NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
"Bloomberg" - "Forbes" - "The Spectator
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Recipient of "Foreign Policy's" 2013 Albie Award

In 2006, Jeffrey Sachs--celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller "The End of Poverty--" launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring, $120-million experiment designed to test his theories about ending poverty. For six years, Nina Munk shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, listened in on conversations with heads-of-state and humanitarian organizations, and immersed herself in the lives of people in two remote African villages. Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty. "The Idealist" is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.

A gripping first-hand account of the devastating "last chapter" of the Holocaust, written by a privileged eyewitness, the secretary of the Hungarian Judenrat, and a member of Budapest's Jewish elite, How It Happened is a unique testament to the senseless brutality that, in a matter of months, decimated what was Europe's largest and last-surviving Jewish community. Writing immediately after the war and examining only those critical months of 1944 when Hitler's Germany occupied its ally Hungary, Erno Munkacsi describes the Judenrat's desperation and fear as it attempted to prevent the looming catastrophe, agonized over decisions not made, and struggled to grasp the immensity of a tragedy that would take the lives of 427,000 Hungarian Jews in the very last year of the Second World War. This long-overdue translation makes available Munkacsi's profound and unparalleled insight into the Holocaust in Hungary, revealing the "choiceless choices" that confronted members of the Judenrat forced to execute the Nazis' orders. With an in-depth introduction, a brief biography of Erno Munkacsi, ample annotations by Laszlo Csosz and Ferenc Laczo, two dozen archival photographs, and detailed maps, How It Happened is an essential resource for historians and students of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and Central Europe.