David De Vries
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As quickly as his face disappeared, so did his mother and father.
Just three days after he was born, Howard Shulman contracted an infection that attacked his face, devouring his nose, lips, lower right eyelid, tear ducts, and palate. Abandoned at the hospital by his parents, he became a ward of New Jersey under the care of a state-employed surgeon who experimentally rebuilt his face.
Running from the Mirror is a poignant story of one man's struggle...
62) Benchwarmers
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The path to victory starts on the sidelines, in this fast-paced new middle grade series from #1 New York Times bestselling sport writing powerhouse John Feinstein.
Twelve-year-old Jeff Michaels, son of a Philadelphia TV sports reporter, is just learning to play soccer on the new sixth-grade team at his middle school. Andrea Carillo has fought her way onto the squad, but the coach doesn't think girls should play with boys, so she's riding the bench...
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A witty and charming account of the wildly entertaining Elsie de Wolfe in 1950s Hollywood, recounted by her dear friend, the beloved creator of Madeline.
Ludwig Bemelmans's charming intergenerational friendship with the late-in-life "First Lady of Interior Decoration" provides an enormously enjoyable nostalgia trip to the sun-soaked glamour of Los Angeles, where de Wolfe surrounded herself with classic movie stars and a luminous parade of life's...
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The rise of international jihad and Western ultra-nationalism.
In the Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs.
Washington's secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States...
65) The Third Reich
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In The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, he found his voice and drew a loyal following.
As his views developed, Hitler attracted like-minded colleagues who formed the nucleus of the nascent Nazi party. Between 1924 and 1929, Hitler...
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From television shows to the manosphere, and from alt-right communities to fatherhood forums, debates about masculinity have come to dominate the media landscape. This growing cultural tension around masculinities has been discussed and analyzed both for general audiences and in burgeoning academic scholarship. What has been typically overlooked, however, is the role that language plays in these mediated performances of masculinity.
In Language and...
67) The Paradise Key
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Amusement parks are supposed to be about fun and entertainment . . .
. . . not death.
A marine biology and science-themed park is scheduled to open later this year. But there seems to be something sinister going on beneath the surface.
OceanTech's Paradisum is a cutting-edge operation, and they are hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of education-based vacation destinations. The park's CEO, Adrian Crawford, has spent his entire professional...
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In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany's leading historian of the twentieth century's first great catastrophe explains the war's origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora's Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the...
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It was one of the most concentrated surges of creativity in the history of civilization. Between 1390 and 1537, Florence poured forth an astonishing stream of magnificent artworks. But Florentines did more during this brief period than create masterpieces. As citizens of a fractious republic threatened from below, without, and within, they also were driven to reimagine the political and ethical basis of their world, exploring the meaning and possibilities...
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On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than sixty feet in length and with a wingspan of forty feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.
Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential...
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Instructions for a Funeral - featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and VICE - finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood,...
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May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad.
Smart, fiercely political, devoted solely to the cause, and "with nothing to lose but their own lives," Hannie,...
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A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight that still haunts contemporary events. And in a very real way, although its true roots and...
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Award-winning author and illustrator Mark Teague tells his humorous version of the beloved fairy tale classic Jack and the Beanstalk with a delicious twist! FEE FI FO FUM! When Jack trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, he gets more beans than he ever expected or wanted. It's bean porridge for breakfast! Bean salad for lunch! Bean chowder for dinner! It doesn't take long before Jack is tired of eating nothing but beans--no matter how...
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When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately one hundred sixty thousand Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than five thousand remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to one thousand. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps.
In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the...
76) Undersea Warrior
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The remarkable true story of Dudley "Mush" Morton, the most admired-and feared-submarine commander of World War II
Mush Morton was a warrior without peer. At the helm of the USS Wahoo he completely changed the way the submarines fought in the Pacific War. He would relentlessly attack the Japanese at every opportunity, burning through his supply of torpedoes in record time on every patrol. Over the course of only nine months and five patrols, Morton...
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Nero fiddled while Rome burned. As catchy as that aphorism is, it's sadly untrue, even if it has a nice ring to it. The one thing Nero is well-known for is the one thing he actually didn't do. But fear not, the truth of his life, his rule and what he did with unrestrained power, is plenty weird, salacious and horrifying.
And he is not alone. Roman history, from the very foundation of the city, is replete with people and stories that shock our modern...
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1975: A young Irish-American man joins an elite US Marine unit to get the most intensive military training possible-then joins the Irish Republican Army, during the days of some of the bloodiest fighting ever in the Irish-British conflict.
In a powerful, brutally honest recounting of his experience, John Crawley details, first, the grueling challenges of his Marine Corps training, then how he put his hard-earned skills to use back in Ireland in service...
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In this challenging work, Christopher Lasch makes an accessible critique of what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. The distinguished historian argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses) had said, but by the elites. These elites-mobile and increasingly global in outlook-refuse to accept limits or ties to nation and place. As they...
80) Hotel Splendide
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Acerbic, colorful, and spirited stories from a bygone era: behind the scenes in a grand New York hotel, from the author of the Madeline books
Picture David Sedaris writing Kitchen Confidential about the Ritz in New York in the 1920s, which had the style and charm of The Grand Budapest Hotel . . .
In this charming and uproariously funny hotel memoir, Ludwig Bemelmans uncovers the fabulous world of the Hotel Splendide-the thinly disguised stand-in...