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The patriarch of the Peniel family, with his own daughter, fathers a son, Victor-Flandrin, who goes on to sire fifteen children of his own. "Their stories, in turn, are driven by eccentricity and surges of inexplicable events, but no amount of magic or love can keep the Peniels safe from the murderous engines of the world wars."--Booklist review.
The moving and untold story of the Russian advance into East Prussia in 1945, and the fight for survival of a people and their way of life
'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ... Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ... The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph
NATIONAL BESTSELLER, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year from NPR, Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and others. The mesmerizing story of one woman's rise from circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva—"a brilliant performance" (Washington Post). The Queen of the Night tells the captivating story of Lilliet Berne, an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept into the glamour and terror of Second Empire France. She became a sensation of the Paris Opera, with every accolade but an original role—her chance at immortality. When one is offered to her, she finds the libretto is based on her deepest secret, something only four people have ever known. But who betrayed her? With epic sweep, gorgeous language, and haunting details, Alexander Chee shares Lilliet’s cunning transformation from circus rider to courtesan to legendary soprano, retracing the path that led to the role that could secure her reputation—or destroy her with the secrets it reveals. “It just sounds terrific. It sounds like opera.”—The New Yorker “Sprawling, soaring, bawdy, and plotted like a fine embroidery.”—NPR
Examines women's life writing in order to shed light on female complicity in the Second World War and the Holocaust.
From the the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Part detective story, part historical epic—a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island’s governor and local administration and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
"The two world wars were undoubtedly two of the most catastrophic events in human history, not just for those who actually fought in them, but for untold millions of civilians. And even though the wars' superlativeness is unquestioned, our understanding of exactly how bad the civilian costs were is limited. Although the numbers are better for the two wars than for most earlier wars, gaps and uncertainties remain. States went to great lengths to record military casualties, but civilian fatalities often went uncounted, and figures were often deliberately obscured. In this book, renowned economic historian Cormac O Grada aims to set the record straight, establishing a figure for civilian fatalities that reveals much about the nature of modern war. The book builds on earlier estimates of casualties from a range of causes, some reliable, some approximate at best, and warns against spurious precision when approximations are impossible. For example, while the human toll of the Jewish Holocaust is generally agreed to have been about 6 million, the tolls of two other war genocides, those of the Armenian community in Turkey during World War I and of the European Roma community during World War II, cannot be determined with any precision. (Scholarly estimates of these range from 0.6 to 1.2 million, and from "at least 130,000" to "between 250,000 and 500,000.") During World War II Chinese civilians faced both a civil war and Japanese occupation, and no estimate of the resulting civilian deaths, which range from an implausibly low 2.5 million to 20 million, is reliable. The book shows that the single biggest cause of civilian deaths during the two wars were famines, some of which are familiar and well-documented, while others have attracted research only recently, and a few await systematic analysis. The book covers these as well as genocides, particularly the Jewish Holocaust, and deaths from aerial bombing, and shows how in each of these categories the numbers have been controversial and contested. Most of the book deals with death, but it contains accounts too of the tens of millions of displaced persons and refugees and forced labourers, of civilian trauma, and of sexual violence and other atrocities. In the end O Grada argues that the two world wars cost at least 45 to 50 million civilian lives, almost double the cost in military lives. Addressing the uncertainties and inaccuracies in civilian casualties, the book shows the failings of international law and gives a vital and harrowing understanding of the true cost of war"--
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.