Every city and every state needs a Richard Ravitch. In sixty years on the job, whether working in business or government, he was the man willing to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing New York. Trained as a lawyer, he worked briefly for the House of Representatives, then began his career in his family's construction business. He built high-profile projects like the Whitney Museum and Citicorp Center but his primary energy was devoted to building over 40,000 units of affordable housing including the first racially integrated apartment complex in Washington, D.C. He dealt with architects, engineers, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, construction workers, bankers, and tenants--virtually all of the people who make cities and states work.
It was no surprise that those endeavors ultimately led to a life of public service. In 1975, Ravitch was asked by then New York Governor Hugh Carey to arrange a rescue of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, a public entity that had issued bonds to finance over 30,000 affordable housing units but was on the verge of bankruptcy. That same year, Ravitch was at Carey's side when New York City's biggest banks said they would no longer underwrite its debt and he became instrumental to averting the city's bankruptcy.
Throughout his career, Ravitch divided his time between public service and private enterprise. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 1979 to 1983 and is generally credited with rebuilding the system. He turned around the Bowery Savings Bank, chaired a commission that rewrote the Charter of the City of New York, served on two Presidential Commissions, and became chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball.
Then, in 2008, after Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal and New York State was in a post-financial-crisis meltdown, Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, appointed Ravitch Lieutenant Governor and asked him to make recommendations regarding the state's budgeting plan. What Ravitch found was the result of not just the economic downturn but years of fiscal denial. And the closer he looked, the clearer it became that the same thing was happening in most states. Budgetary pressures from Medicaid, pension promises to public employees, and deceptive budgeting and borrowing practices are crippling our states' ability to do what only they can do--invest in the physical and human infrastructure the country needs to thrive. Making this case is Ravitch's current public endeavor and it deserves immediate attention from both public officials and private citizens.

In central Brussels stands a statue of a young woman. Built in 1923, it is the first monument to a working-class woman in European history. Her name was Gabrielle Petit. History has forgotten Petit, an ambitious and patriotic Belgian, executed by firing squad in 1916 for her role as an intelligence agent for the British Army. After the First World War she was celebrated as an example of stern endeavour, but a hundred years later her memory has faded. In the first part of this historical biography Sophie De Schaepdrijver uses Petit's life to explore gender, class and heroism in the context of occupied Europe. Petit's experiences reveal the reality of civilian engagement under military occupation and the emergence of modern espionage. The second part of the book focuses on the legacy and cultural memory of Petit and the First World War. By analysing Petit's representation in ceremony, discourse and popular culture De Schaepdrijver expands our understanding of remembrance across the 20th century.

Drafted when he was 37 years old, this is the story of Dale Hubley - his life and service during World War II as a member of the Seventh Armored Division in Patton's Third Army. Being drafted when he was older change his life in many way but he was never bitter. He would always say, "I was one of the lucky ones, I got to come home." This positive attitude is what shaped Dale's life.

With the agreement at Munich in 1938 he effectively abandoned Czechoslovakia, but immediately accelerated Britain's rearmament programme and the following year declared that Britain would defend Poland. This commitment led, in September 1939, to the start of World War II.

Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist, forced into hiding, captured, threatened with the death penalty and eventually thrown into jail for twenty-seven years, but nothing could stop him from fighting to liberate his country from the evil of apartheid. A hero in the struggle against a terrible regime, he never gave up. Even when he was a prisoner, he worked secretly with his comrades to undermine the oppressive apartheid government. This is the exciting true story of a young herd boy who was to grow up to become a lawyer, a freedom fighter, South Africa’s first democratically elected president and the beloved grandfather of a nation. It is told here in words and pictures for the young and the young at heart: a story to read with enjoyment and remember with pride.

A masterful biography of Lincoln that follows his bitter struggle with poverty, his self-made success in business and law, his early disappointing political career, and his leadership as President during one of America's most tumultuous periods.

Louis Botha was ’n briljante Boeregeneraal wie se taktiese vernuf en intuïtiewe aanslag vir etlike oorwinnings oor die Britse magte in die Anglo-Boereoorlog gesorg het. Maar dit was sy enigmatiese karakter en vaste oortuiging om te hou by wat hy geglo het reg was, wat hom as ’n leier van die Boerevolk bevestig het.

Richard Steyn gee op meesterlike wyse insae in die lewe van hierdie grootse Suid-Afrikaanse krygsman en staatsman. Hy beskryf verhelderend hoe Botha saam met sy hegte vriend, Jan Smuts, die vier Suid-Afrikaanse kolonies na Uniewording in 1910 gelei het waarna Botha as die eerste eerste minister van die Unie aangewys is.

Gedurende die Eerste Wêreldoorlog was Botha aan die voorpunt van die Suid-Afrikaanse magte se suksesvolle inval van Duits-Suidwes-Afrika. Tog is hy deur talle Afrikaners verkwalik vir sy steun aan Brittanje, en die Afrikaner-rebellie van 1914, waartydens hy teen voormalige makkers moes optree, het sy hart gebreek.

Botha se groothartig en vrygewige omgang met mense – van Vereeniging tot Versailles – het hom bo sy tydgenote laat uitstaan.

A "New York Times "bestseller, Jeff Guinn's definitive, myth-busting account of the most famous gunfight in American history reveals who Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys really were and what the shootout was all about.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral would shape how future generations came to view the Old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, symbolic of a frontier populated by good guys in white hats and villains in black ones. It's a colorful story--but the truth is even better.
Drawing on new material from private collections--including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion--as well as archival research, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what actually happened that day in Tombstone and why

Revered in his lifetime, Robert E. Lee achieved legendary status after his death. This memoir by Lee's son gathers a wealth of material written by the General, offering rare glimpses of the man behind the uniform, with scenes from family life and touching letters from a loving husband and father.

For author Virginia Kiernan, February 2003 is a month, though more than ten years past, that remains vivid in her memory. It was the month her husband, Verner Kiernan, a father of six, was deployed with the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, only one month before the war with Iraq began. In Dear God, Please Keep Daddy Safe, Virginia narrates the trials and triumphs of a year of deployment. She discusses the struggles army families face as she provides insight into the unknown world of army life in one of the nation's top units-including a deadly grenade attack on her husband's unit, the emotion of attending heart-wrenching memorial services, and the family crisis that becomes compounded with separation. A compelling true story written by a mom raising six children while her husband was deployed during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dear God, Please Keep Daddy Safe chronicles the highs and lows of events both overseas and on the home front, showing that the often overlooked issues at home can sometimes be as stressful as serving in uniform.

Harry Rosenberg grew up near the hottest place on Earth-Death Valley-in a very unusual dwelling: a red caboose. His father repaired bridges for the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad, which hauled ore from remote mines. During the Depression, the Rosenbergs traveled from washout to washout across a fiery land prone, paradoxically, to devastating floods of the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers. No other place on Earth was better suited to forge a curious boy into a metallurgist who would spend his life unlocking the vast potential of a difficult, new metal-titanium. In Fire and Forge, author Kathleen L. Housley tells Rosenberg's life story-working as a miner, having a chance meeting with a geologist studying Death Valley, earning a PhD from Stanford, gaining patents for aerospace alloys, and founding a company that manufactures the purest titanium in the world. This biography captures the essence of a man whose work as a metallurgist left an impact on the world, but it also communicates Rosenberg's love for his roots. No matter how far he traveled, no matter the number of his successes, he never really left the Mojave Desert and the Amargosa River-it still flows through his veins.

In 1940 a first-year student at Oxford gave up his legal studies to serve his country in its time of need. He served with valour and distinction, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for developing and then delivering battlewinning tactics that protected the flanks of the D-Day landings. But Guy Hudson also saw things that cannot be unseen, and experienced the horrors of war that become tattooed on one's soul. This is the story of a brave and patriotic sailor who helped sink the German battleship Bismarck, drove his Motor Torpedo Boat into enemy harbours right under the muzzles of Axis guns, and then pioneered radar control procedures for the small torpedo and gun boats that careered across pitch-dark maritime battlefields to guard the Allied landings in northern France. It is also the story of a man who turned to alcohol to control the darker memories created by war, and whose life and business collapsed due to the demon of drink, before he was rescued by his second wife. His legacy now lives on at the University of Oxford through the Guy Hudson Memorial Trust - this biography is his tribute.

Before his murder at twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the pre-eminent storyteller of the 90s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded several platinum-selling albums, starred in major films and became an activist and political hero known the world over.

In this cultural history and brilliantly researched biography, Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac's coming of age, fame and influence and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprising. Words for My Comrades crucially engages with the influence of Tupac's mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party, with its dedication to dismantling American imperialism and police brutality, informed Tupac's art. Tupac's childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his militant step-father Mutulu Shakur, became his own riveting code of ethics that helped listeners reckon with America's inherent injustices.

Drawing upon conversations with the people who bore witness - from Panther veterans and other committed Marxist revolutionaries of 1970s America, to good friends and close collaborators of the rapper himself - Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics.

Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture and how America produced, in Tupac and Afeni, two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.