The suspenseful true story of a love that defied Nazi oppression, and a harrowing journey to freedom.In 1945, Ditha Bruncel was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbors were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time more than fifteen hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII, a POW camp in the sam...

A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic stripThe internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world. The story of a boy and his best friend — a stuffed tiger — was a pitch-perfect distillation of ...

Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book PrizeOn his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was...

A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world.The story of a boy and his best friend ― a stuffed tiger ― was a pitch-perfect distillation of the joys and horrors of ch...

On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming.Try Not to Be Strange: The Cur...

The suspenseful true story of a love that defied Nazi oppression, and a harrowing journey to freedom.In 1945, Ditha Bruncel was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbors were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time more than fifteen hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII, a POW camp in the sam...

Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.Based on correspondence, legal documents, and journal entr...

On the night of March 24, 1944, Bram Vanderstok was number eighteen of seventy-six men who crawled beyond the barbed wire fence of Stalag Luft III in Zagan, Poland. The 1963 film The Great Escape, was largely based on this autobiography but—with Vanderstok's agreement—filmmakers chose to turn his story into an Australian character named Sedgwick.His memoir sets down his wartime adventures before being incarcerated in Stalag Luft III and then in extraordinary detail describ...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories (the New York Times).Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and a...

The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection—but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was forty-seven years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her w...

Winner, 2019 Spirit of Anne Frank Human Writes Award "This deeply personal and extremely informative portrait of a man of indomitable will to live, as Hersch emphasizes, reminds us of why we must never forget nor trivialize the full, shocking truth about the Holocaust." — BooklistHersch effectively uses his father’s unusual story to convey the horrors of the Holocaust. A valuable addition to Holocaust literature. - Publishers WeeklyHersch's amazing tale is ...

In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted primarily to family, craft, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become “revolutionary” by ambition, but when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved, in a matter of months, from protest to war.In this remarkable book, historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these me...