Did you know that the great Jewish sage and physician Maimonides practiced medicine while lying flat on his back? That a famous passage penned by George Washington was actually the work of a rabbi? That a Jewish athlete represented Nazi Germany in its infamous 1936 Olympic Games? That Yasser Arafat was made by the KGB? These and many more such intriguing stories make up Jack Cooper's fascinating collection of historical windows on the life of the Jews. Covering biblical times through to today, these unusual vignettes on the sidelines of history come together to form a story that is anything but a sideline, depicting a resourceful people who have survived and thrived despite the worst history has thrown at them. Whether you read it straight through, or pick out individual stories to read as the mood strikes, you're in for a captivating read!

Jack likes a lot of things. Men. Women. Poetry, cigarettes, and alcohol. Art and illegal substances. Jack doesn't like homophobic cops and angry mobsters. When his drug dealer skips town, he leaves Jack stuck between the two. If he can't juggle both, he'll lose the only reliable person he's ever known...himself.

George Hibbard has always endorsed T.S. Eliot's idea that 'we must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it, ' and this idea, implicit in the first essay in this volume, informs the whole collection, written in honour of one of Canada's leading Shakespearian editors and scholars. The two essays which begin the collection present broad overviews of Elizabethan drama and discuss Shakespeare's first great editor, Theobald. Together with the final essay - on publication and performance in early Stuart drama - these form the frame of the mirror held up to Shakespeare in the other eighteen essays, whether they of general themes running through some or all of Shakespeare's plays or the plays his contemporaries, or whether they treat of specific plays. There is an especially rich concentration on Macbeth and Coriolanus