"In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish...

In this volume, the author sifts the facts from legends and rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover(s) over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams."

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long...

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....

Counter Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.

Discusses how the defeat and American military occupation of Japan after World War II affected each level of Japanese society.

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, has drawn on his decade in the Middle East to produce the most trenchant, vivid, and thought-provoking book yet on the region. No issue in international politics has been more hotly debated than the Arab-Israeli conflict. And no reporter has illuminated both the conflict and the rhythms of life in the Middle East with more immediacy and brilliance...

"There is a vast literature on death and dying, but there are few reliable accounts of the ways in which we die. The intimate account of how various diseases take away life, offered in How We Die, is not meant to prompt horror or terror but to demythologize the process of dying to help us rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita." "Though the avenues of death— AIDS, cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer's, accident, and stroke— are common,...

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City: the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.