Born in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston University in government and dramatics and an MA in international relations and American government from Northeastern University. She built a career devoted largely to public health that has included positions at Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the National Research Council. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Joe Lieberman, a US senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president with Al Gore and would go on to run for president.
In Hadassah, Lieberman pens the compelling story of her extraordinary life: from her family's experience in Eastern Europe to their move to Gardner, Massachusetts; forging her career; experiencing divorce; and, following her remarriage, her life on the national political stage. By offering insight into her identity as an immigrant, an American Jew, a working woman, and a wife, mother, and grandmother, Lieberman’s moving memoir speaks to many of the major issues of our time, from immigration to gender politics. Featuring an introduction by Joe Lieberman and an afterword by Megan McCain, it is a true American story.
Half-Life of a Zealot tells how the girl who spoke against “Reds” alongside her father became a fierce advocate for progressive change in America and abroad, an innovative philanthropist, and Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to Austria. In captivating prose, Hunt describes the warmth and wear of Southern Baptist culture, which instilled in her a calling to help those who are vulnerable. The reader is drawn into her full-throttle professional life as it competes with critical family needs.
Hunt gives a remarkably frank account of her triumphs and shortcomings; her sorrows, including a miscarriage and the failure of a marriage; the joys and struggles of her second marriage; and her angst over the life-threatening illness of one of her three children. She is candid about the opportunities her fortune has created, as well as the challenge of life as an heiress.
Much of Swanee Hunt’s professional life is devoted to expanding women’s roles in making and shaping public policy. She is the founding director of Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government, chair of the Initiative for Inclusive Security, and president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund.
Swanee Hunt’s autobiography brims over with strong women: her mother, whose religious faith and optimism were an inspiration; her daughter, who fights the social stigma of mental disorders; the women of war-torn Bosnia, who transformed their grief into action; and friends like Hillary Clinton, who used her position as First Lady to strengthen the voices of others.
Hunt is one more strong woman. Half-Life of a Zealot is her story—so far.
“A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review
“His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —New Yorker
“If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World
“Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review
"War is about patriotism, about sacrifice, about conquering fear. And perhaps most of all, it's about the guy in the foxhole next to you, taking care of each other, protecting each other, loving each other; a camaraderie so intense only men who have been in combat can ever know what it's like. Yes, most of all, war is about love."
Heartland Heroes is a collection of remarkable stories from ordinary men and women who lived through extraordinary times. They resided in places like Lee’s Summit, Independence, and Kansas City, yet their experiences were very much like those of World War II veterans everywhere. Some were marines, nurses, or fighter pilots, others were simply civilians who lived through the war under the martial law imposed on the Hawaiian Islands after the attack on Pearl Harbor.Of the Rosenbluth family, only the older children, Faiga and Luzer, had gone into hiding before the SS rounded up the Jews of Kanczuga, Poland. Hidden is Faiga and Luzer’s story, a memoir whose intimate and quiet particularity makes the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real.
In alternating first-person narratives, Faiga (Fay) and Luzer (Leo) take readers into their very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, the once-dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister’s fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler’s only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows’ warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war’s end, back once more into the world—but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confident, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.
This is a personal and insightful portrait of Pope Pius XII, the memories of Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert, who served as his housekeeper for forty years. Her book, most of it written just a few months after the Pope’s death, shares insights into the person, the life, and the thinking of Pius XII, from his time as Nuncio in Munich until his death. Much of Sister’s motivation in writing this work was to correct the many distortions of fact and interpretation regarding this great pope.
This book was a best seller in the original German, as well as in the Italian and French translations. This is the first edition in English.
These reminiscences were written down at the instructions of Sister’s Superior General, but were not made known to the public until 1982, when it was published in German at the express wishes of Pope John Paul II to publish the work without any changes. So the work remained a lively, flowing account of memories and anecdotes in a simple, spontaneous style. It is a powerful and insightful account of Pius’s daily life, his treatment of those around him, and his concern for the upholding of the traditional teaching of the Church in the face of his awesome burden to lead the Church during World War II.
"It's in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear," writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman's insightful memoir. "Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of the living."
To ensure that the world of Jimmye Hillman's childhood in Greene County, Mississippi during the Great Depression doesn't slip away, he has gathered together accounts of his family and the other people of Old Washington village. There are humorous stories of hog hunting and heart-wrenching tales of poverty set against a rural backdrop shaded by the local social, religious, and political climate of the time. Jimmye and his family were subsistence farmers out of bare-bones necessity, decades before discussions about sustainability made such practices laudable.
More than just childhood memories and a family saga, though, this book serves as a snapshot of the natural, historical, and linguistic details of the time and place. It is a remarkable record of Southern life. Observations loaded with detail uncover broader themes of work, family loyalty, and the politics of changing times.
Hillman, now eighty-eight, went on to a distinguished career as an economist specializing in agriculture. He realizes the importance of his story as an example of the cultural history of the Deep South but allows readers to discover the significance on their own by witnessing the lives of a colorful cast of characters. Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs is unique, a blend of humor and reflection, wisdom and sympathy—but it's also a hard-nosed look at the realities of living on a dirt farm in a vanished world.
Once again, through a boy’s eyes, Ralph Jackson sees a winter sky darkened with geese and ducks, a kitchen stove glowing with cheerful warmth, Aunt May strolling in her flower garden, moonlight filtering through treetops to cast patches of white light on a sandy woodland road.
Again he catches odors once so familiar: of a mysterious attic, of burning salt grass in late summer, of mountain streams with their fresh green smell, of dark-roast coffee and of slab bacon sizzling in the pan.
He hears again a panther’s scream from the darkness surrounding a campfire, the scampering of mice across the barnloft floor, the sigh of a felled pine tree changing to a crashing roar as it meets the ground, the sounds of a meal in preparation, the hum of a mosquito swarm rising from the marshes.
He remembers the taste of barbecued goat, the sweet sharpness of peppermint candy, the flavor of gumdrops from the country store—where, as showcase neighbors of cigars and chewing tobacco, they acquired a faint tobacco taste.
And he feels again the welcome shock of frigid spring water on a hot perspiring body, the pleasant sensation of sand between his toes, the breathtaking exhilaration of swinging on a sapling top.
The joy of childhood on an East Texas ranch is the subject of this book: exciting events like the arrival of the first norther of the season, swimming with alligators, hogkilling, building tree houses, roundup, hunting and fishing, calf-riding, fording strange streams. Interspersed among these episodes are others of darker mood: a smallpox epidemic, the burning of the ranch house, wolves attacking the cattle.
Jackson’s characters come alive. Scenes are vivid; moods are various and enveloping. The author has told the delightful story of his boyhood from a highly personal yet universal perspective, and in doing so he has presented a picture of a region of the state previously largely neglected in Texas literature.
If he had not fouled out, maybe Washington State University’s center, James McKean, might have held Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to only forty points. It was 1967, a transition year for college athletics in a dramatic time for those coming ofage. In this memoir set in the 1950s and 1960s, McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University (for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote), and his fashioning a life during and after basketball.
Driven by the energy and spirit of athletics, the language in Home Stand lights up McKean’s wonderfully eclectic work—the aunt who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his last run as a misguided drag racer, his playing basketball for a washing machine factory in Bologna, Italy, or against the prisoners in Walla Walla State Penitentiary—all seen in the context of turbulent times. Needless to say, Lew Alcindor scored his points and UCLA won, which they did every game that season. What James McKean took home was five fouls and a good story.
Home Stand delivers a lyrical, thoughtful reflection of what it is to be an athlete—inside as well as outside the game—and how one man’s love of basketball evolved into a love of poetry, "good turns of speech," writing, and teaching.
Mary Beth Rogers has led an eventful life rooted in the weeds of Texas politics, occasionally savoring a few victories—particularly the 1990 governor’s race when, as campaign manager for Ann Richards, she did the impossible and put a Democratic woman in office. She also learned to absorb her losses—after all, she was a liberal feminist in America’s most aggressively conservative state.
Rogers’s road to a political life was complex. Candidly and vulnerably, she shares both public and private memories of how she tried to maintain a rich family life with growing children and a husband with a debilitating illness. She goes on to provide an insider’s account of her experiences as Richards’s first chief of staff while weaving her way through the highs and lows of political intrigue and legislative maneuvering.
Reflecting on her family heritage and nascent spiritual quest, Rogers discovers a reality at once sobering and invigorating: nothing is ever completely lost or completely won. It is a constant struggle to create humane public policies built on a foundation of fairness and justice—particularly in her beloved Texas.
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.
Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.
Meet the Jolly Boys—five men from northern Wisconsin who built a deer hunting shack in 1955 and established a tradition that has now lasted over six decades. Hunting Camp 52, affectionately known as Blue Heaven, is a place where every trail, rock, and ravine has its own nickname; every kill is recorded by hand on a window shade; every hunter happily croons along during evening songfests; and every rowdy poker game lasts late into the night. The outhouse is always cold, the porcupines are always a problem, and the vehicles are always getting stuck in the mud, but there’s nowhere else these men would rather be.
In Hunting Camp 52: Tales from a North Woods Deer Camp, John Marvin Hanson—the son of one of the original Jolly Boys—recounts the sidesplitting antics, the memorable hunts, and the profound camaraderie that has developed over almost sixty seasons at Blue Heaven. Hanson also includes more than twenty recipes for gourmet comfort foods prepared each year at camp, from pickled venison hearts to Norwegian meatballs to the treasured recipe for Reali Spaghetti. As the Jolly Boys age and younger generations take up the mantle of Blue Heaven, Hanson comes to appreciate that hunting camp is not about bagging a trophy buck as much as it is about spending time with the friends and family members who matter most.
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