Category Archives: Books

Books

In My Hands Today…

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I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust – Julian Borger

In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out adverts offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life.

Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.

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Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen – Hallie Rubenhold

This is the story of a murder, not a murderer . . .

In Story of a Murder, bestselling author of The Five and celebrated historian Hallie Rubenhold reexamines the events leading up to the infamous Crippen murder from the perspectives of the three women at the center of it all.

When Belle Elmore’s remains were discovered in the basement of London’s 39 Hilldrop Crescent in July 1910, the larger-than-life vaudevillian performer was launched into stardom she never achieved on the stage.

Story of a Murder provides an intricately plotted, intimate look into the lives of three multifaceted women living during a time of electric progress and stifling Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte, who died under mysterious circumstances; his mistress, Ethel, who claimed ignorance of his crime even as she escaped with Crippen disguised as his son; and Belle, the woman whose life Crippen took.

Throughout the twentieth century, the infamous Crippen murder was told in such a way as to cast doubt on Crippen’s guilt and to victim-blame his wife Cora for her own murder. It also astonishingly depicted Crippen’s younger mistress, Ethel, as innocent of any involvement in the killing of her love rival.

But new evidence unearthed by Rubenhold completely subverts this famous history, unravelling assumptions about the crime and deconstructing Edwardian beliefs about women, class aspiration, and the transatlantic world, ultimately proving that Charlotte, Belle, and Ethel were so much more than the passive victims history has portrayed them as.

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The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir – Sarah Kendzior

It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland — and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road — again and again.

Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events – the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic – reshape American life. They explore Route 66, national parks, historical sites, and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland. Together, the family watches the landscape of the United States – physical, environmental, social, political -transform through the car window.

Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future – even though at times she struggles to believe it herself.

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Blood in the Water: The Untold Story of a Family Tragedy – Casey Sherman

When Nathan Carman, a young man with a complicated past, is miraculously rescued from a lifeboat bobbing in the unforgiving North Atlantic, questions swirl about the fate of his mother, who is presumed to have drowned when their fishing boat sank. Nathan is in remarkably good shape for being lost at sea for a week, and his account of what exactly happened out there on the waves raises questions from family members and law enforcement.

Nathan’s story of a fishing trip gone awry doesn’t quite add up, and suspicion mounts. The mysterious murder of Nathan’s multi-millionaire grandfather a few years before had made Nathan’s mother an extremely wealthy woman. With a seven-million-dollar fortune at stake, did Nathan commit the ultimate betrayal? Or is there more to this tragic tale than meets the eye?

From New York Times bestselling author Casey Sherman comes a gripping contemporary true crime narrative for everyone who was fascinated by the Murdaugh murders, and for anyone compelled by the intersection between money, power, and family.

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The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West – Amy Gamerman

Big Timber, Montana (population 1,673) is one of the windiest towns in one of the windiest states in the country. Arctic chinooks and slashing westerlies howl down from the Crazy Mountains like a pack of coyotes, nudging semi-trucks sideways on Interstate 90. Most locals learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and a newly precious resource, its million-dollar wind.

The trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most well-connected men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.

And so began an epic a wildly entertaining yarn that would pull in an ever-widening cast of characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe’s rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett’s wind farm. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires. In time, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the future of an iconic landscape—and the values that define us as Americans.

The Crazies is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys—a real-life Yellowstone. But it’s also so much more. It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life, and an electrifying inquiry into what it means to love the land.