Triple bill of thrillers. In 'Catch .44' (2011) Tes (Malin Åkerman), Kara (Nikki Reed) and Dawn (Deborah Ann Woll) are three women with guns who are working for crime boss Mel (Bruce Willis). When they find themselves the victims in a double-crossing drug deal that turns out to be more of a set-up than a heist gone wrong, they set out to get their revenge. Forest Whitaker and Brad Dourif co-star. 'Switch' (2011) is a French-language thriller in which a woman's attempts to spice up her life through switching apartments goes disastrously wrong. Sophie Malaterre (Karine Vanasse), a Montreal fashion designer, initially enjoys swapping apartments with a French woman she met over the internet, Bénédicte Serteaux (Karina Testa). Sophie's first day in Paris is like a dream - but her second is a nightmare. She is awoken by the police, led by Detective Forgeat (Eric Cantona), who have discovered a dead body in the duplex, and seem unable to distinguish Sophie from Bénédicte... 'Hijacked' (2012) stars Randy Couture, Dominic Purcell and Vinnie Jones. Paul Ross (Couture), a grizzled government agent, has been investigating an influential crime organisation known as The Tribe for a number of years. Just when he begins to feel that he is making progress with the investigation his personal and professional interests interconnect. When a private jet carrying a wealthy businessman and Ross' former fiancée, Olivia (Tiffany Dupont), is hijacked by The Tribe, Ross is the only government agent on the scene. How will he cope?

In May 1941, Gertrude van Tijn arrived in Lisbon on a mission of mercy from German occupied Amsterdam. She came with Nazi approval to the capital of neutral Portugal to negotiate the departure from Hitler's Europe of thousands of German and Dutch Jews. Was this middle aged Jewish woman, burdened with such a terrible responsibility, merely a pawn of the Nazis, or was her journey a genuine opportunity to save large numbers of Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

A moving account of courage and of all-too-human failings in the face of extraordinary moral challenges, Th"e Ambiguity of Virtue "tells the story of Van Tijn's work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Nazi appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam and enabled many Jews to escape. Some later called her a heroine for the choices she made; others denounced her as a collaborator.

Bernard Wasserstein's haunting narrative draws readers into the twilight world of wartime Europe, to expose the wrenching dilemmas that confronted Jews under Nazi occupation. Gertrude van Tijn's experience raises crucial questions about German policy toward the Jews, about the role of the Jewish Council, and about Dutch, American, and British responses to the persecution and mass murder of Jews on an unimaginable scale."

Herbert Samuel's extraordinarily long political life coincided with the long drawn-out sunset of Liberalism as a dominant political force in Britain. His career in the Liberal Party began in the age of Gladstone and ended in the era of Grimond. At the turn of the century Samuel played a vital role in the formulation of the `New Liberalism', and later helped translate that doctrine into legislation that laid the foundations of the welfare state. He played a central role in the history of Zionism, serving as first British High Commissioner in Palestine from 1920 to 1925. He returned to office in the National Government of 1931, and led the Liberal Party between 1931 and 1935. In later life Samuel won a broad public audience as a philosopher, a respected elder statesman, and a much admired broadcaster. Bernard Wasserstein assesses Samuel's importance in British politics and in the emergence of the state of Israel. This accessible and scholarly biography, based on extensive research in all the available sources, provides a revealing portrait of a leading twentieth-century statesman.

Contents:
Introduction: International Treaties; 1. The Changing Alliances and Alignments before World War I; 2. Secret Agreements and Treaties of World War I; 3. The Peace Settlements 1919-23; 4. France, Britain, Italy and Germany 1921-33; 5. France and her Eastern Allies, 1921-39; 6. The Soviet Union and her Neighbours; 7. The Collapse of the Terrritorial Settlements of Versailles, 1931-7; 8. From Peace to World War in Europe and Asia, 1937-41; 9. The Grand Alliance, 1941-5; 10. The Wartime Conferences and the Surrender of Japan, 1943-5; 11. The Peace Treaties, 1945-51; 12. The United Nations; 13. The United States Treaty System; 14. The Soviet Treaty System; 15. The German Question; 16. The Irish Question, 1920-1999; 17. European Integration, 1947-85; 18. European Union, 1985-99; 19. Asia after 1947; 20. Independent Africa; 21 The Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean since 1945; 22. The Americas, 1960-99; 23 Détente and Arms Control, 1963-86; 24. Human Rights; 25. The Environment; 26. The Break-Up of the Soviet Empire; 27. The Disintegration of Yugoslavia; 28. New World Order, 1986-99.

'A fine and deeply affecting work of history and memoir' Philippe Sands Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' The result is an exceptional, often moving book. Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish magnate Ignacy Cetner built his palace at Krakowiec and, with his vivacious daughter, Princess Anna, created an arcadia of refinement and serenity. Under the Habsburg emperors after 1772, Krakowiec developed into a typical shtetl, with a jostling population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In 1914, disaster struck. 'Seven years of terror and carnage' left a legacy of ferocious national antagonisms. During the Second World War the Jews were murdered in circumstances harrowingly described by Wasserstein. After the war the Poles were expelled and the town dwindled into a border outpost. Today, the storm of history once again rains down on Krakowiec as hordes of refugees flee for their lives from Ukraine to Poland. At the beginning and end of the book we encounter Wasserstein's own family, especially his grandfather Berl. In their lives and the many others Wasserstein has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.

This is a study of the caliphate as a political institution in Islamic Spain, from its inception in 316/939 until the disappearance of the Umayyads in Cordoba in 422/1031. David J. Wasserstein explores the caliphal claims of the Hammudid dynasty in the south of the peninsula, and examines the caliphal practices of two Slav rulers of the eleventh century. He shows that the caliphal insitution was not abolished at any stage, and that it served rulers throughout the eleventh century as, among other things, an important source of legitimacy. Professor Wasserstein's important new interpretation is thoroughly grounded not only in the documentary sources, but also in the little-studied and revealing numismatic evidence. This is a significant contribution both to the Islamic history of the Iberian Peninsula and to our understanding of the nature of the caliphate within Islam in general.

The Septuagint is the most influential of the Greek versions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The exact circumstances of its creation are uncertain, but different versions of a legend about the miraculous nature of the translation have existed since antiquity. Beginning in the Letter of Aristeas, the legend describes how Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scribes to translate the sacred Hebrew scriptures for his famous library in Alexandria. Subsequent variations on the story recount how the scribes, working independently, produced word-for-word, identical Greek versions. In the course of the following centuries, to our own time, the story has been adapted and changed by Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans for many different reasons: to tell a story, to explain historical events and to lend authority to the Greek text for the institutions that used it. This book offers the first account of all of these versions over the last two millennia, providing a history of the uses and abuses of the legend in various cultures around the Mediterranean.

Recent advances in neuroimaging and genetics technologies have enhanced our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders in adults. The authors in this volume not only discuss such advances as they apply to adults with learning disorders, but also address their translation into clinical practice. One cluster of chapters addresses developmental concerns as children and adolescents with learning disorders approach young adulthood. Experts discuss dyslexia, language-based and writing disorders, perhaps the most widely studied group of learning disorders, from the point of view of neuroimaging and genetic underpinnings. Chapters on the neuroscience of nonverbal, math and executive function disorders are also included. Clinically-oriented chapters with case studies, recommendations for accommodation, and considerations for evaluation follow. Study of specialized populations - such as late high school students, college, medical and law students - further demonstrate how our expanded knowledge base may be applicable to clinical practice. The heterogeneity of adults with learning disorders, the complexity of their clinical presentation and co-existing disorders are addressed from both a scientific and clinical point of view demonstrating how empirical research and clinical practice inform each other. This volume will enhance the practice of clinicians and educators working with adults with neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as providing essential current information for researchers of adults with learning disorders.

Focusing on Near Eastern history in Mamluk and Ottoman times, this book, dedicated to Michael Winter, stresses elements of variety and continuity in the history of the Near East, an area of study which has traditionally attracted little attention from Islamists. Ranging over the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, the articles in this book look at the area from Istanbul down through Syria and Palestine to Arabia, the Yemen and the Sudan. The articles demonstrate the great wealth of the materials available, in a wide variety of languages, from archival documents to manuscripts and art works, as well as inscriptions and buildings, police records and divorce documentation. The topics covered are equally as varied and include Dufism, the festival of Nabi Musa, military organisations, doctors, and charity to name but a few.

Focusing on Near Eastern history in Mamluk and Ottoman times, this book, dedicated to Michael Winter, stresses elements of variety and continuity in the history of the Near East, an area of study which has traditionally attracted little attention from Islamists.

Ranging over the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, the articles in this book look at the area from Istanbul down through Syria and Palestine to Arabia, the Yemen and the Sudan. The articles demonstrate the great wealth of the materials available, in a wide variety of languages, from archival documents to manuscripts and art works, as well as inscriptions and buildings, police records and divorce documentation. The topics covered are equally as varied and include Dufism, the festival of Nabi Musa, military organisations, doctors, and charity to name but a few.

This is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein presents a disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught and World War Two. In this revisionist account of modern European Jewry, Wasserstein shows how the harsh realities of the age devastated the lives of communities and individuals. By 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Ranging from Vilna ('Jerusalem of Lithuania') to Salonica with its Judeo-Espanol-speaking stevedores and singers, and beyond, the book's focus is squarely on the Jews themselves rather than their persecutors. Wasserstein's aim is to 'breathe life into dry bones.' Based on vast research, written with compassion and empathy, and enlivened by dry wit, On the Eve paints a vivid and shocking picture of the European Jews in their final hour.

The sisters Rosensweig are three extraordinary Brooklyn-born Jewish women. Sara is the managing director of the European branch of an international bank, and she lives ostensibly happy, man-free-life in London with her intelligent daughter, Tess. Pfeni is an eccentric travel writer who pursues an unsatisfactory relationship with Geoffrey, a bisexual theatre director. And Gorgeous has the perfect husband and family in Massachusetts, where she pursues a "funsy" career as a radio agony aunt. When they meet up at Sara'a house in Holland Park to celebrate her 54th birthday, reawakened familial bonds cause each women to confront her past and her future. This self-exploration is sometimes painful, but the reunion is made very interesting by the arrival of the New Yorker, Merv, a furrier who takes a shine to Sara. Falling in love at 54 is not impossible, but who said it was meant to be easy?

This highly practical book provides evidence-based strategies for helping adults with ADHD build essential skills for time management, organization, planning, and coping. Each of the 12 group sessions-which can also be adapted for individual therapy-is reviewed in step-by-step detail. Handy features include quick-reference Leader Notes for therapists, engaging in-session exercises, and reproducible take-home notes and homework assignments. Purchasers get access to a Web page featuring all of the reproducible materials, ready to download and print in a convenient 8 1/2 x 11 size. The paperback edition includes the adult ADHD criteria from DSM-5. The treatment program presented in this book received the Innovative Program of the Year Award from CHADD (Children and Adults with ADHD).

'A fine and deeply affecting work of history and memoir' Philippe Sands Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' The result is an exceptional, often moving book. Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish magnate Ignacy Cetner built his palace at Krakowiec and, with his vivacious daughter, Princess Anna, created an arcadia of refinement and serenity. Under the Habsburg emperors after 1772, Krakowiec developed into a typical shtetl, with a jostling population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In 1914, disaster struck. 'Seven years of terror and carnage' left a legacy of ferocious national antagonisms. During the Second World War the Jews were murdered in circumstances harrowingly described by Wasserstein. After the war the Poles were expelled and the town dwindled into a border outpost. Today, the storm of history once again rains down on Krakowiec as hordes of refugees flee for their lives from Ukraine to Poland. At the beginning and end of the book we encounter Wasserstein's own family, especially his grandfather Berl. In their lives and the many others Wasserstein has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.

Here is a rollicking parody of the self-help genre, one that skewers the couch-bound, apathetic mentality so pervasive in America today.
With tongue in cheek, Sloth guides readers step-by-step toward a life of noncommittal inertia. "You have the right to be lazy," writes Wasserstein. "You can choose not to respond. You can choose not to move." Readers will find out the importance of Lethargiosis--the process of eliminating energy and drive, the vital first step in becoming a sloth. To help you attain the perfect state of indolent bliss, the book offers a wealth of self-help aids. Readers will find the sloth songbook, sloth breakfast bars (packed with sugar, additives, and a delicious touch of Ambien), sloth documentaries (such as the author's 12-hour epic on Thomas Aquinas), and the sloth network, channel 823, programming guaranteed not to stimulate or challenge in any way. ("It may be difficult to distinguish between this and other channels, but only on channel 823 can you watch me sleeping.") Readers will also learn the top ten lies about Sloth, the ten commandments of Sloth, the SLOTH mantra, even the "too-much ten"--over-achievers such as Marie Curie, Shakespeare, and William the Conqueror. You will discover how to become a sloth in your diet, exercise, work, and even love-life (true love leads to passion, she warns, and passion is the biggest enemy of sloth).
Wendy Wasserstein is one of America's great comic writers--one who always has a serious point to her humor. Here, as she pokes fun at the self-help industry, she also satirizes the legion of Americans who are cultural and political sloths.

The eight hundred years between the first Roman conquests and the conquest of Islam saw a rich, constantly shifting blend of languages and writing systems, legal structures, religious practices and beliefs in the Near East. While the different ethnic groups and cultural forms often clashed with each other, adaptation was as much a characteristic of the region as conflict. This volume, emphasizing the inscriptions in many languages from the Near East, brings together mutually informative studies by scholars in diverse fields. Together, they reveal how the different languages, peoples and cultures interacted, competed with, tried to ignore or were influenced by each other, and how their relationships evolved over time. It will be of great value to those interested in Greek and Roman history, Jewish history and Near Eastern studies.

The eight hundred years between the first Roman conquests and the conquest of Islam saw a rich, constantly shifting blend of languages and writing systems, legal structures, religious practices and beliefs in the Near East. While the different ethnic groups and cultural forms often clashed with each other, adaptation was as much a characteristic of the region as conflict. This 2009 volume, emphasizing the inscriptions in many languages from the Near East, brings together mutually informative studies by scholars in diverse fields. Together, they reveal how the different languages, peoples and cultures interacted, competed with, tried to ignore or were influenced by each other, and how their relationships evolved over time. It will be of great value to those interested in Greek and Roman history, Jewish history and Near Eastern studies.

The Septuagint is the most influential of the Greek versions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The exact circumstances of its creation are uncertain, but different versions of a legend about the miraculous nature of the translation have existed since antiquity. Beginning in the Letter of Aristeas, the legend describes how Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scribes to translate the sacred Hebrew scriptures for his famous library in Alexandria. Subsequent variations on the story recount how the scribes, working independently, produced word-for-word, identical Greek versions. In the course of the following centuries, to our own time, the story has been adapted and changed by Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans for many different reasons: to tell a story, to explain historical events and to lend authority to the Greek text for the institutions that used it. This book offers the first account of all of these versions over the last two millennia, providing a history of the uses and abuses of the legend in various cultures around the Mediterranean.

"The poems in This Ecstasy They Call Damnation walk a razor's edge, bristling with intensity as they tackle the hard work of survival, both physical and spiritual. In this wide-ranging collection, Israel Wasserstein tells and re-tells myths, legends, Bible stories, and his own brilliant poems of Highway 54. The speedometer's always broken in this life, Wasserstein reminds us, and how we cope with this knowledge, and this lack of knowledge, seems to be at the heart of this rich, sure-handed debut." -Jim Daniels, author of Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry and other books "An evocative and lyrical storyteller, Israel Wasserstein takes on Bible stories and zombies, politics and myth. Like the angels that "we might entertain...unaware" these poems bless us with startling beauty and intelligence as they plumb the depths of the human condition. A deft and stunning debut that lingers long after the last page has been turned." -Lisa D. Ch vez, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, author of Destruction Bay and In an Angry Season

Fast-paced action movie starring Randy Couture, Dominic Purcell and Vinnie Jones. Paul Ross (Couture), a grizzled government agent, has been investigating an influential crime organisation known as The Tribe for a number of years. Just when he begins to feel that he is making progress with the investigation his personal and professional interests interconnect. When a private jet carrying a wealthy businessman and Ross' former fiancée, Olivia (Tiffany Dupont), is hijacked by The Tribe, Ross is the only government agent on the scene. The Tribe declare that they will begin killing passengers if their ransom demands aren't met, but have they reckoned with the equally proficient killing skills of Ross?

Here is the definitive history of contemporary Europe, a controversial but authoritative and lively narrative that is destined to become the standard account of the period from 1914 to the present. In this superb volume, esteemed historian Bernard Wasserstein offers the first serious, full-length history of a century of convulsive change. It is a history of barbarism and civilization, of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental blight, of imperial expansion and withdrawal, of authoritarian repression and of individual rebirth. Wasserstein provides both a narrative of the main contours of the political, diplomatic, and military history and an analysis the underpinnings of demographic, economic, and social developments. Drawing on the latest scholarly findings, including recent disclosures of intelligence materials and archival revelations that followed the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Wasserstein captures the essence of contemporary European history in an engaging narrative that is by turns grim, humorous, surprising, and enlightening.

In 1939 there were ten million Jews in Europe. After Hitler there were four million. Today in 1996 there are under two million. On current projections the Jews will become virtually extinct as a significant element in European society over the course of the twenty-first century. Now, in the first comprehensive social and political history of the experience and fate of European Jews during the last fifty years, Bernard Wasserstein sheds light on the reasons for this dire demographic projection. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, many hitherto unpublished, Wasserstein begins with the painful years of liberation after World War II when Jews tried to recover from the destruction of their people and communities, then traces the Jewish experience in Eastern and Western Europe in different national and ideological contexts. His important and original inquiry covers the impact on Jews of postwar reconstruction, Soviet occupation, the Cold War, and the collapse of communism. These, combined with the memory of Nazi genocide, the persistence of antisemitism, the development of Israel, and the Middle East conflicts, shaped the history of European Jewry in the second half of the twentieth century. With exceptional eloquence and conviction, Vanishing Diaspora argues that survival for European Jews ultimately will depend on choices they themselves make to reverse trends. They have an alarmingly imbalanced death-to-birth ratio, and many have jettisoned religious observance in the spirit of a secular Europe, losing their cultural distinctiveness as well as their numbers. This often painful story of destruction, irreparable loss, and the shattering of ties thus serves as a wake-up call and a dramatic warning.