Neuroscientist Charles Gross has been interested in the history of his field since his days as an undergraduate. A Hole in the Head is the second... collection of essays in which he illuminates the study of the brain with fascinating episodes from the past. This volume's tales range from the history of trepanation (drilling a hole in the skull) to neurosurgery as painted by Hieronymus Bosch to the discovery that bats navigate using echolocation. The emphasis is on blind alleys and errors as well as triumphs and discoveries, with ancient practices connected to recent developments and controversies. Gross first reaches back into the beginnings of neuroscience, then takes up the interaction of art and neuroscience, exploring, among other things, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" paintings, and finally, examines discoveries by scientists whose work was scorned in their own time but proven correct in later eras.

How has the world come to focus on the Holocaust and why has it invariably done so in the heat of controversy, scandal, and polemics about the past?... These questions are at the heart of this unique investigation of the Treblinka affair that occurred in France in 1966 when Jean-Francois Steiner, a young Jewish journalist, published Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp. A cross between a history and a novel, Steiner's book narrated the 1943 revolt at one of the major Nazi death camps. Abetted by a scandalous interview he gave, as well as Simone de Beauvoir's glowing preface, the book shot to the top of the Parisian bestseller list and prompted a wide-ranging controversy in which both the well-known and the obscure were embroiled.Few had heard of Treblinka, or other death camps, before the affair. The validity of the difference between those killing centers and the larger network of concentration camps making up the universe of Nazi crime had to be fought out in public. The affair also bore on the frequently raised question of the Jews' response to their dire straits.Moyn delves into events surrounding the publication of Steiner's book and the subsequent furor. In the process, he sheds light on a few forgotten but thought-provoking months in French cultural history. Reconstructing the affair in detail, Moyn studies it as a paradigm-shifting controversy that helped change perceptions of the Holocaust in the French public and among French Jews in particular. Then Moyn follows the controversy beyond French borders to the other countries--especially Israel and the United States--where it resonated powerfully.Based on a complete reconstruction of the debate in the press (including Yiddish dailies) and on archives on three continents, Moyn's study concludes with the response of the survivors of Treblinka to the controversy and reflects on its place in the longer history of Holocaust memory. Finally, Moyn revisits, in the context of a detailed case study, some of the theoretical controversies the genocide has provoked, including whether it is appropriate to draw universalistic lessons from the victimhood of particular groups.

This unique book presents selections of original material related to the Holocaust, including documents, memoirs, and other primary sources that... allows readers an unfiltered, firsthand means of evaluating the causes, events, and results of the Holocaust. A Holocaust Reader includes material excerpted from documents and memoirs that is intended to supplement information generally available on the Holocaust. It also includes an index, uncommon in anthologies. An essential reference book for anyone studying the Holocaust for personal or professional reasons.

The most comprehensive and representative collection of its kind, A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination features writings by... theologians, literary figures, cultural critics, philosophers, political theorists, and others. It surveys the major themes raised by the Holocaust and examines the most provocative and influential responses to these topics and to the Holocaust itself. Organized in a roughly chronological pattern, the volume opens with early responses from the postwar period. Subsequent sections cover the emergence of central theological statements in the late 1960s and 1970s, the development of post-Holocaust thinking in the 1970s and 1980s, and burgeoning reflections on the significance of the death camps. Connections between the Holocaust and important events and episodes in Western culture in the 1980s and 1990s are also discussed. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination offers selections from Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt, Omer Bartov, Eliezer Berkovits, Michael André Bernstein, Martin Buber, Arthur A. Cohen, A. Roy Eckardt, Emil L. Fackenheim, Saul Friedlander, Amos Funkenstein, Irving Greenberg, Andreas Huyssen, Hans Jonas, Berel Lang, Primo Levi, Johann Baptist Metz, Richard Rubenstein, Kenneth Seeskin, Franklin Sherman, David Tracy, Elie Wiesel, Robert E. Willis, and Michael Wyschogrod. Ideal for courses in the Holocaust, Jewish studies, and the philosophy of religion, this extensive collection will also be of interest to general readers and scholars.

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off... foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment — and a moving story of how we got here.

Find yourself drawn into effective and heartfelt worship with this 12-week devotional guide by Carl Leth. Understanding what the Scriptures say about... God is an important first step in a deepening relationship with Him. As a believer learns more about who God is, this worship inevitably spills over into a life of growing discipleship and of service. With care and sensitivity, Leth spotlights critical biblical truths and encourages the reader to cultivate a closer relationship with the Lord and a bigger heart for service. Paper.

From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely,... introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical... works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature. Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.

"It's hard to picture this part of the country as I first remember it. Here and there was a cabin home with a little spot of clearin close by. The rest... of the country was jist one great big woods and miles and miles in most every direction. From your cabin you could see no farther than the wall of trees surrounding the clearin; not another cabin in sight."Thus begins Oliver Johnson's account of pioneer life in the Indianapolis area in the 1820s and 1830s. Elsewhere, he says, "We lived mighty happy and contented in the early days. With a good snug cabin, a big fireplace, and a supply of corn meal on hand, there wasn't much to worry about. Our big family spent many a pleasant winter evenin settin around a blazin fire while the wind and snow cut capers outside." Each chapter is a story in itself: "The Endless Tress," "To Build a Cabin," "Clearing the Land," "The Fireplace," "The Spinning Wheel," "Ills and Aches," "The Three R's," "Early Grist Mills," "Hunting Tales," "Fights and Shooting Matches," "The First County Fairs," "Driving Hogs to the River," and "How I Met Your Grandmother."

A Home on the Field is about faith, loyalty, and trust. It is a parable in the tradition of Stand and Deliver and Hoosiers—a story of one team and... their accidental coach who became certain heroes to the whole community. For the past ten years, Siler City, North Carolina, has been at the front lines of immigration in the interior portion of the United States. Like a number of small Southern towns, workers come from traditional Latino enclaves across the United States, as well as from Latin American countries, to work in what is considered the home of industrial-scale poultry processing. At enormous risk, these people have come with the hope of a better life and a chance to realize their portion of the American Dream. But it isn't always easy. Assimilation into the South is fraught with struggles, and in no place is this more poignant than in the schools. When Paul Cuadros packed his bags and moved south to study the impact of the burgeoning Latino community, he encountered a culture clash between the long-time residents and the newcomers that eventually boiled over into an anti-immigrant rally featuring former Klansman David Duke. It became Paul's goal to show the growing numbers of Latino youth that their lives could be more than the cutting line at the poultry plants, that finishing high school and heading to college could be a reality. He needed to find something that the boys could commit to passionately, knowing that devotion to something bigger than them would be the key to helping the boys find where they fit in the world. The answer was soccer. But Siler City, like so many other small rural communities, was a football town, and long-time residents saw soccer as a foreign sport and yet another accommodation to the newcomers. After an uphill battle, the Jets soccer team at Jordan-Matthews High School was born. Suffering setbacks and heartbreak, the majority Latino team, in only three seasons and against all odds, emerged poised to win the state championship.

Autenrieth’s A Homeric Dictionary has been the companion of countless individuals who have begun the study of Homer. Far and away the hardiest and... most helpful of all the aids to the reading of Homeric Greek, it provides the student with a full listing of Homeric forms and concise accounts of the meanings of words.

It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most... dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric has almost no friends. He eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition–which is fully supported by his forceful mother–is to attend a top-flight college.In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.

The distilled, haunting, and subtly complex poems in Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World often arrive at that moment when solitude... slips into separation, when a person suddenly realizes he can barely see the place he set out from however long ago. He now sees he must find his connection back to the present, socially entangled world in which he lives. For Clay, reverie can be a siren’s song, luring him to that space in which prisoners will begin “to interrogate themselves.”Clay pays attention to the poet’s return to the world of his daily life, tracking the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around him changes. Clay is fully aware of the difficulties of Thoreau’s “border life,” and his poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness, all the while acknowledging that “a fragment is as complete as thought can be.” In the end, what we encounter most in these poems is a generous gentleness--an attention to the world so careful it’s as if the mind is “washing each grain of sand.”

A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels... anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett's works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else. New York Review Books is reissuing two of the finest novels of this singular modern genius—works that look forward to the blacky comic inventions of Muriel Spark as much as they do back to the drawing rooms of Jane Austen.A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.