Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: modern, anti, semitism, rise, role, jews, vatican, popes
Number of Pages: 368
Published: 2002-09-24
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0375706054
ISBN-13: 9780375706059

The Vatican’s 1998 report "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" purportedly exonerated the Church of complicity in the Holocaust. In The Popes Against the Jews, David I. Kertzer argues that the report is "not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history." Kertzer’s book refutes the Church’s thesis that the Holocaust grew out of "an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious." In fact, Kertzer asserts, those dimensions of European anti-Semitism developed "in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church its

Author: Oliver Sack
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: tales, paradoxical, seven, mars, anthropologist
Number of Pages: 327
Published: 1996-02-13
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0679756973
ISBN-13: 9780679756972

The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind." The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks’s stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie. The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic

Author: Oliver Sack
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: colorblind, island
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 1998-01-12
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0375700730
ISBN-13: 9780375700736

In his books An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks details the lives of patients isolated by neurological disorders, shedding light on our common humanity and the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Now he looks at the effects of physical isolation in The Island of the Colorblind. On this journey, he carried with him the intellectual curiousity, kind understanding, and unique vision he has so consistently demonstrated. Drawn to the Micronesian island of Pingelap by reports of a community of people born totally colorblind, Dr. Sacks set up

Author: Oliver Sack
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: awakenings
Number of Pages: 464
Published: 1999-10-05
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0375704051
ISBN-13: 9780375704055

It hardly seems fair that so many great doctors are also great writers. Perhaps it’s qualities like sensitivity, craft, and dedication that keep physicians like Oliver Sacks in hospitals all day and at writing desks all night; if nothing else, these qualities shine in books like Awakenings. This powerful set of case histories rises above its pathological foundation to find new literary territory, a medical-spiritual synthesis equally stimulating for the mind and the soul. It’s no wonder Hollywood producers chose to turn it into a feature film--anyone can see the universal human str

Author: Simon Schama
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: revolution, french, chronicle, citizens
Number of Pages: 976
Published: 1990-03-17
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 0679726101
ISBN-13: 9780679726104

Instead of the dying Old Regime, Schama presents an ebullient country, vital and inventive, infatuated with novelty and technology--a strikingly fresh view of Louis XVI’s France. A New York Times bestseller in hardcover. 200 illustrations.

Author: Joseph J. Elli
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: jefferson, thomas, character, sphinx, american
Number of Pages: 464
Published: 1998-04-07
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0679764410
ISBN-13: 9780679764410

Well timed to coincide with Ken Burns’s documentary (on which the author served as a consultant), this new biography doesn’t aim to displace the many massive tomes about America’s third president that already weigh down bookshelves. Instead, as suggested by the subtitle--"The Character of Thomas Jefferson"--Ellis searches for the "living, breathing person" underneath the icon and tries to elucidate his actual beliefs. Jefferson’s most ardent admirers may find this perspective too critical, but Ellis’s portrait of a complex, sometimes devious man who both sought an

Author: Mark Danner
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: mozote, massacre
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 1994-04-05
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 067975525X
ISBN-13: 9780679755258

In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army’s select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children, often by decapitation. Although reports of the massacre -- and photographs of its victims -- appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.When Mark Danner’s reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news