'The Automaton' is based on a story told to Paolo Ventura as a child. It centres on an elderly, Jewish watchmaker living in the Venice ghetto in 1943, one of the darkest periods of the Nazi occupation and the rule of the fascist regime in Italy. The city where the watchmaker has lived his entire life, now desolate and fearful, is the stage on which the story unfolds. The old man decides to build an automaton (a robot), to keep him company while he awaits the arrival of the fascist police who will deport the last of the remaining Jews from the ghetto. Paolo Ventura is internationally known for the complex creative process he adopts. Having created the narrative script for the book, he then builds elaborate models and miniature figurines in his studio and incorporates them in what appear as almost film sets. These are then photographed and his final artworks are the photographs of these constructed tableaux. 'The Automaton' is a photographic narrative from beginning to end.

A leading Yugoslav dissident offers valuable insights into the demise of communism and the bloody mayhem that followed in its wake.
The collapse of communism in Europe liberated Yugoslavia only to see it plunge into a brutal civil war between religious, ethnic, and nationalist factions. Why did communism's nonviolent end ignite a nationalist war that has exacted such a high price in human suffering?
International affairs scholar Svetozar Stojanovi? a member of the famous Praxis group that resisted the communists has studied the developments in his war-torn homeland. He examines the internal and external factors that forced the transition from communist rule to democracy and a free-market economy. His insider's, behind-the-scenes look at the internal power struggles that pull factions in various directions, examines the cultural weaknesses of communism, the "capitalist encirclement" of Marxist-socialist economies, communism's ideological decay, and the roles played by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Fall of Yugoslavia also examines the international reaction to these historic developments. Stojanovi? urges the West not to fall victim to a "triumphalistic temptation," with as yet unforeseen consequences, but to anticipate and face the problems in this volatile Yugoslav region.

For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept hidden from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann, her daughter, and offer to answer any questions Ann wished to ask.

When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Germany, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty.

"Sala's Gift" is a heartbreaking, eye-opening story of survival and love amidst history's worst nightmare.