Bücher veröffentlicht von W. W. Norton & Company

Kids today seem to be under more competitive pressure than ever, while studies show that reading, writing, and the arts in schools are suffering. Is there any place for imagination in kids' lives anymore? In a dog-eat-dog world, why dream things that aren't there?In gorgeous prose and through personal stories, Beth Kephart resoundingly affirms the imagination as the heart of our ability to empathize with others, to appreciate the world, and to envision possibilities for the future. The star of her story is once again her son, Jeremy (as in her National Book Award-nominated A Slant of Sun), now fourteen years old-a child who at first resists storytelling, preferring more objective and orderly pursuits, but later leads a neighborhood book club/writing group and aspires to follow Steven Spielberg into moviemaking.Embedded in the text and appendices are examples of how to inspire children to read, write, and dream.

The title of Melvin Jules Bukiet's latest collection hints at the deceitful nature of its multiple protagonists. An aspiring writer stalks Vladmir Nabokov across midtown Manhattan one afternoon in the summer of Watergate. A young co-ed's seduction of her elderly philosophy professor delivers her an A and him lasting happiness. Max, "a liar and a voyeur, like any true artist," wanders the East Village taking photographs of murder victims. A famous Holocaust survivor "with the big eyes and the big prize" conducts an impromptu circumcision.Ranging from 1895 Prague to the site of a Central American rebellion to the home of a certain Seattle software magnate to the roof of an urban skyscraper, each of these outrageous (though occasionally tender) stories offers keen insight into human nature.

The essays in this latest American Assembly title have been conditioned by the harsh fiscal realities facing the U.S. government and the real need for reform in the United Nations system. Assessing the diverse issues that surround the United States's policy toward the UN, contributors from a diversity of fields - law, government, academia, military - are united in their belief that, with work, it will be possible to forge a sound, bipartisan U.S. policy toward the UN system - and that it is critical for such an effort to begin immediately. As in other areas of foreign policy, budgetary considerations are now driving substance. The United Nations should not be shielded from careful budgetary examination, but it is crucial for the American people to engage in a rational debate to examine which UN activities are most in the United States's interest.

In the central Yucatan a group of Maya Indian workers revolt against the corrupt oligarchy of government, business, the official union, and the press. Two young men-a traditional Maya leader and a Mexican-American lawyer-are drawn into ever deeper commitment to the struggle. When they are caught in a trap and thrown into jail, the lawyer declares a hunger strike. The story of the Maya workers, and of their village, is narrated in a series of vivid flashbacks that alternate with the grim deprivations and interrogations in the prison. Day by day, the young lawyer approaches death, and in his discussions with his friend and cell mate, there emerge two different definitions of love, loyalty, and courage, each man's version determined by the culture from which he springs. One of the chief delights of this rich, intense storytelling is the introduction it provides to the Maya understanding of time, medicine, and proper behavior. Although everything that happens in the novel could have appeared in the latest news stories out of Mexico, nothing happens quite as expected, and the startling conclusion could only have taken place in the Yucatan.

Celia Pippet, founder of a feminist magazine, impulsively steals a bizarre artifact from the British Museum. Joined by her friend Martin, a filmmaker, and American academic Tamara, she flees to Bez in southern France to escape detection and to pursue the trail of the beguiling Adèle. Fifty years before, Adèle had been rescued from Bez by Dr. Jonas Sylvester. He brought her to Paris where she captured the city's attention with her alluring beauty and air of secrecy. When Sylvester brings over sister Blanche to look after Adèle, he is not prepared for the love between them nor their escape from him. He takes his revenge.Moving between Blanche's life with Adèle and Celia's search for clues into that life, the stories converge in Bez where the three friends discover Blanche's existence and Adèle's true, if unbelievable, identity. The effects of the revelation are shattering-Adèle's erotic power extends beyond the grave, melding past and present into a single reality. A provocative and original novel by an accomplished literary writer who steps beyond the boundaries of what we know as male and female.

Written in the tautest prose, this portrait of a family on the verge of collapse shimmers with the heat and dissipated fog of October in San Francisco.Lillie returns home one night to discover that her mother has disappeared. She is left to care for her father, a drug-addicted anesthesiologist, with little support from her only sibling, a stripper at a North Beach nightclub. Fueled by alcohol and too-little sleep, she seeks comfort in the form of sex and target practice with an attractive cop. Her one true solace is the map store where she works with Finch, the man who was always there for her when her own family wasn't.Grappling with the loss of her mother and her vexatious relationship with her father, Lillie navigates San Francisco's seedy underworld of sex for sale, drugs, and duplicity, in search of a grown-up life that might lie at the periphery.

Felix Gilbert begins this book of memoirs by describing his peaceful and protected childhood in Germany before the First World War. That war, and the revolutionary events that followed it, strongly influenced his choice of profession; he studied history at Heidelberg, Munich, and the University of Berlin. He gives a firsthand account of the intellectually stimulating and politically restless atmosphere in 1920s Berlin. During the first six months of 1933, when the Nazi takeover occurred in Germany, Mr. Gilbert was at work in the archives in Italy. There he received letters from relations and friends in Germany; published here, these letters convey the impact of Nazism on the daily lives of these people. In other chapters of the book Mr. Gilbert, who served as a member of the OSS, vividly describes wartime London, liberated Paris, and occupied Germany. These memoirs end with an account of a mission to Berlin which, for Mr. Gilbert, was also a search for what remained of a world that once had been.

As deputy attorney general under Bobby Kennedy and then attorney general and under secretary of state for Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a unique perspective on the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other issues of the day. In this engaging memoir, by turns intensely dramatic and charmingly matter-of-fact, we are treated to a ringside seat for Katzenbach's confrontation with segregationist governor George C. Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama, his efforts to steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, and then his transition to the State Department, where he served at the center of the storm over Vietnam. In the political climate of this election season, Some of It Was Fun provides a refreshing reminder of the hopes and struggles of an earlier era, speaking both to readers who came of age in the 1960s and to a generation of young people looking to that period for political inspiration.

At the heart of this novel, which spans from the 1930s through the 1980s, is principled, passionate Dillon Freeman and his more conventional cousin Rachel Honaker. Best friends as children, as they grow older they realize, and are torn apart by, their forbidden love for each other. Rachel consigns herself to a loveless marriage and careful avoidance of Dillon. He in turns enlists to fight in World War II, and, upon his return, against the big-time coal company and the dark shadow of destruction it casts across Blackberry Creek.Rachel's daughter, Jackie, carries Dillon's activism and passion into the next generation. As Dillon fought, and was imprisoned, for union-organizing, Jackie, as a journalist, fights against injustice by exposing American Coal's methodical destruction of the community. And, like her mother, Jackie falls passionately in love with a young man with whom a conventional relationship is not possible. Tom Kolwecki, a Jesuit seminarian who arrives in Blackberry Creek as a Vista Volunteer, is powerfully attractive to her, but the pull of his religious vocation and the accidents of history and tragedies of nature render their unions stillborn.Denise Giardina creates, with brutal honesty and painful insight, a carefully woven narrative tapestry and a generational saga that builds to a climax as shattering as any in recent American fiction.

It is April 1922. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in New York on a spiritualist crusade. To packed houses at Carnegie Hall, he displays photographs of ghosts and spirits; of female mediums bound and gagged, ectoplasmic goo emerging from their bodies. In the newspapers, he defends the powers of the mysterious Margery, one of the most famous mediums of the day. His good friend Harry Houdini is a skeptic, and when Doyle claims Margery's powers are superior to Houdini's, the magician goes on the attack. Into this mix of spirit-chasing celebrities enters Molly Goodman, a young reporter whose job is to cover the heated debate. As she wanders into this world of spooks and spirits, murder and criminal frauds, Molly discovers herself: her true love, her place in the world; even her relationship to her beloved dead brother, Carl.

Combining the pace of a detective story with the bold prose of a master storyteller, North is both an adventure and a pilgrimage. Alone and haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, Jack-who prowled the backwaters of Girls-returns to upstate New York from the Carolina coast, where he has been working as a security guard. A New York lawyer hires him to find her missing nephew, last seen in the area of Jack's northern hometown. His search gradually uncovers a dark underside of rural life and a cast of dangerous characters. Jack is besieged by memories as he uncovers a brutal crime and finds himself in a turbulent relationship with a treacherous woman. In trying to save another's life, Jack must relive his own; memory, obsession, and reality fuse; and Jack discovers the truth of Faulkner's observation that "the past is not really past; it's not even over."

On the night of the festive holiday of Shrove Tuesday in 1672 Anna Fessler died after eating one of her neighbor's buttery cakes. Could it have been poisoned? Drawing on vivid court documents, eyewitness accounts, and an early autopsy report, historian Thomas Robisheaux brings the story to life. Exploring one of Europe's last witch panics, he unravels why neighbors and the court magistrates became convinced that Fessler's neighbor Anna Schmieg was a witch-one of several in the area-ensnared by the devil. Once arrested, Schmieg, the wife of the local miller, and her daughter were caught up in a high-stakes drama that led to charges of sorcery and witchcraft against the entire family. Robisheaux shows how ordinary events became diabolical ones, leading magistrates to torture and turn a daughter against her mother. In so doing he portrays an entire world caught between superstition and modernity.

The torch relay-that staple of Olympic pageantry-first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain.The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. Nazi Games offers a superb blend of history and sport. The narrative includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed finally by the American Olympic Committee and the determination of its head, Avery Brundage, to participate. Nazi Games also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a young Italian bookkeeper fell under the spell of the classical past. Despite his limited education, the Greeks and Romans seemed to speak directly to him-not from books but from the physical ruins and inscriptions that lay neglected around the shores of the Mediterranean.As an international merchant, Cyriacus of Ancona was accustomed to the perils of travel in foreign lands-unlike his more scholarly peers with their handsome libraries and wealthy patrons, who benefited greatly from the discoveries communicated in his widely distributed letters and drawings. Having seen firsthand the destruction of the world's cultural heritage, Cyriacus resolved to preserve it for future generations. To do so he would spy on the Ottomans, court popes and emperors, and even organize a crusade.

The title of this collection-at times mournful, sardonic, and joyous-refers to the grief in the wake of loss. Yet these poems aren't just about the consequences of loss but also about the complex experiences of endurance, acquiescence, and rebirth that, with luck, mark the aftermath of sorrow.from "Aftermath: Kite"      But the thought is only paper after all,      a soul that clings to a stick, tears open, shreds      as if it's flung to the ground in a final shiny fall,      and at last the line goes limp, the climbing ends.      Beyond the rush & sweep, an arc of silence-      though a mind imagined this flight, & proved it once.

In Superconnect, Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood show that success is less about who you are than how you connect-a chance meeting with an old colleague leads to a swanky new job; two businessmen collaborate online and cofound a successful start-up; a friend introduces a promising entrepreneur to a millionaire looking to invest. But why do these lucky breaks always happen to other people?Personal and professional networks shape everything we do, but simply knowing that they exist won't help you harness your connections for maximum success. With an eye toward business applications, Superconnect outlines the new rules of our densely linked society. At the core of the analysis are three simple network components-strong relationships, weak relationships, and hubs-that interact in surprising, counterintuitive ways. Understanding how these components mesh, and connecting unrelated people, is the way to achieve in today's hyper-connected world.

An exciting lineage of women singers-originating with Ma Rainey and her protégée Bessie Smith-shaped the blues, launching it as a powerful, expressive vehicle of emotional liberation. Along with their successors Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Janis Joplin, they injected a dose of reality into the often trivial world of popular song, bringing their message of higher expectations and broader horizons to their audiences. These women passed their image, their rhythms, and their toughness on to the next generation of blues women, which has its contemporary incarnation in singers like Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams (with whom the author has done an in-depth interview). Buzzy Jackson combines biography, an appreciation of music, and a sweeping view of American history to illuminate the pivotal role of blues women in a powerful musical tradition. Musician Thomas Dorsey said, "The blues is a good woman feeling bad." But these women show by their style that he had it backward: The blues is a bad woman feeling good.

Jeffrey T. Richelson reveals the history of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, from the events leading to its creation in 1974 to today. Defusing Armageddon provides a behind-the-scenes look at NEST's personnel, operations, and detection and disablement equipment--employed in response to attempts at nuclear extortion, lost and stolen nuclear material, crashed nuclear-powered Soviet satellites, and al Qaeda's quest for nuclear weapons. Richelson traces the Cosmos satellite that crashed into the Canadian wilderness; nuclear threats to Los Angeles, New York, and other cities; and the surveillance of Muslim sites in the United States after 9/11. Relying on recently declassified documents and interviews with former NEST personnel, Richelson's extensive research reveals how NEST operated during the Cold War, how the agency has evolved, and its current efforts to reduce the chance of a nuclear device decimating an American city.

In March 1863, nine hundred black Union soldiers, led by white officers, invaded Florida and seized the town of Jacksonville. They were among the first African American troops in the Northern army, and their expedition into enemy territory was like no other in the Civil War. It was intended as an assault on slavery by which thousands would be freed.At the center of the story is prominent abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who led one of the regiments. After waging battle for three weeks, Higginson and his men were mysteriously ordered to withdraw, their mission a seeming failure. Yet their successes in resisting the Confederates and collaborating with white Union forces persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to begin full-scale recruitment of black troops, a momentous decision that helped turned the tide of the war.Using long-neglected primary sources, historian Stephen V. Ash's stirring narrative re-creates this event with insight, vivid characterizations, and a keen sense of drama.

Affectionately named "the Grandfathers' retreats," these sojourns into the depths of the Maine woods have inspired Gould's finest and most emotionally resonant writing to date.With a naturalist's sensitivity to his environment, and his great good humor, Gould writes of hiking through dense forests, of fly fishing for salmon and trout in deserted creeks, of campside culinary triumphs, and of friendship and shared reflections on careers, family, and the modern world. The resulting book is a wonderful, memorable meditation on the beauty of the Maine woods and on John Gould's ever-interesting life.

Gabriel Brockwell-aesthete, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent-is thinking terminal. He's decided to kill himself-but not immediately. His destination is Wonderland. The style of the journey is all that's to be decided.Traveling between London, Tokyo, and Berlin, Gabriel is in search of the bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties. His adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience eating a poisonous Japanese delicacy, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way, Gabriel falls apart, only to reemerge with a new outlook on the world and a mission to right his past wrongs.Lights Out in Wonderland is an allegorical banquet, a sly commentary on these End Times and the march toward banality, and a joyful expression of the human spirit.

First published in 1963, this book is now restored to print in a new edition containing some revisions and one hitherto unpublished poem.

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

"[A] tight, well-researched, sometimes funny book about one of the crimes of the century, the motley group that pulled it off, and the assorted characters who tried to catch them. Pseudonyms are used here, but anyone with access to Boston newspaper files can figure out most of the dramatis personae in the ingenious 1962 robbery of a post office van (the feds were saving money on an armored car) heading up from Cape Cod to Boston, packed with $1.5 million in bank deposits from a big summer weekend. Not a shot was fired, the loot was never recovered and, although three people were eventually indicted, no one was convicted of the crime." - Kirkus Review

Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives-afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide-than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"-tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art. An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light.

Following the careers of the swiftest in the sporting world has been the preoccupation of Kenneth Rudeen as a writer, and now as a senior editor, for Sports Illustrated. "Man has always been obsessed with speed, and throughout history his quest has gone on in a thousand ways. He has continually pushed for faster speed of communication, for swifter movement of people and goods from the day of the cart to that of the jet airplane. Speed afoot and afloat has always been essential for victory in war. But never has the search for speed been more dramatic than in individual man's struggle to go faster than those before him in sports, in racing cars and in the air."This is an appreciation of the champions of the postwar era in those pursuits where the ultimate criterion is speed, running, swimming, skiing, auto racing, flying, and speed-record hunting on land and water. The equipment of these champions ranges from the legs, lungs, and cerebellum of a supreme mile runner to the multi-million dollar jet chariot of a record-breaking aviator. Their velocities vary from the runner's glorious 15 mph to the sensational 4,000 mph of the pilot of the X-15.In addition to their involvement in speed, these champions possess a rare disciplined courage. Auto racer Jim Clark risks his life nearly every week to justify his claim for recognition as the world's finest racing driver. Roger Bannister risked public humiliation and personal agony on a gusty, gray afternoon in Oxford, England, in 1954 when he set out to run the first four-minute mile. In their will to hurtle toward the outer boundaries of human capability, the swiftest experience a joy and perfection beyond the reach of most of us.

Balazuc is a tiny medieval village carved into a limestone cliff that towers above the Ardeche River in southeastern France. Its dramatic landscape and Mediterranean climate make it a lovely destination for summer visitors, but for its residents over the centuries life in Balazuc has been harsh. At times Balazuc has prospered, most notably in the nineteenth century through the cultivation of "the golden tree" and the silkworms it fed, a process whose rigors and rewards are gleefully detailed in this splendid book. But the rewards proved fleeting, leaving only the rigors of life on the "tormented soil."Historical events from the French Revolution, through the Paris Commune and the two world wars, sent ripples through this isolated region, but the continuities of everyday life remained strong. Twenty-eight men from Balazuc signed the list of grievances against the king in the spring of 1789; the families of nineteen still live in the village. This is a story of resilience. It is the French story of tensions between Paris and the village expressed in battles over the school, the church, the council, and people's livelihoods. Most of all it is a love letter from an acclaimed historian who with his family has made Balazuc his adopted home. With a new "golden tree," tourism, now flourishing, the struggles of the village to prosper and to retain its identity continue, transmuted to a world of cell phones and an imagined village past.