"The former Treasury Secretary has shared his story in a memoir that is both an engrossing personal narrative and a thoughtful reflection on leadership" (Henry Kissinger, author of On China).In a life that has spanned nearly nine decades and has taken him around the world and back, W. Michael Blumenthal has borne witness to the world's convulsions and transformations during the twentieth century. Born in Germany between the two world wars, Blumenthal narro...

Through Michael Blumenthal’s eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Blumenthal uses the conjunction to unify this collection and create a chanting, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises.Michael Blumenthal holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His other books inclu...

Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily—and terrifyingly—similar to his ...

What’s wrong with the contemporary American medical system? What does it mean when a state’s democratic presidential primary casts 40% of its votes for a felon incarcerated in another state? What’s so bad about teaching by PowerPoint? What is truly the dirtiest word in America?These are just a few of the engaging and controversial issues that Michael Blumenthal, poet, novelist, essayist, and law professor, tackles in this collection of poignant essays commissioned by West ...

Martin Weinstock is a Harvard Lecturer in Poetry who has lost his way. He doesn't feel that he belongs on the esteemed Faculty ("the best in the world"). He sees his position to be a type of death sentence. Meanwhile, is love life is dying and his parents redying. He feels as though he's surrounded by death wherever he turns. This is his story, (Winner of Hadassah Magazine's 1994 Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Best Work of Jewish Fiction.)

New York Times BestsellerFrom the New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark provides a way to find spirituality in those times when we don’t have all the answers.Taylor has become increasingly uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness. Doesn’t God work in the nighttime as well? In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor asks ...

A brilliantly arresting historical work, John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War takes us as never before to the time when the world stood on the brink of destruction.In 1945 war came to an end. But a whole new terror was only just beginning...Here is the truth behind every spy thriller you've read: why America and the Soviet Union became locked in a deadly stalemate; how close we came to nuclear catastrophe; what was really going on in t...

In this deeply smart and sneakily poignant collection of essays, the bestselling author of Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable makes an inspired case for always assuming the worst—because then you’ll never be disappointed.Whether he’s taking on pop culture phenomena with Oscar Wilde-worthy wit or dealing with personal tragedy, Rakoff’s sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the untapped power of negativity.

Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of ‘The Corrections’.Jonathan Franzen's ‘Freedom’ was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst ‘The Corrections’ was the best-loved and most written-about novel the previous decade. ‘How to be Alone’, is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen...

The stunning story of Russia's slide back into a dictatorship-and how the West is now paying the price for allowing it to happen.The ascension of Vladimir Putin-a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB-to the presidency of Russia in 1999 was a strong signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years-as America and the world's other leading powers have continued to appease him-Putin has grown not only into a dictator but an internati...

**“This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.”"A superlative organizer, strategist, and tactician who is also a social philosopher.” —Charles E. Silberman**First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first...

A penniless émigré who made a fortune and became one of the great philanthropists of the twentieth century, George Soros has led a remarkable life. This biography brings forth his story in unprecedented depth, from his childhood as a Jew in occupied Budapest during World War II to his conquests on Wall Street and the establishment of his philanthropic Open Society foundations. Soros offers exclusive glimpses at an often misunderstood man, revealing a shy character whose ow...