Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns.Through close readings...

All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the body’s transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And they show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape.

Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did.Many years later, wh...

Trapped in Poland in 1941, like many Jews, Millie Werber went from the Radom Ghetto to slave labor in an armaments factory, survived Auschwitz, and toiled in a second factory until liberation came on April 1, 1945. She faced death many times but lived to marry a good man and fellow survivor. Meanwhile, she concealed a photograph in her closet and carried a secret in her heart.Many years later, Millie began telling her story to writer Eve Keller. Together, the two women rediscovered...

Imagine being a thirteen-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family—life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. You can no longer attend school, have possessions, talk to your neighbors. One day your family has to leave your house behind and move into a crowded ghetto, where you lose all privacy and there isn’t enough food to eat. Still you manage, somehow, to adjust. But there is much, much worse to come …This is ...

Inge Auerbacher is a happy German girl when the nightmare begins. Six-year-old Inge is made to wear a yellow star to identify her as a Jew. As the Nazis gain power, her family is subjected to greater and greater horrors. Their home and citizenship are taken away. Inge's relatives are sent away, and she and her parents are forced into the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Background material on Hitler, the Nazi plan, and WW II provides a helpful context for understanding Inge's ...

The amazing story of Corrie ten Boom, a heroine of the Dutch Resistance who helped Jews escape from the Nazis and became one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20th century, is told in her classic memoir, now retold for a new generation.

Over the course of his career, New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Midwives brought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy winter’s night and a home birth gone tragically wrong. The Double Bind perfectly conjured the Roaring Twenties on Long Island—and a young social worker’s descent into madness. And Skeletons at the Feast chronicled the last six months of World War Two in Pola...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn estranged mother and daughter reunite to confront their family’s role in World War II in this harrowing, unforgettable novel about lost love and inherited shame.For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph...

The sinking of an ocean liner leaves a newly married woman battling for survival in this powerful debut novel.Grace Winter, 22, is both a newlywed and a widow. She is also on trial for her life.In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying her and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize is over capacity. For an...

I Choose Life is the true, first person account of two Jewish youths, Sol and Goldie, who survived Nazi concentration camps and transcended despair by choosing life. The book title derives from a harrowing encounter between Sol and the Commandant in Auschwitz. The Nazi cruelly forced Sol to choose between execution by hanging or firing squad. Sol, then 19-years-old, defied him, declaring, If I have a choice, I choose life!Goldie Cukier, a 13-year-old girl, and her older si...

A powerful suspense novel narrated by a young girl who must fend for herself and her little brother after a brutal bear attack.While camping with her family on a remote island, five-year-old Anna awakes in the night to the sound of her mother screaming. A rogue black bear, three hundred pounds of fury, is attacking the family's campsite -- and pouncing on her parents as prey.At her dying mother's faint urging, Anna manages to get her brother into the family...