Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture―and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks―Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life―trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study―to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past―making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

Why did Abraham Lincoln sneak into Washington for his inauguration? was the Gettysburg Address written on the back of an envelope? Where did the Underground Railroad run? Did General Sherman really say, "War is Hell"?

If you can't answer these questions, you're not alone. Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events - Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and much more. Drawing on moving eyewitness accounts, Davis includes a wealth of "hidden history" about the roles played by women and African Americans before and during the war, along with lesser-known facts that will enthrall even learned Civil War buffs. Vivid, informative, and hugely entertaining, Don't Know Much About the Civil War is the only book you'll ever need on "the war that never ended."

Wars are expensive, both in human terms and monetary ones. But while warfare might be costly it has also, at times, been an important driver of economic change and progress. Over the long span of history nothing has shaped human institutions - and thus the process of economic development - as much as war and violence. Wars made states and states made wars. As the costs of warfighting grew so did state structures, taxation systems and national markets for debt. And as warfare became ever more destructive the incentive for governments to resort to it changed too.

Blood and Treasure looks at the history and economics of warfare from the Viking Age to the war in Ukraine, examining how incentives and institutions have changed over time. It surveys how warfare may have driven Europe's rise to global prominence, and it explains how the total wars of the twentieth century required a new type of strategy, one that took economics seriously.

Along the way it asks whether Genghis Khan should be regarded as the father of globalisation, explains how New World gold and silver kept Spain poor, ponders why some economists think of witch trials as a form of 'non-price competition', notes how pirate captains were pioneers of effective HR techniques, asks if handing out medals hurt the Luftwaffe in the Second World War and assesses if economic theories helped to create a tragedy in Vietnam. As well as considering why some medieval kings were right to arm their soldiers with inferior weapons, taking some management lessons from Joseph Stalin and asking if a culture of patronage and cronyism helped the Royal Navy rise to greatness.

Underpinning it all is a focus on how and why the economics of conflict have changed over time. Economics can help to explain war and understanding the history of warfare can help explain modern economics.

A gripping account of the Soviet victories of 1944.

The year 1944 was the turning point of World War Two, and nowhere was this more evident than on the Eastern Front. For three years, following the onslaught of the German Army during Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Red Army had retreated and then eventually held, fighting to a stalemate while the Germans occupied and ravaged large parts of the Soviet Union and its republics. Finally, following the breaking of the German siege of Leningrad in January 1944, Stalin and his generals were able to consider striking back. In June, they launched Operation Bagration, during which more than two million Red Army soldiers began an offensive, pushing west. The results were almost immediate and devastating. Within three weeks, Army Group Centre, the core of the German Army, had lost 28 of its 32 divisions. The ending had begun.

Drawing on new sources-some previously untranslated-including accounts from ordinary soldiers and witnesses, Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles this decisive year in what was arguably the most crucial front in the war against Nazi Germany, a front extending 1200 miles. He covers the military, political, and diplomatic aspects in his trademark accessible and evocative style, illuminating the major conflicts as well as the roles played by deception, Partisan fighting, and the war within a war in Ukraine.

Endgame 1944 reveals how the Soviet victories enabled Stalin to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement, laying the foundations for the Cold War.

The first political history of the Second World War, of building the Grand Alliance to defeat Hitler, by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Appeasing Hitler.

After the fall of France in June 1940, only Britain stood between Hitler and total victory. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination.

By 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, yet they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their points of conflict, as well as of co-operation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.

Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from over a hundred archives. Using vivid, first-hand accounts and unpublished diaries, we enter the rooms where the critical decisions were made while going beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other themes, the doomed Anglo-French alliance, fractious relations with General de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece and Nationalist China.

Ambitious and compelling, revealing the political drama behind the military events, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.