The first popular history of the Emancipation of Europe’s Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a transformation that was startling to those who lived through it and continues to affect the world today.Freed from their ghettos, Jews ushered in a second renaissance. Within a century Marx, Freud, and Einstein created revolutions in politics, human science, and physics that continue to shape our world. Proust, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Kafka redefined artistic...

AHMAD SHAWKAT WAS AN IRAQI KURD WHO edited his own radical magazine—Bilattijah— after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who wrote enthusiastically about Iraq’s future as a state free from tyranny, secular and religious, having been imprisoned and tortured four times by the regime.When Michael Goldfarb went to Iraq the cover the Second Gulf War for the US’s National Public Radio in 2003, Shawkat became his translator, guide and close friend. They planned to stay in touch after Saddam w...

Michael Goldfarb looks back to the Europe of the 1930s and asks how artists, writers and film-makers responded to the poverty, mass unemployment and poltical instability of the Great Depression.Through the work of Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Jean Renoir and others, Michael charts the devastating impact of the slump as economic crisis impoverished the continent, engulfing both highly-industrialised nations such as Germany and the more agrarian economies of Greece...

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST“Extraordinary … A sweeping history of the Palestinian-Israeli conundrum … Highly readable and evocative.” – The Washington PostThe tale of a simple act of faith between two young people, one Israeli and one Palestinian, that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East – with an updated afterword by the author.In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a twenty-five-year-old P...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11” (The New York Times Book Review), this definitive history explains in gripping detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center.**One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Boo...

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTIONNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbrea...

****New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven in this “fast-paced narrative that is…part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller” (The Washington Post) from the award-winning journalist and author of The Falcon Thief.**In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel...

Winner of the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-FictionFinalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political WritingFinalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fictionFinalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for NonfictionAn incredible work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller, All We Leave Behind is the true story of a family fleeing the death sentence of a ruthless warlord, written by th...

“Riveting . . . This thorough work is immensely detailed yet readable and continuously engaging.” —Publishers WeeklyAn immersive, gripping account of the rise and fall of Iran's glamorous Pahlavi dynasty, written with the cooperation of the late Shah's widow, Empress Farah, Iranian revolutionaries and US officials from the Carter administration.In this remarkably human portrait of one of the twentieth century's most complicated per...

A major New York Times bestseller by NBC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel—this riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen close up “should be required reading” (Booklist, starred review).In 1997, young Richard Engel, working freelance for Arab news sources, got a call that a busload of Italian tourists was massacred at a Cairo museum. This is his first view of the carnage these years would pi...

Fully Revised & Updated Edition of the New York Times Bestselling and Highly Praised Book on ISISWith newly added material and breaking news including:—Interview with a former ISIS spymaster—Why ISIS is targeting Europe and the US—What Russia wants in Syria—Revelations on the brutal ideology of ISISWith brutal attacks in last year across...

Prize-winning author Michael J. Totten’s gripping first-person narratives from the war zones, police states, and revolutionary capitals of the Middle East and North Africa paint a vivid picture of peoples and nations at war with themselves, each other, and—sometimes—with the rest of the world.His journeys take him from Libya under the gruesome rule of Muammar Qaddafi to Egypt before, during and after the Arab Spring; from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights in Syria on the eve of ...