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In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten's mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After eventually discovering the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, Karen travelled the globe to uncover her family's past and to find the answers to some baffling questions. Irena's Gift weaves together a mystery, history and memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war.

Las cartas falsas que los judíos escribieron obligados por los nazis. «Te escribo desde el campo de trabajo de Birkenau, donde me encuentro ahora. Estoy sano, trabajo y espero noticias tuyas».

Non appena in Occidente si sparse la voce della prossima uscita della flotta turca, papa Pio V decise che quella era l'occasione buona per realizzare un progetto che sognava da tempo: l'unione delle potenze cristiane per affrontare gli infedeli in mare con forze schiaccianti, e mettere fine una volta per tutte alla minaccia che gravava sulla Cristianità. Quando divenne sempre più evidente che la tempesta era destinata a scaricarsi su Cipro, il vecchio inquisitore divenuto pontefice, persecutore accanito di ebrei ed eretici, volle affrettare i tempi." È la primavera del 1570.

Als Michael Frank die heute hundertjährige Stella Levi zufällig kennenlernt, nimmt eine große Geschichte ihren Anfang. Sie lädt ihn in ihr New Yorker Apartment ein, und bald wird aus den Besuchen ein Ritual: An hundert Sams­tagen erzählt Levi dem Schriftsteller ihr Leben. Gemeinsam suchen und erkunden die beiden eine fast märchenhafte, verlorene Welt. Levi, geboren 1923, wuchs auf im jüdischen Viertel La Juderia auf der Mittelmeerinsel Rhodos - eine Kindheit und Jugend zwischen sephardischer Tradition und Moderne, inmitten einer Vielfalt von Kulturen und Sprachen zwischen Orient und Okzident.

Two Weeks in November is the thrilling, surreal, unbelievable and often very funny true story of four would-be enemies - a high ranking politician, an exiled human rights lawyer, a dangerous spy and a low-key white businessman turned political fixer - who team up to help unseat one of Africa's longest serving dictators, Robert Mugabe.

D'Ajaccio à Sainte-Hélène, en passant par le Grand-Saint-Bernard, Austerlitz, Moscou, Waterloo, l'île d'Elbe, André Castelot a mis ses pas dans ceux de Napoléon Bonaparte pour respirer et restituer le décor de son prodigieux destin. Exploitant et mettant en valeur, avec son art célèbre du récit qui visualise les événements, les lieux et les personnages, une immense masse d'archives, de mémoires et de correspondance parfois inédits ou oubliés, il a écrit cette monumentale biographie si vivante, si colorée, si passionnante que depuis trente ans, son public se renouvelle sans cesse.

D'Ajaccio à Sainte-Hélène, en passant par le Grand-Saint-Bernard, Austerlitz, Moscou, Waterloo, l'île d'Elbe, André Castelot a mis ses pas dans ceux de Napoléon Bonaparte pour respirer et restituer le décor de son prodigieux destin. Exploitant et mettant en valeur, avec son art célèbre du récit qui visualise les événements, les lieux et les personnages, une immense masse d'archives, de mémoires et de correspondance parfois inédits ou oubliés, il a écrit cette monumentale biographie si vivante, si colorée, si passionnante que depuis trente ans, son public se renouvelle sans cesse.

D'Ajaccio à Sainte-Hélène, en passant par le Grand-Saint-Bernard, Austerlitz, Moscou, Waterloo, l'île d'Elbe, André Castelot a mis ses pas dans ceux de Napoléon Bonaparte pour respirer et restituer le décor de son prodigieux destin. Exploitant et mettant en valeur, avec son art célèbre du récit qui visualise les événements, les lieux et les personnages, une immense masse d'archives, de mémoires et de correspondance parfois inédits ou oubliés, il a écrit cette monumentale biographie si vivante, si colorée, si passionnante que depuis trente ans, son public se renouvelle sans cesse.

D'Ajaccio à Sainte-Hélène, en passant par le Grand-Saint-Bernard, Austerlitz, Moscou, Waterloo, l'île d'Elbe, André Castelot a mis ses pas dans ceux de Napoléon Bonaparte pour respirer et restituer le décor de son prodigieux destin. Exploitant et mettant en valeur, avec son art célèbre du récit qui visualise les événements, les lieux et les personnages, une immense masse d'archives, de mémoires et de correspondance parfois inédits ou oubliés, il a écrit cette monumentale biographie si vivante, si colorée, si passionnante que depuis trente ans, son public se renouvelle sans cesse.

1919 dürfen Frauen in Deutschland erstmals wählen und machen sich auf allen Gebieten daran, ihr Leben selbst zu gestalten: Käthe Kollwitz wird als erste Frau in die Akademie der Künste berufen, Marie Juchacz hält als Erste eine Rede im Parlament und Gunta Stölzl studiert am 1919 gegründeten Bauhaus. Während Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin ihren mutigen Einsatz für die politische Neuordnung mit dem Leben bezahlt, widmet man sich in Paris schon wieder der Wissenschaft und Kultur.

"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia.

1944: Heavy footfalls thud on the road on a rainy May night. A band of gunmen scour a hilltop farm, acting on rumors that it harbors a Jewish family. For 18 months, the Rozeneks have been hiding safely, but their luck is about to run out. Only one from the family of six will live to see the sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Hena Rozenek shelters in the woods until morning . . . and then she runs.

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. As Edward Dolnick reveals, his true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

In 1654, the Thunderclap—an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store—devasted the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people, including the extraordinary painter Carel Fabritius, and injuring thousands more. Framing the story around the life of Fabritius, Cumming illuminates this extraordinary moment in art history while also writing about her own father, a painter. Like Dutch art, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior—all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread.

“An uncannily honest writer,” Amitav Ghosh has published firsthand accounts of pivotal world events in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and the New Yorker (The New York Times Book Review). This volume brings together the finest of these pieces, chronicling the turmoil of our times.

Thinking of Spain as a modern nation state today distorts the complicated reality that the Iberian Peninsula faced in the past. Spain was a nation in progress, consisting of regions united under the Spanish crown, but with strong regional identities based on different historical and cultural experiences. The largest entities were the kingdoms of León and Castile, but Spain also included the kingdoms of Navarre, Andalusia, Granada, Jaén, Aragon, and Valencia.

The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people.

¿Estuvo implicado Alfonso XIII en el golpe de Estado de 1923?, ¿se produjeron mejoras sociales y económicas? ¿Dimitió voluntariamente Primo de Rivera? (tag de abajo) Los seis años que abarca la dictadura de Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) supone uno de los periodos de la historia de España menos conocidos, quizás, porque no pocos historiadores la han calificado como un paréntesis vacío dentro de la Restauración borbónica. Hoy sabemos que, en absoluto, fue un hombre campechano sin ideología.

Revelador ensayo periodístico que ahonda en las décadas de corrupción política en la comunidad valenciana. Con nombres y apellidos, con datos y fechas, Rodrigo Terrasa nos presenta un escalofriante y certero análisis de los factores que han dado por cierto un triste y polémico dicho: la corrupción era como la paella, que se hacía en todas partes, pero en ningún sitio como en Valencia.

In October 1942, SS guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp violently disbanded a rehearsal of a secret Jewish choir led by conductor Rosebery d'Arguto. Many in the group did not live to see morning, and those who survived were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only one of its members survived the Holocaust. Yet their story survives, thanks to Aleksander Kulisiewicz. An amateur musician, he was not Jewish, but became friends with d'Arguto in Sachsenhausen. D'Arguto tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.