From the author of The Arab Predicament and Dream Palace of the Arabs comes a beautiful and haunting memoir of growing up in Lebanon in the '50s and '60s--the story of a sensitive young man and budding intellectual caught between tradition and modernity, East and West. As one of the most profound and insightful scholars of the Middle East, Fouad Ajami's sensibility was powerfully shaped by his childhood and youth in Lebanon in the '50s and '60s. The...

In 1995, Iowa native Bill Bryson took a motoring trip around Britain to explore that green and pleasant land. The uproarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute portrayals of the United Kingdom ever written. Two decades later, Bryson--now a British citizen--set out again to rediscover his adopted country. In these pages, he follows a straight line through the island--from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath--and shows us...

"An exhilarating journey through the subcultures, occupied squats, and late-night scenes in the anarchic first few years of Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Berlin Calling is a gripping account of the 1989 'peaceful revolution' in East Germany that upended communism and the tumultuous years of artistic ferment, political improvisation, and pirate utopias that followed. It's the story of a newly undivided Berlin when protest and punk rock, bohemia...

Everyone knows of Hitler’s attempt to create a master race, but not everyone is familiar with his similar attempt to mold an equine master race. Hidden on a secret farm in Czechoslovakia was an endangered breed of horses, rescued by the joint efforts of an American colonel, the Austrian Olympian in charge of the horses and the support of US General George Patton.

Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck and chance. This is the story of one such child. As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast...

"Berlin, 1989. As the wall between East and West falls, Miriam Winter cares for her dying father, Henryk. When he cries out for someone named Frieda - and Miriam discovers an Auschwitz tattoo hidden under his watch strap - Henryk's secret history begins to unravel. Searching for more clues of her father's past, Miriam finds an inmate uniform from the Ravensbrück women's camp concealed among her mother's things. Within its seams are dozens of letters...

"Abounding in exquisite narrative irony, this compulsively readable retelling of the Medea myth is an unexpected East-meets-West love story and a masterful meditation on the true nature of freedom. Milena is a Red Princess living in a Soviet Satellite state in the 1980s. She enjoys limitless luxury and limited freedom; the end of the Cold War seems unimaginable. When she meets Jason, a confident British poet, Milena is appalled by his political naivety...

"Three teens chase their own version of the American Dream during the Roaring 20s in this YA remix of The Great Gatsby"-- New York City, 1922. Nicòls Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Minnesota, has no interest in the city's glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future--and his life as a man--and benefit his family. Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old...

A series of 12 half-hour lectures on a college course level. Covers the rise of the Nazi party and the Third Reich in power.