariosophy, providing the first comprehensive account of the wide array of occult doctrines and esoteric sciences that flourished in Germany and Austria at the turn of the twentieth century.
While she does include a chapter on occultism in the Third Reich, Treitel is careful not to blame occultism for Nazism, showing how Theosophy and Anthroposophy (the progenitors of Ariosophy), astrology, parapsychology, spiritualism, and other esoteric doctrines provided a socially and politically diverse group of Germans a range of alternative beliefs and practices to help make sense of a modernizing, post-industrial, “disenchanted” world.
One of the two best books, with Anne Harrington’s Reenchanted Science, on the history of German occultism and “border science”.
Germany's painful entry into the modern age elicited many conflicting emotions. Excitement and anxiety about the "disenchantment of the world" predominated, as Germans realized that the triumph of science and reason had made the nation materially powerful while impoverishing it spiritually. Eager to enchant their world anew, many Germans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded by turning to a variety of paranormal beliefs and practices-including Theosophy, astrology, psychical research, graphology, dowsing, and spirit healing. No mere fringe phenomenon, the German occult movement had a truly national presence, encompassing hundreds of clubs, businesses, institutes, and publishers providing and…
After living in, while restoring, an old farmhouse built in the late 17th century or very early in the 18th, it was impossible for me not to want to know the history of the house and the people who lived there. Combine that with the stories my grandmother told me about our ancestor, the suspected witch Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton, and I felt destined to know her story. That led to many years of research and writing. At the moment I am writing another 17th century New England historical fiction. I love this period of history and so few write about it.
Mary Dyer is a forgotten American hero, who suffered unbelievably for her faith. In early Boston Quakers, Baptists, Jews, Catholics—everyone but the Puritans—were banished. She became a Quaker missionary and led what became a hopeless cause: freedom of worship. Her whole story is painful, shocking, and cannot be summed up here without spoilers. The Puritan men who settled the Bay Colony hated and feared women who spoke up. They banished or destroyed them.
This is the story of Mary Dyer whose indomitable efforts to seek and find “freedom to worship” lead eventually to her death. Her quest began when she and her husband sailed from old to new England in 1635. Landing in Boston, they were soon disillusioned by the intolerant practices and beliefs of the Puritans, who considered that all truth could be found in the Old Testament—and only there. Variations, from Puritan interpretations of the Ten Commandments, were punished by cruel torture and/or death. Banished from Boston for protesting such rigidity in belief and in practice, Mary was among the group…
I think it is so important for everyone to be able to see others get their happily ever after. Illness and disability doesn't mean a person can't or shouldn't find love. Everyone should be able to find love. I love seeing characters find their happily ever after even if they aren't physically perfect.
Ok, confession time, I don't remember which book in the series Drew first appears in but if I recall this is the book that really focuses on him and Belinda.
I don't read a lot of Inspirational fiction but I absolutely love the Love Comes Softly series. It was the first romance series I ever read. I read the series initially as a teenager but I have gone back and re-read a few of the books as an adult.
This book has Drew who is missing an arm as a romantic interest for Belinda. The series also features Clark who is the romantic interest in book one and the patriarch of the family in the rest of the series who loses his leg in one of the later books. I adored his story and how him and Marty deal with accepting his injury. However, since Marty and Clark are already…
Book 8 of the bestselling Love Comes Softly series. Leaving her little prairie town, Belinda Davis never dreamed that the excitement of living in Boston would leave her restless and empty inside. Wealth, literature, travel, and romance touched her life with choices and decisions that brought dissatisfaction rather than joy. She discovered that only when God had first place in her life was her peace restored. Belinda once again faces decisions about her life that are no less difficult than before. A very unexpected responsibility makes the choice even harder.
I’m an economist, now in my fiftieth year as a professor at Harvard. While much of my work has focused on economic policy – questions like the effects of government budget deficits, guidelines for the conduct of U.S. monetary policy, and what actions to take in response to a banking or more general financial crisis – in recent years I’ve also addressed broader issues surrounding the connections between economics and society. Several years ago, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, I examined the implications of our economy’s growth, or stagnation, for the social, political, and ultimately moral character of our society. My most recent book explores the connections between economic thinking and religious thinking.
Everyone knows that the Puritans settled in Boston and the Quakers settled in Philadelphia. What I found surprising is Baltzell’s argument that the two cities’ founding religions shaped their respective character for hundreds of years afterward. And, he says, the difference between Puritanism and Quakerism explains why Boston and Philadelphia played such different roles in American history.
Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been…
The roots of my debut novel Charlesgate Confidentialare in the time I spent in Boston, most notably the three years I lived in the Charlesgate building when it was an Emerson College dormitory. I always wanted to find a way to write about that time, but it wasn’t until I immersed myself in the world of Boston crime—not only the novels of Higgins, Lehane, and company but nonfiction works like Black Massand movies like The Departedand The Town—that I hit on the way to tell my story. I’ll always be excited for new Boston-based crime fiction, and I’m happy to share these recommendations with you.
Here’s another PI series set in Boston, and while Carlotta Carlyle is nowhere near as well-known as Spenser, Linda Barnes is every bit as readable as Robert Parker. In her first outing (an Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel), ex-cabbie and ex-cop Carlyle takes on a missing person case that has her tangling with IRA gunrunners.A Trouble of Fools is my pick because it brings the ‘80s Boston I remember to life, and because of the light, humorous voice Barnes lends the proceedings.
This award-winning debut mystery introduces a Boston PI who’s “one of the most sparkling, most irresistible heroines ever to grace the pages of a whodunit” (Chicago Sun-Times).
Six-foot-tall, redheaded ex-cop and Boston-based private eye Carlotta Carlyle is “the genuine article: a straightforward, funny, thoroughly American mystery heroine” (New York Post).
Let go from the Beantown police force for insubordination, Carlotta Carlyle is ready for business. Her first client is the genteel and elderly Margaret Devens, whose brother, Eugene, one of the last in a handful of Boston’s aging Irish cabbies, has suddenly vanished.
I like thinking about the people who misbehaved in the 1700s. As a teenager, I was initially drawn to journalism as a medium for telling stories, but in college, I was entranced by the stories I could tell with early American sources. Years ago, Jan Lewis noted that many readers want “bedtime stories” about how great the American Revolution was, but there’s much more to the Revolution’s history. Now, I’m a history professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City of New York. Having lived in the Boston area and New York City, it’s been a thrill to write books about the American Revolution in both places.
This book made me want to dedicate my life to studying the American Revolution.
Alfred F. Young tells the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a poor, diminutive shoemaker who was at the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. He also touched off a riot that led to a man being tarred and feathered. Hewes spent his whole life as a poor man, but he briefly became a celebrity in his old age. Young uses this fleeting moment of fame to explore how Americans sanitized and distorted the memory of the American Revolution.
This book inspired me to study the American Revolution in the cities, and the forgotten, sometimes violent ways that radicals pushed for greater equality.
George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's. When the Tea Party became a leading symbol of the Revolutionary ear fifty years after the actual event, this 'common man' in his nineties was 'discovered' and celebrated in Boston as a national hero. Young pieces together this extraordinary tale, adding new insights about the role that individual and collective memory play in shaping our understanding of…
I’m a 54-year-old gay man who has led my own messy life here in New York City, marked as much by sex, romance, friendship, and culture as by drug addiction, relationship drama, mental illness and youthful trauma. I’ve published five novels, all of which contain queer characters who’ve not exactly been poster children for mainstream-world-approved LGBTQ behavior. I’m drawn to novels like the ones I’ve mentioned because they show queer people not as the hetero world often would like them to be—sanitized, asexual, witty and “fabulous”—but as capable of dysfunction, mediocrity, unwise choices and poor conduct as anybody else.
One of the most kinetic books I read a few years back and told in a kind of beautiful, white-hot stream of consciousness, Sketchtasy is the tale of young, genderqueer Alexa and her friends navigating pleasure and survival in mid-90s, AIDS-battered Boston.
This is no “model LGBTQ person” book; Alexa and her friends, scarred by trauma and addled by every recreational drug on the planet, are creatures of the night, showing off outrageous looks in the clubs and turning tricks to pay the rent and put food in their mouths.
It’s a breakneck-paced look at both exuberant and terrified young queer people right before HIV went from being a near death sentence to a chronic manageable disease.
Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart—it’s an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-‘90s.
This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting middle-class pretensions, she negotiates past and present traumas with a scathing critique of the world. Drawn to the ecstasy of drugged-out escapades, Alexa searches for nourishment in a gay culture bonded by clubs and conformity, willful apathy, and the specter of AIDS. Is there any…
I am a pediatric emergency physician turned author, and I am passionate about sharing an insider’s view of the emergency room, as well as addressing larger health issues that should be more visible to the general public. The emergency room is a world unlike any other, filled with humor, drama, emotions, and energy twenty-four hours a day, and I like to bring that energy to my stories. I’ve worked in many different medical settings, and every day, I find a new story that is worth sharing.
This is another story that takes me back to my medical training days. A young member of the surgical team makes an impulsive decision that leads to an ethical dilemma and a web of deception.
This story is not only a thriller but addresses important issues related to the ethics of the transplant system. It’s a great read to get a look at the inner workings of the medical system.
'Suspense as sharp as a scalpel's edge. A page-turning, hold-your-breath read' Tami Hoag
HEART-STOPPING TERROR
Dr Abby Di Matteo has made the best - and the worst - decision of her career. Instead of giving a donor heart to the wealthy patient it's been reserved for, she uses it to save a dying boy's life.
Luckily, a new heart appears that's perfectly suited to the original patient, and the furore dies down. But then Abby discovers that the organ has been obtained illegally. Defying the hospital's commands, she starts her own investigation...
And uncovers a murderous conspiracy that will threaten…
As an educator, I’ve experienced the power of true stories to engage readers, widen their world, spur thinking, and support content areas. I’ve learned plenty from these books, too! As an author, I’m fascinated with many aspects of the American Revolutionthat I never learned about as a student. Researching this time period has revealed much more than men at war. The revolution affected every aspect of life—a “world turned upside-down.” Today, we’re fortunate to have a range of stories that help kids understand that history is about people much like them facing the challenges of their time and place.
You may recognize the names of revolutionary era patriots Samuel Adams and John Hancock, an unlikely duo, who led the resistance against British rule in Massachusetts. The British, too, knew their names—but they called them troublemakers.
Here’s a peek behind the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord, when the two men barely escaped capture by the redcoats. I love these kinds of stories that make history come alive and allow us to see the real people in action facing challenges and decisions.
John Hancock and Samuel Adams were an unlikely pair of troublemakers. Hancock was young and dashing. Adams was old and stodgy. But working together, they rallied the people of Boston against the unfair policies of Great Britain and inspired American resistance. And to King George, they became a royal pain.
When the British army began marching toward Lexington and Concord, sending Hancock and Adams fleeing into the woods, the two men couldn't help but worry--this time, had they gone too far?
Rich with historical detail and primary sources, this spirited tale takes readers through ten years of taxes and tea-tossing,…
I know a lot about “ripped from the headlines” news stories because I’ve been around a lot of news stories and headlines most of my life. I’m a longtime New York City journalist who has worked as a top editor at both the NY Post and the NY Daily News. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of wild headlines in these places (e.g., Headless Body in Topless Bar!). So you can understand why I now like ripping from news headlines for fiction books as an author.
I love Hank Phillippi Ryan’s books, and I love big court trials, so it makes perfect sense that I loved this book.
Ryan–who is an award-winning TV journalist as well as a best-selling thriller author–started covering the murder trial of Casey Anthony, the mother who made headlines for allegedly killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee and hiding the body for months, with the idea of doing a non-fiction book about the case.
But, when Anthony was found not guilty by the jury, Ryan switched gears and came up with the idea of doing a mesmerizing fictional novel inspired by a case such as Casey Anthony. The result is a must-read!
Trust Me is the chilling novel of psychological suspense and manipulation that award-winning author and renowned investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan was born to write. "Ryan dazzles―a must read."―Mary Kubica "Mesmerizing!" ―Lisa Gardner
**Now an AGATHA AWARD nominee** Best Contemporary Novel
"A knockout."―Booklist (starred review)Now a Criminal Element Best Book of 2018! Now an >>AMAZON Editors' Pick BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER OF THE MONTH!BOOKLIST Starred review! "A knockout." Now a Criminal Element Best of 2018! Now a REAL SIMPLE Magazine Top Thriller of 2018!Now a Book Bub Top Summer Thriller of 2018!Now a POPSUGAR Top Summer Thriller!Now a CrimeReads Most Anticipated Thriller…
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