Bücher von Tom Shachtman

Rumspringa is Tom Shachtman's celebrated look at a littleknown Amish coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa-the period of "running around" that begins for their youth at age sixteen. During this time, Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with alcohol, premarital sex, revealing clothes, telephones, drugs, and wild parties. By allowing such broad freedoms, their parents hope they will learn enough to help them make the most important decision of their lives-whether to be baptized as Christians, join the church, and forever give up worldly ways, or to remain in the world.In this searching book, Shachtman draws on his skills as a documentarian to capture young people on the cusp of a fateful decision, and to give us "one of the most absorbing books ever written about the Plain People" (Publishers Weekly).

The dreadful global conflagration known as the Second World War was more than the clashing of great armies on bloody battlefields. A different kind of war was being waged in the secret laboratories on both sides of the conflict -- a war that would alter the course and determine the outcome of the bitter hostilities, forever changing our world and our future.While it is a widely accepted fact that America's development and employment of the atomic bomb ended the Pacific struggle -- and that the failure of Hitler's scientists to develop their own A-bomb helped to doom Germany -- little has been made of the other remarkable scientific accomplishments of this dark and terrible epoch. Edifying, enthralling, startling, and sobering, Laboratory Warriors is a masterful work that sheds light on the technological achievements that swung the pendulum of victory in the Allies' direction.

A city with eight million people has eight million ways to die For fifteen years, Shiya Ribowsky worked as a medicolegal investigator in New York City's medical examiner's office?the largest, most sophisticated organization of its kind in the world. Utilizing his background in medicine, he led the investigations of more than eight thousand individual deaths, becoming a key figure in some of New York's most bizarre death cases and eventually taking charge of the largest forensic investigation ever attempted: identifying the dead in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies. Now, in this mesmerizing book, Ribowsky pulls back the curtain on the New York City's medical examiner's office, giving an enthralling, never-before-seen glimpse into death and the city. Born and raised in New York City's orthodox Jewish community, Ribowsky seems an unlikely candidate for this macabre profession. Nevertheless he has forsaken a promising career of medical work with the living, descending instead into the realm of the dead, enticed by the challenge of confronting death on a daily basis. Taking you through the vermin-infested Bowery flophouses and posh Upper East Side apartments of the city's dead, Ribowsky explores in gruesome detail the skeletons that hang in the Big Apple's closets. Combing through the autopsy room, he also exposes the grim secrets that only a scalpel and a dead body can tell and explains how forensic investigation does not merely solve crimes?it saves lives. But it is in the aftermath of September 11 that the ME's office is handed its biggest challenge: to identify as many of the fallen as possible. With poignant descriptions, Ribowsky provides a dramatic account of the office's diligent and unflappable work with the families of the victims, helping them emerge from the ashes of this tragedy while displaying the strength, grit, intelligence, and compassion that Americans expect from true New Yorkers. At once compelling and heartbreaking, Dead Center is a story of New York unlike any other, blending the haunting with the sublime, while painting a striking portrait of death (and life) in the city that never sleeps.

Thomas Schachtman, author of Skyscraper Dreams, approaches the muddy, intolerant world of political conversation through the belief that Americans have lost the ability to respond and argue differing points of view without coming swiftly to blows. Considering the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it, Thomas Schachtman argues that political debates are in danger of moving from the Senate chamber to the streets, taking the social stability needed for a working democracy with it. Blaming this decline on the jargon used by specialists in the professions and academia in order to distinguish superiority over common citizens, Schachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media in combination with political and educational reform.