Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared...

""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...

"The first memoir published by a survivor of the USS Arizona and perhaps the most extraordinary account ever to emerge from the Pearl Harbor attack: 94-year old Donald Stratton's moment-by-moment account of survival on December 7, 1941, and his inspiring return to the fight."--Provided by publisher.

Englund examines the history of World War I through the experiences of the average man and woman-- not only the tragedy and horror but also the absurdity and even, at times, the beauty. In a brilliant mosaic of perspectives that moves between the home front and the front lines, he reconstructs the feelings, impressions, experiences, and shifting spirits of twenty particular people, allowing them to speak not only for themselves but also for all those...

"This astonishing book by the prize-winning journalist Rania Abouzeid tells the tragedy of the Syrian War through the dramatic stories of four young people seeking safety and freedom in a shattered country. Extending back to the first demonstrations of 2011, No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict. As protests ignited in Daraa, some citizens were brimming with a sense of possibility. A privileged...

"Groundbreaking, compelling, and poignant, The Slaves' Wardelivers an unprecedented vision of the nation's bloodiest conflict. An acclaimed historian of nineteenth-century and African-American history, Andrew Ward gives us the first narrative of the Civil War told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided. Woven together from hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, here is the Civil War as seen from not only battlefields,...

Christian G. Appy's oral history of the Vietnam War probes the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides -- Americans and Vietnamese,...

"First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide--but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the...

Red Azalea is the story of a young woman's emotional and political education in the last years of Mao's China. Born in Shanghai in 1957 Anchee Min, as a member of the Little Red Guards, was asked to betray and publicly humiliate a beloved teacher. At seventeen she was sent to work at a labor collective, the Red Fire Farm, where her education in fear, deprivation, and hardship continued. And yet, forbidden to speak, to dress, to read, write, or love...

A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms...