What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective dad you knew . . . or thought you knew?Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As he uncovered documents the Nazis didn’t burn, however, another man emerged—a black market ringleader and wily camp survivor who made his own luck. The tattered papers also shed light on painful ...

What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective Dad you knew…or thought you knew?Kirkus Reviews..."A scrupulously researched and dramatic remembrance… the author presents his findings with a remarkable blend of meticulousness and unabashed emotion, movingly communicating what he experienced during the process."Midwest Book Review..."**A memoir an...

Harry Lenga was born to a family of Chassidic Jews in Kozhnitz, Poland. The proud sons of a watchmaker, Harry and his two brothers, Mailekh and Moishe, studied their father's trade at a young age. Upon the German invasion of Poland, when the Lenga family was upended, Harry and his brothers never anticipated that the tools acquired from their father would be the key to their survival.Under the most devastating conditions imaginable—with death always imminent—fixing watches for the G...

**The nearly forgotten story of the American Plan, a government program to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality—and how they fought back—told through the lens of one of its survivors“A consistently surprising page-turner . . . a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior.”—New York Times Book Review**Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government t...

The history of espionage is far older than any of today’s intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada.Those who do not understand past mistakes are li...

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg’s great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing-room tickets to the Vienna State Opera. Hans never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique story in magnificent reportage. She also port...

A new historical mystery for fans of Susan Elia MacNeal’s Maggie Hope series and Kate Quinn’s The Alice NetworkHow far would you go for vengeance?It’s V-E Day 1946 in London. World War II is long over, and former spy Livy Nash is celebrating with her third drink before noon. She went to war to kill Nazis. Dropped behind enemy lines as a courier, she quickly became one of the toughest agents in France. But her war ended with betrayal and the executi...

From renowned writer and travel journalist Gary Krist comes the never-before-told story of one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history in which two trains full of people, trapped high in the Cascade Mountains, are hit by a devastating avalanche.In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard centered on Washington State hit the Northwest, breaking records. The world stopped—but nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town called Wellington, perched high ...

Winner of the Maine Literary AwardShortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for WritingListed as a “Best Book of the Month” by Apple BooksIn 2009 Rachael Cerrotti, a college student pursuing a career in photojournalism, asked her grandmother, Hana, if she could record her story. Rachael knew that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and the only one in her family alive at the end of the war. Rachael also knew...

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair.On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the...

October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father—to live, at any cost—and to the moments he is able to spend in the company of Anna, impriso...