Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West

Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West

In Israel and Civilization, acclaimed journalist, legal expert, and pundit Josh Hammer makes a righteous case that the key to the prosperity of the West is the flourishing of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel. Hammer's uplifting offense is our best defense against the enemies of the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. And as Hammer makes clear, manifesting the promise of Israel requires action by the United States and its allies. There can be no overstating the impact of the trauma of October 7, 2023, on the Jewish people. Yet the anti-Israel reactions the world over have been equally devastating. Rallies of hundreds of thousands explicitly or implicitly promoting Hamas violence; demonstrations of Ivy League professors celebrating the pogrom as awesome and exhilarating; so-called human rights organizations that refuse to unequivocally condemn the use of rape as a weapon of war; and a hydra of multiculturalism, postmodern relativism, and tolerance--it all threatens the physical and metaphysical survival of the West and our essential Jewish heritage. Preserving the best of what's been thought and said throughout history and ensuring that there will be centuries more requires a West that is proud of its Jewish heritage. In other words, the continued existence of the Jewish people is inextricably tied to the endurance of Western civilization. Israel is the center of the battle, and Israel and Civilization explains why and how the Jewish state must win.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

The Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize. In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play. Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.

The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward

The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward

In a rare window into some of her life's pivotal moments, Melinda French Gates draws from previously untold stories to offer a new perspective on encountering transitions. "You don't get to be my age without navigating all kinds of transitions. Some you embraced and some you never expected. Some you hoped for and some you fought as hard as you could." - Melinda French Gates Transitions are moments in which we step out of our familiar surroundings and into a new landscape-a space that, for many people, is shadowed by confusion, fear, and indecision. The Next Day accompanies readers as they cross that space, offering guidance on how to make the most of the time between an ending and a new beginning and how to move forward into the next day when the ground beneath you is shifting. In this book, Melinda will reflect, for the first time in print, on some of the most significant transitions in her own life, including becoming a parent, the death of a dear friend, and her departure from the Gates Foundation. The stories she tells illuminate universal lessons about loosening the bonds of perfectionism, helping friends navigate times of crisis, embracing uncertainty, and more. Each one of us, no matter who we are or where we are in life, is headed toward transitions of our own. With her signature warmth and grace, Melinda candidly shares stories of times when she was in need of wisdom and shines a path through the open space stretching out before us all.

A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist

A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist

Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent's crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish. Theo, a successful art dealer at a prestigious Parisian firm, dismissed them as gloomy, unappealing, and, worst of all, unmarketable. By the time Vincent left Paris, almost exactly two years later, he'd transformed himself into one of the most original artists of the age, turning out works of hallucinatory intensity in vivid hues and stamped with his own distinctive personality. A Fire in His Soul chronicles this remarkable transformation. It's a tale filled with tragedy and triumph, personal anguish and creative fulfillment, as Vincent, through sheer force of will, reinvents himself as a painter of unparalleled expressive power. Along the way, the reader will discover an unfamiliar Van Gogh: not the solitary genius of the popular imagination, shunned by an uncomprehending world and conjuring masterpieces from the depths of his lonely soul. In Paris, he was at the center of a community of like-minded seekers. Here, Van Gogh was able to engage in a lively dialogue with fellow artists almost as daring as he was, expanding his notion of what art could and should be. It was in the cafes and studios of Montmartre and in the grand galleries of the Louvre and Luxembourg, that Van Gogh received his artistic education--a crash course that at first disoriented him but ultimately sparked his creative breakthrough. Working alongside such legendary figures as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Signac, Vincent perfected his technique and launched an artistic revolution.

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

A thrilling investigation into the mysterious identity of Bitcoin’s creator and a deep dive into crypto’s utopian origin story—from The New York Times bestselling author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar “Could be the best mystery story of the past twenty years.”—James Patterson “ The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto will leave you amazed, enlightened, and utterly breathless.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought. Nakamoto’s Bitcoin at first seemed destined to fulfill the dreams of fringe 1990s utopians for a currency set free from governments and big banks. Yet after he disappeared, his creation took on a strange new life in the financial markets, where rampant speculation fueled a vision of crypto as a potential windfall, inviting charlatans and scammers and opening a vast gulf between Bitcoin’s idealistic origins and its troubled reputation. But who was Nakamoto? Whoever he was could rightly claim to have invented one of the most important technologies of the new century. And Nakamoto was a billionaire—his Bitcoin wallet held an untouched eleven-figure fortune waiting to be claimed. With the same propulsive-narrative flair that made his New York Times bestseller The Billionaire’s Vinegar an instant success, Benjamin Wallace presents a page-turning work of investigative journalism. Tracking leads from London to Oslo to Los Angeles, from coastal Australia to the Arizona desert, he takes readers through a rogues’ gallery tour of Nakamoto suspects—from benevolent geniuses like cryptographer Hal Finney to difficult ones like a reclusive polymath known to his followers only as Jim; from the mercurial Australian Craig Wright, who claims to be Nakamoto, to a secret team at the National Security Agency. With the forensic skill of Sherlock Holmes and the storytelling verve of Arthur Conan Doyle, Wallace follows the trail of computer code and personal writings to the heart of the Nakamoto mystery while interrogating the very nature of mystery itself.

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

An explosive, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from an award-winning investigative journalist “A page-turning drama that raises life-or-death questions about the world’s largest healthcare conglomerate.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times . His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led to this book—a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world. Harris takes us light-years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding the link of Johnson’s Baby Powder to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics that have cost countless lives, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. Filled with shocking and infuriating but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture. From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools-sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation-were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people. Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection. Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions-a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet

An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski -- President Carter's national security advisor and one of America's leading geopolitical thinkers -- from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union's demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw -- the heart of central Europe's bloodlands -- Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland's razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump's first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America's "Cold War University" -- and who ousted Washington's gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run U.S. foreign policy for so long. Brzezinski's impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow's "Achilles heel" -- the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow's grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush's Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history's orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.

Terrestrial History: A Novel

Terrestrial History: A Novel

Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough-and then things go terribly wrong. Joe Mungo Reed's intricately crafted novel expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars. Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland's First Minister. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph, if only he can persuade people to band together. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn't offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond-in contravention of all Andrew stands for.In considering which concerns should guide us in a time of crisis-social, technological, or familial-and reckoning with the question of whether there is meaning to be found in the pursuit of salvation beyond success itself, Joe Mungo Reed has written a novel of elegiac wonder and beauty.

Counting Backwards

Counting Backwards

A middle-aged couple struggles with the husband's descent into early-onset Lewy Body dementia in this profound and deeply moving novel shot through with Kirshenbaum's lacerating humor. It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the street. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to visual impairment-they are something he and his wife, Addie, can joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities that mimic myriad brain disorders: aphasia, the inability to perform simple tasks, Capgras Syndrome, audial hallucinations he believes to be real. The doctors have no answers. Leo, a scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, had a loving and happy marriage. But as his periods of lucidity become rarer, Addie finds herself less and less able to cope. Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with Lewy Body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot come home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie's agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo's diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die-too soon, and yet not soon enough. Kirshenbaum captures the couple's final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease, as well the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them amid the larger tides of loss.

Happy Land

Happy Land

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family's ties to a real-life American kingdom in this transporting and riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Award-winning author of Take My Hand. In the hills of Appalachia, there once existed a land ruled by a king and a queen. Inspired by distant memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom and started lives on mountain land that they owned. They worked hard, lived well, and loved there. For a time the kingdom thrived...and then it disappeared. Present Day. Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she's determined to get answers while she still can. But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki a shocking story about her great-great-great-grandmother Queen Luella and the very land they are standing on. Land that Mother Rita says must be protected. The more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she finds in the woods-who are buried beneath stone grave markers-the more she understands that sometimes, atonement for the previous generations' mistakes falls squarely on the shoulders of the descendants. And it's up to her to make things right.

Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

Reading Silent Spring as an outgrowth of Rachel Carson's love with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell argues for the power of queer love now in the fight against climate change. There is something major missing from most accounts of Silent Spring and its impact: namely, Dorothy Freeman, with whom Rachel Carson had a love relationship for over a decade. Freeman had a summer house with her husband, Stan, on the island of Southport, Maine, where Carson settled after the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us . Correspondence shows the women developing strong feelings as they connect over their shared pleasure in the rocky coast. In this moving new book, political theorist Lida Maxwell offers close readings that suggest Carson's relationship with Freeman was central to her writing of Silent Spring -a work whose defense of vibrant nonhuman nature allowed Carson and Freeman's love to flourish and for the pair to become their most authentic selves. What Maxwell calls Carson and Freeman's "queer love" unsettled their heteronormative ideas of the good life as based in bourgeois private life, and led Carson to an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike. From these women's experience Maxwell compellingly makes the case for an alternative democratic climate politics based on learning how to tune into authentic desire. Read through this lens, Carson's work begins to look different and shows us not that the human incursion into nature is dangerous, but that a particular relationship is: the loveless using up of nature for capitalism. When Carson and Freeman correspond in excited detail about the algae, anemones, and veery thrushes of the Maine coast, they give us a glimpse of a different, more loving use of nature. Inspired by Carson and Freeman's deep care for one another, Maxwell reveals how a form of loving available to all of us can help reshape political desire amidst contemporary environmental crises.

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture. From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools-sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation-were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people. Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection. Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions-a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.

Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen's books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn't a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers -- and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen's work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn't a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase "pride and prejudice" came from Frances Burney's second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen's bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn't Romney -- despite her training -- ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon? Jane Austen's Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen's heroes -- women writers who were erased from the Western canon -- to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth -- and recounts Romney's experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen's. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen's bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen's Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live

Ever since its debut in the fall of 1975, Saturday Night Live's impact on the culture has been lasting and profound. It has been a breeding ground for our brightest comedy stars, launching the careers of John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Pete Davidson, and many many more. Its iconic sketches - from Wayne's World to Weekend Update to Coneheads to the Californians to of course, More Cowbell -- have dominated water cooler talk for five decades, and its catchphrases, from "we're not worthy!" to ""Daaaaa Beeeears" are embedded in the public lexicon. And at the center of it all, from the moment of its inception to the present day, is one man: producer Lorne Michaels. Over his 50 years running the show, Lorne Michaels has become a revered, inimitable and bewildering presence in the world of entertainment. He's a mogul, a kingmaker, a tastemaker, a grudge-holder, a mensch, a workaholic, a genius spotter of talent, a ruthless businessman, a name dropper, an obsessive step counter, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, a winner of 90 Emmys--and a mystery. Generations of writers, actors, and stars have spent their lives trying to figure him out. He's "Obi wan Kenobi" (Tracey Morgan), the "Great and Powerful Oz" (Kate McKinnon), the Godfather (Will Forte), or "some kind of very distant, strange Comedy God" (Bob Odenkirk). Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels (who has spent his career mostly avoiding reporters) and the entire SNL apparatus, The New Yorker's Susan Morrison takes you behind the curtain for the rollicking, definitive story of how Lorne created the institution that would change comedy forever. Lorne features hundreds of interviews with Michaels, conducted over several years; his close friends (such as Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Steve Martin); and the candid, hilarious stars of the show, including Chris Rock, Amy Poehler, Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader, Buck Henry, Chevy Chase, and more. Nearly a decade in the making, Lorne is an intimate, deeply reported, and wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life - and change American culture.

Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan

Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan

With the development of the B-29 "Superfortress" in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned the city's most densely populated sector, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than one million homeless. The attack was part of a months-long campaign of incendiary bombing that destroyed almost two-thirds of Japan's cities. The two atomic blasts in August killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them civilians. The bombing brought a destabilizing devastation that, combined with a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, induced Japan, as they put it, to terminate the war. Many at the time and since have credited American air power, and especially the two atomic bombs, with Japan's surrender. But Richard Overy tells a different, more dimensional story. Drawing on his expertise on the war and its bombing campaigns, he delivers a precise recounting of these aerial attacks, and a balanced, informed assessment of how and why they occurred. Overy is astute on the Allied decision-making, and, notably, integrates the Japanese leadership as well. He ably navigates the dramatic endgame of the war, which featured factional infighting within the Japanese cabinet, a scramble by American officials to formulate an acceptable version of "unconditional surrender," and the crucial role played by the emperor, Hirohito. The atomic bombing emerges as impactful but not decisive in this rich, multilayered history.

Super-Italian

Super-Italian: More Than 110 Indulgent Recipes Using Italy's Healthiest Foods; A Cookbook

If the past few years have taught us anything, it's that life involves a series of pivots. Certainly, that has been true for Giada herself and her journey through the world of food and cooking. Although through it all her fundamental formula has not changed: good cooking = Technique + Ingredients + Ambience. In writing her 11th (yes, 11th!) cookbook, Giada has found that "healthy" needs to be a part of that fundatmental formula as well. Choosing ingredients that promote wellness is the starting point not just to better meals, but to better health and longevity. We all know that food can cause inflammation, weight gain, and other maladies that lead to chronic illness, but we rarely think about the fact that the flip side is equally true. A diet rich in a variety of nutrients can make a world of difference in how you look and feel. And this is where this cookbook comes in. Every single recipe in this book will include the vitamins and minerals our bodies need to stay strong and function properly; antioxidants that tame inflammation; protein to help our bodies repair cells and make new ones; and fiber to keep our guts happy and remove waste from the body. With a deep dive into the Italian superfoods (think olives, beans and legumes, and bitter greens) as well as 100 recipes to help us get the very most out of these ingredients, Giada proves once again that she is an essential member of the food world.