Friday, September 30, 2011

Hitler, God, and the Bible

Hitler God
Hitler, God, and the Bible
by Ray Comfort, Tim LaHaye
Publication Date: December 20, 2011

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In Hitler, God, and the Bible, international evangelist and best-selling author Ray Comfort exposes Adolf Hitler's theology and abuse of religion as a means to seize political power and ultimately instigate World War II and genocide.

This fascinating study mines the depths of Hitler's beliefs and convincingly argues that without Hitler's misuse of Christianity the Third Reich would not have had its legendary rise, resulting in the deaths of more than six million Jews.

Highlighting Hitler's youth, his influences, and his path to seducing a nation, Hitler, God, and the Bible is a fresh, stinging reminder of the power of the cross and how its misuse led to the Final Solution. Read more


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Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage

Franklin and Eleanor
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage
by Hazel Rowley
4.6 out of 5 stars(32)
Release Date: September 27, 2011

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A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

In this groundbreaking account of the marriage, critically acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley describes the remarkable courage and lack of convention---private and public---that kept FDR and Eleanor together. She reveals a partnership that was both supportive and daring. Most of all, she depicts an extraordinary evolution---from conventional Victorian marriage to the bold and radical partnership that has made Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt go down in history as one of the most inspiring and fascinating couples of all time.

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Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

Midnight Rising
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
by Tony Horwitz
4.3 out of 5 stars(18)
Release Date: October 25, 2011

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Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war

Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.

Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."

Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided�a time that still resonates in ours.

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Our Queen

Our Queen
Our Queen
by Robert Hardman
Release Date: November 22, 2011



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Inside the world of Elizabeth II.

Throughout history, there has been no Monarch like her. She is not merely the oldest Sovereign England has ever known. She is the most worldly. She has travelled further than all her predecessors put together. She has met more historic figures than anyone alive -- from Churchill to Mandela, de Gaulle, Reagan and Obama. And today, Queen Elizabeth II is no more contemplating retirement than she was when she came to the throne in 1952. She sits at the head of a hereditary institution so often associated with rigid tradition. And yet, it is more dynamic now than ever.

Having inherited a quasi-Edwardian insitution nearly 600 years ago, the Queen presides over a Monarchy which has managed to remain, simultaneously, popular, regal, inclusive and relevant in a 21st Century world. She has done this so effectively that she is, beyond doubt, the most respected and popular figure in British public life.

As she reaches a defining moment of her reign -- her Diamond Jubliee -- Robert Hardman explores the secrets of the Queen's success to produce a fascinating new portrait of a Sovereign who has witnessed more change than any since the creation of Great Britain. Read more


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Sunday, September 25, 2011

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

The Hare with Amber Eyes
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Edmund de Waal (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars(49)

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The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who �burned like a comet� in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

The netsuke�drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers�were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir�s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.

The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler�s theorist on the �Jewish question� appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she�d served even in their exile.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: At the heart of Edmund de Waal's strange and graceful family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, is a one-of-a-kind inherited collection of ornamental Japanese carvings known as netsuke. The netsuke are tiny and tactile--they sit in the palm of your hand--and de Waal is drawn to them as "small, tough explosions of exactitude." He's also drawn to the story behind them, and for years he put aside his own work as a world-renowned potter and curator to uncover the rich and tragic family history of which the carvings are one of the few concrete legacies. De Waal's family was the Ephrussis, wealthy Jewish grain traders who branched out from Russia across the capitals of Europe before seeing their empire destroyed by the Nazis. Beginning with his art connoisseur ancestor Charles (a model for Proust's Swann), who acquired the netsuke during the European rage for Japonisme, de Waal traces the collection from Japan to Europe--where they were saved from the brutal bureaucracy of the Nazi Anschluss in the pockets of a family servant--and back to Japan and Europe again. Throughout, he writes with a tough, funny, and elegant attention to detail and personality that does full justice to the exactitude of the little carvings that first roused his curiosity. --Tom Nissley

The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who �burned like a comet� in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

The netsuke�drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers�were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir�s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.

The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler�s theorist on the �Jewish question� appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she�d served even in their exile.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.

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The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon

The Man Who Never Died
The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon
by William M. Adler
5.0 out of 5 stars(1)
Release Date: August 30, 2011

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In 1914, Joe Hill was convicted of murder in Utah and sentenced to death by firing squad, igniting international controversy. Many believed Hill was innocent, condemned for his association with the Industrial Workers of the World -- the radical Wobblies. Now, following four years of intensive investigation, William M. Adler gives us the first full-scale biography of Joe Hill, and presents never before published documentary evidence that comes as close as one can to definitively exonerating him.

Joe Hill's gripping tale is set against a brief but electrifying moment in American history, between the century's turn and World War I, when the call for industrial unionism struck a deep chord among disenfranchised workers; when class warfare raged and capitalism was on the run. Hill was the union's preeminent songwriter, and in death, he became organized labor's most venerated martyr, celebrated by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and immortalized in the ballad "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night."

The Man Who Never Died does justice to Joe Hill's extraordinary life and its controversial end. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Adler deconstructs the case against his subject and argues convincingly for the guilt of another man. Reading like a murder mystery, and set against the background of the raw, turn-of-the-century West, this essential American story will make news and expose the roots of critical contemporary issues.

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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Gandhi the Man: How One Man Changed Himself to Change the World

Gandhi the Man
Gandhi the Man: How One Man Changed Himself to Change the World
Eknath Easwaran (Author)
4.9 out of 5 stars(14)

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This is the moving story of a nonviolent hero, illustrated with more than 70 photographs, and told by a highly respected author who grew up in Gandhi�s India.

Gandhi�s life continues to inspire and baffle readers today. How did an unsuccessful young lawyer become the Mahatma, the �great soul� who led 400 million Indians in their struggle for independence from the British Empire? What is nonviolence, and how does it work?

Easwaran answers these questions and gives a vivid account of the turning points and choices in Gandhi�s life that made him an icon of nonviolence. Easwaran witnessed at firsthand how Gandhi inspired ordinary people to turn fear into fearlessness, and anger into love. He visited Gandhi in his ashram to find out more about this human alchemy, and during the prayer meeting watched the Mahatma absorbed in meditation on the Bhagavad Gita, the scripture that was the wellspring of his spiritual power.

Quotations highlight Gandhi�s teachings in his own words, and sidebar notes and a chronology, new to this updated edition, provide historical context.

This book conveys the spirit and soul of Gandhi � the only way he can be truly understood.This is the moving story of a nonviolent hero, illustrated with more than 70 photographs, and told by a highly respected author who grew up in Gandhi�s India.

Gandhi�s life continues to inspire and baffle readers today. How did an unsuccessful young lawyer become the Mahatma, the �great soul� who led 400 million Indians in their struggle for independence from the British Empire? What is nonviolence, and how does it work?

Easwaran answers these questions and gives a vivid account of the turning points and choices in Gandhi�s life that made him an icon of nonviolence. Easwaran witnessed at firsthand how Gandhi inspired ordinary people to turn fear into fearlessness, and anger into love. He visited Gandhi in his ashram to find out more about this human alchemy, and during the prayer meeting watched the Mahatma absorbed in meditation on the Bhagavad Gita, the scripture that was the wellspring of his spiritual power.

Quotations highlight Gandhi�s teachings in his own words, and sidebar notes and a chronology, new to this updated edition, provide historical context.

This book conveys the spirit and soul of Gandhi � the only way he can be truly understood. Read more


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Colonel Roosevelt

Colonel Roosevelt
Colonel Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
4.7 out of 5 stars(83)
Release Date: October 18, 2011

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This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize� and National Book Award�winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin�s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this masterwork recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history.

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Friday, September 23, 2011

Back from the Brink

Back from
Back from the Brink
Alistair Darling (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars(3)

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Back from the Brink is a vivid and immediate depiction of the British government's handling of an unprecedented global financial catastrophe. Alistair Darling's knowledge and understanding provide a unique perspective on the events that rocked international capitalism. It is also a vital historical document.Back from the Brink is a vivid and immediate depiction of the British government's handling of an unprecedented global financial catastrophe. Alistair Darling's knowledge and understanding provide a unique perspective on the events that rocked international capitalism. It is also a vital historical document. Read more


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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

Elizabeth and Hazel
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock
by Mr. David Margolick
Publication Date: October 4, 2011

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The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation�in Little Rock and throughout the South�and an epic moment in the civil rights movement.

In this gripping book, David Margolick tells the remarkable story of two separate lives unexpectedly braided together. He explores how the haunting picture of Elizabeth and Hazel came to be taken, its significance in the wider world, and why, for the next half-century, neither woman has ever escaped from its long shadow. He recounts Elizabeth�s struggle to overcome the trauma of her hate-filled school experience, and Hazel�s long efforts to atone for a fateful, horrible mistake. The book follows the painful journey of the two as they progress from apology to forgiveness to reconciliation and, amazingly, to friendship. This friendship foundered, then collapsed�perhaps inevitably�over the same fissures and misunderstandings that continue to permeate American race relations more than half a century after the unforgettable photograph at Little Rock. And yet, as Margolick explains, a bond between Elizabeth and Hazel, silent but complex, endures. Read more


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Washington: A Life

Washington
Washington: A Life
by Ron Chernow
Release Date: September 27, 2011

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"The best, most comprehensive, and most balanced single-volume biography of Washington ever written." -Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books

Celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other onevolume life of George Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his adventurous early years, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Continental Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow shatters forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional figure and brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods.

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Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

Jack Kennedy
Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
by Chris Matthews
Release Date: November 1, 2011

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�What was he like?�Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. With the verve of a novelist, Chris Matthews gives us just that. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up, having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged, rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war.What was he like, this person whose own wife called him �that elusive, unforgettable man�? The Jack Kennedy you discover here wanted never to be alone, never to be bored. He loved courage, hated war, lived each day as if it were his last.Chris Matthews�s extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK, oral histories by top political aide Kenneth O�Donnell and others, documents from his years as a student at Choate, and notes from Jacqueline Kennedy�s first interview after Dallas. You�ll learn the origins of his inaugural call to �Ask what you can do for your country.� You�ll discover his role in the genesis of the Peace Corps, his stand on civil rights, his push to put a man on the moon, his ban on nuclear arms testing. You�ll get, more than ever before, to the root of the man, including the unsettling aspects of his personal life. As Matthews writes, �I found a fighting prince never free of pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father�s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.� Read more


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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Coolidge: An American Enigma

Coolidge
Coolidge: An American Enigma
by Robert Sobel (Author), Charles Bice (Narrator)
4.7 out of 5 stars(15)

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The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer

The Fall of the House of Zeus
The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer
by Curtis Wilkie
4.4 out of 5 stars(32)
Release Date: September 13, 2011

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�Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.�
�Douglas Brinkley

The Fall of the House of Zeus tells the story of Dickie Scruggs, arguably the most successful plaintiff's lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against �Big Tobacco� and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter day Robin Hood, and portrayed in the movie, The Insider, as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs� legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics--but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge.

Here Mississippi is emblematic of the modern South, with its influx of new money and its rising professional class, including lawyers such as Scruggs, whose interests became inextricably entwined with state and national politics.

Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus exposes the dark side of Southern and Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. In gripping detail, Curtis Wilkie crafts an authentic legal thriller propelled by a �welter of betrayals and personal hatreds,� providing large supporting parts for Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe, and cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other DC insiders and influence peddlers.

Above all, we get to see how and why the mighty fail and fall, a story as gripping and timeless as a Greek tragedy.


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Ethan Allen: His Life and Times

Ethan Allen
Ethan Allen: His Life and Times
by Willard Sterne Randall
3.5 out of 5 stars(4)
Publication Date: August 22, 2011

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The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation from Paine to Madison.

On May 10, 1775, in the storm-tossed hours after midnight, Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary firebrand, was poised for attack. With only two boatloads of his scraggly band of Vermont volunteers having made it across the wind-whipped waters of Lake Champlain, he was waiting for the rest of his Green Mountain boys to arrive. But with the protective darkness quickly fading, Allen determined that he hold off no longer.

While Ethan Allen, a canonical hero of the American Revolution, has always been defined by his daring, predawn attack on the British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga, Willard Sterne Randall, the author of Benedict Arnold, now challenges our conventional understanding of this largely unexamined Founding Father. Widening the scope of his inquiry beyond the Revolutionary War, Randall traces Allen�s beginning back to his modest origins in Connecticut, where he was born in 1738. Largely self-educated, emerging from a relatively impoverished background, Allen demonstrated his deeply rebellious nature early on through his attraction to Deism, his dramatic defense of smallpox vaccinations, and his early support of separation of church and state.

Chronicling Allen�s upward struggle from precocious, if not unruly, adolescent to commander of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution, Randall unlocks a trove of new source material, particularly evident in his gripping portrait of Allen as a British prisoner-of-war. While the biography reacquaints readers with the familiar details of Allen�s life�his capture during the aborted American invasion of Canada, his philosophical works that influenced Thomas Paine, his seminal role in gaining Vermont statehood, his stirring funeral in 1789�Randall documents that so much of what we know of Allen is mere myth, historical folklore that people have handed down, as if Allen were Paul Bunyan.

As Randall reveals, Ethan Allen, a so-called Robin Hood in the eyes of his dispossessed Green Mountain settlers, aggrandized, and unabashedly so, the holdings of his own family, a fact that is glossed over in previous accounts, embellishing his own best-selling prisoner-of-war narrative as well. He emerges not only as a public-spirited leader but as a self-interested individual, often no less rapacious than his archenemies, the New York land barons of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys.

As John E. Ferling comments, �Randall has stripped away the myths to provide as accurate an account of Allen�s life as will ever be written.� The keen insights that he produces shed new light, not only on this most enigmatic of Founding Fathers, but on today�s descendants of the Green Mountain Boys, whose own political disenfranchisement resonates now more than ever. 16 pages of illustrations Read more


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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Narrative of
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
by Frederick Douglass
4.6 out of 5 stars(154)
Release Date: September 16, 2011

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Published in 1845, this autobiography powerfully details the life of the internationally famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838 - how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die. In his introduction, Houston A. Baker, Jr., discusses the slave narrative as a distinct American literary genre and points out its social, political, historical, and literary significance, past and present. Read more


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Night (Oprah's Book Club)

Night Oprahs
Night (Oprah's Book Club)
by Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel
4.7 out of 5 stars(744)

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Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died. Read more


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The Seamstress

The Seamstress
The Seamstress
by Sara Tuvel Bernstein, Louise Loots Thornton, Marlene bernst Samuels, Edgar M. Bronfman, Marlene Bernstein Samuels
4.8 out of 5 stars(72)

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"From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania...and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him...After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, [and] managed to survive...she tells this story with style and power." -Kirkus Reviews

"There are many recent accounts of Holocaust victims, but this work stands alone as a testimony to personal strength and an independent spirit." -Library Journal

"Extraordinary." -Booklist

"An engrossing history lesson as well as an important archive." -Faye Kellerman
"Well-told...deserves a prominent place in the archive of Holocaust survival stories." -Publishers Weekly

"One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs" (Kirkus Reviews)

--An ALA choice for the Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, and the second-place winner in the General Trade Nonfiction category at the New York Book Show
--Includes an introduction by Edgar M. Bronfman
--Written by a strong woman with a colorful and unusual story to tell, this book is a standout in a popular subgenre of the memoir form Read more


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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

A First-Rate Madness
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness
by Nassir Ghaemi
3.9 out of 5 stars(27)

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Review & Description

An investigation into the surprisingly deep correlation between mental illness and successful leadership, as seen through some of history's greatest politicians, generals, and businesspeople.

In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, who runs the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, draws from the careers and personal plights of such notable leaders as Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, and others from the past two centuries to build an argument at once controversial and compelling: the very qualities that mark those with mood disorders- realism, empathy, resilience, and creativity-also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. By combining astute analysis of the historical evidence with the latest psychiatric research, Ghaemi demonstrates how these qualities have produced brilliant leadership under the toughest circumstances.

Take realism, for instance: study after study has shown that those suffering depression are better than "normal" people at assessing current threats and predicting future outcomes. Looking at Lincoln and Churchill among others, Ghaemi shows how depressive realism helped these men tackle challenges both personal and national. Or consider creativity, a quality psychiatrists have studied extensively in relation to bipolar disorder. A First-Rate Madness shows how mania inspired General Sherman and Ted Turner to design and execute their most creative-and successful-strategies.

Ghaemi's thesis is both robust and expansive; he even explains why eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made such poor leaders. Though sane people are better shepherds in good times, sanity can be a severe liability in moments of crisis. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, can leave one ill equipped to endure dire straits. He also clarifies which kinds of insanity-like psychosis-make for despotism and ineptitude, sometimes on a grand scale.

Ghaemi's bold, authoritative analysis offers powerful new tools for determining who should lead us. But perhaps most profoundly, he encourages us to rethink our view of mental illness as a purely negative phenomenon. As A First-Rate Madness makes clear, the most common types of insanity can confer vital benefits on individuals and society at large-however high the price for those who endure these illnesses. Read more


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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

In the Garden of Beasts
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
by Erik Larson
4.0 out of 5 stars(430)

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Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler�s rise to power.

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America�s first ambassador to Hitler�s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the �New Germany,� she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance--and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler�s true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre G�ring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

�Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.��New York Times Book Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2011: In the Garden of Beasts is a vivid portrait of Berlin during the first years of Hitler�s reign, brought to life through the stories of two people: William E. Dodd, who in 1933 became America�s first ambassador to Hitler�s regime, and his scandalously carefree daughter, Martha. Ambassador Dodd, an unassuming and scholarly man, is an odd fit among the extravagance of the Nazi elite. His frugality annoys his fellow Americans in the State Department and Dodd�s growing misgivings about Hitler�s ambitions fall on deaf ears among his peers, who are content to �give Hitler everything he wants.� Martha, on the other hand, is mesmerized by the glamorous parties and the high-minded conversation of Berlin�s salon society�and flings herself headlong into numerous affairs with the city�s elite, most notably the head of the Gestapo and a Soviet spy. Both become players in the exhilarating (and terrifying) story of Hitler�s obsession for absolute power, which culminates in the events of one murderous night, later known as �the Night of Long Knives.� The rise of Nazi Germany is a well-chronicled time in history, which makes In the Garden of Beasts all the more remarkable. Erik Larson has crafted a gripping, deeply-intimate narrative with a climax that reads like the best political thriller, where we are stunned with each turn of the page, even though we already know the outcome. --Shane Hansanuwat Read more


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David Crockett: The Lion of the West

David Crockett
David Crockett: The Lion of the West
by Michael Wallis
4.4 out of 5 stars(9)

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Steeped in legend, shrouded in folklore, the real David Crockett, American frontiersman and cultural icon, finally emerges in this engrossing biography.

His name was David Crockett. He never signed his name any other way, but popular culture transformed his memory into "Davy Crockett," and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. Best-selling historian Michael Wallis casts a fresh look at the frontiersman, storyteller, and politician behind these legendary stories. Born into a humble Tennessee family in 1786, Crockett never "killed him a b'ar" when he was only three. But he did cut a huge swath across early-nineteenth-century America�as a bear hunter, a frontier explorer, a soldier serving under Andrew Jackson, an unlikely congressman, and, finally, a martyr in his now-controversial death at the Alamo. Wallis's David Crockett is more than a riveting story. It is a revelatory, authoritative biography that separates fact from fiction, providing us with an extraordinary evocation of a true American hero and the rough-and-tumble times in which he lived. 60 black-and-white illustrations Read more


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The 48 Laws of Power

The 48
The 48 Laws of Power
by Robert Greene
4.1 out of 5 stars(642)

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Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention-grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers.

Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life.

Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or been victimized by--power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control."Learning the game of power requires a certain way of looking at the world, a shifting of perspective," writes Robert Greene. Mastery of one's emotions and the arts of deception and indirection are, he goes on to assert, essential. The 48 laws outlined in this book "have a simple premise: certain actions always increase one's power ... while others decrease it and even ruin us."

The laws cull their principles from many great schemers--and scheming instructors--throughout history, from Sun-Tzu to Talleyrand, from Casanova to con man Yellow Kid Weil. They are straightforward in their amoral simplicity: "Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit," or "Discover each man's thumbscrew." Each chapter provides examples of the consequences of observance or transgression of the law, along with "keys to power," potential "reversals" (where the converse of the law might also be useful), and a single paragraph cleverly laid out to suggest an image (such as the aforementioned thumbscrew); the margins are filled with illustrative quotations. Practitioners of one-upmanship have been given a new, comprehensive training manual, as up-to-date as it is timeless. Read more


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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Alexandra Fuller (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars(216)

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When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, heady scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy.

�Smell that,� she whispered, �that�s home.�

Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already.

I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever.

In Don�t Let�s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with visceral authenticity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller�s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller�s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller�known to friends and family as Bobo�grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation.

A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don�t Let�s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor�s story. It is the story of one woman�s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, heady scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy.

�Smell that,� she whispered, �that�s home.�

Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already.

I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever.

In Don�t Let�s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with visceral authenticity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller�s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller�s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller�known to friends and family as Bobo�grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation.

A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don�t Let�s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor�s story. It is the story of one woman�s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt. Read more


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The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

The Fiery Trial
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
by Eric Foner
4.8 out of 5 stars(21)
Publication Date: September 26, 2011

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�A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.��Boston Globe

Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations; 3 maps Read more


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Monday, September 19, 2011

In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir

In My Time
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir
by Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney
3.3 out of 5 stars(111)

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In this eagerly anticipated memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivers an unyielding portrait of American politics over nearly forty years and shares personal reflections on his role as one of the most steadfast and influential statesmen in the history of our country.

The public perception of Dick Cheney has long been something of a contradiction. He has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents-secretive, even mysterious, and at the same time opinionated and unflinchingly outspoken. He has been both praised and attacked by his peers, the press, and the public. Through it all, courting only the ideals that define him, he has remained true to himself, his principles, his family, and his country. Now in an enlightening and provocative memoir, a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor and remarkable candor, Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history.

Born into a family of New Deal Democrats in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was the son of a father at war and a high-spirited and resilient mother. He came of age in Casper, Wyoming, playing baseball and football and, as senior class president, courting homecoming queen Lynne Vincent, whom he later married. This all-American story took an abrupt turn when he flunked out of Yale University, signed on to build power line in the West, and started living as hard as he worked. Cheney tells the story of how he got himself back on track and began an extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life, where he would remain for nearly four decades:

* He was the youngest White House Chief of Staff, working for President Gerald Ford--the first of four chief executives he would come to know well.

* He became Congressman from Wyoming and was soon a member of the congressional leadership working closely with President Ronald Reagan.

* He became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America's military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War.

* He was CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company with projects and personnel around the globe.

* He became the first vice president of the United States to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the beginning of the global war on terror, he was--and remains--an outspoken defender of taking every step necessary to defend the nation.

Eyewitness to history at the highest levels, Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present. He describes driving through the White House gates on August 9, 1974, just hours after Richard Nixon resigned, to begin work on the Ford transition; and he portrays a time of national crisis a quarter century later when, on September 11, 2001, he was in the White House bunker and conveyed orders to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert With its unique perspective on a remarkable span of American history, In My Time will enlighten. As an intimate and personal chronicle, it will surprise, move, and inspire. Dick Cheney's is an enduring political vision to be reckoned with and admired for its honesty, its wisdom, and its resonance. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it--with courage and without compromise. Read more


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Man's Search for Meaning

Mans Search
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
4.7 out of 5 stars(526)

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Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory�known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")�holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is among the most influential works of psychiatric literature since Freud. The book begins with a lengthy, austere, and deeply moving personal essay about Frankl's imprisonment in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for five years, and his struggle during this time to find reasons to live. The second part of the book, called "Logotherapy in a Nutshell," describes the psychotherapeutic method that Frankl pioneered as a result of his experiences in the concentration camps. Freud believed that sexual instincts and urges were the driving force of humanity's life; Frankl, by contrast, believes that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. Frankl's logotherapy, therefore, is much more compatible with Western religions than Freudian psychotherapy. This is a fascinating, sophisticated, and very human book. At times, Frankl's personal and professional discourses merge into a style of tremendous power. "Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is," Frankl writes. "After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." Read more


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