Biographies 
Showing 1 - 20 of 29
There are a total of 217 valid entries on the list.
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"Ever since she was young, Julie Klam has been fascinated by the Morris sisters, cousins of her grandmother. According to family lore, early in the 20th century the sisters' parents decided to move the family from Eastern Europe to Los Angeles so their father could become a movie director. On the way, their pregnant mother went into labor in St. Louis, where the baby was born and where their mother died. The father left the children in an orphanage...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"January, 1945. 14-year-old Moshe Kessler steps off the train at Buchenwald concentration camp. Having endured the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, lost touch with his entire family, and survived the death march in the freezing European winter, he has seen more than his share of tragedy. Moshe knows only one thing about Buchenwald. Everyone knows it. If you want to survive, you have to get to Block 66. The Germans are cruel and determined - but they...
3. Brazen
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"A riveting, inspiring memoir of one woman's escape from an extremist religious sect and an extraordinary rise from housewife to shoe designer, to CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life-what she wore, what she ate, what she thought-was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At nineteen, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she...
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"The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps. When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived...
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4.3 stars
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"The first-ever biography of Anna Marie Rosenberg, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant with only a high school education who went on to be dubbed by Life Magazine "the most important woman in the American government." Her life ran parallel to the front lines of history yet her influence on 20th century America, from the New Deal to the Cold War and beyond, has never before been told."--
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"World War II and the Holocaust have given rise to many stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the remarkable, unknown story of 'Countess Janina Suchodolska,' a Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Poland's Nazi occupiers. Mehlberg operated in Lublin, Poland, headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Using the identity papers...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland under Nazi occupation who finds refuge in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author's grandparents Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: a young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over...
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Bronx-native Bernard Slotnick's mantra was that everyone deserved a good defense--and he was the best defender out there. A bold strategist in the courtroom, and a doting husband and father of four at home, "Liberty's Last Champion" stood up for the unpopular and the controversial, including John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family; Joe Colombo Sr., inspiration for The Godfather; Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League; and Bernhard...
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As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.
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A portrait of a Jewish German family divided by exile, abandonment and emigration.
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Average Rating:
4.6 stars
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"In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz--one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world--and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line. Against all odds, he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the...
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"Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara had lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power in Europe, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it--until long after her grandmother's death, she found a shoebox tucked in a closet. In it was a photograph of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger; a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross; and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long journey, as she tried...
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Average Rating:
4 stars
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In the Garden of the Righteous chronicles extraordinary acts at a time when the moral choices were stark, the threat immense, and the passive apathy of millions predominated. Deeply researched, it focuses on ten remarkable stories. These heroes provided hiding places, participated in underground networks, refused to betray their neighbors, and secured safe passage to save the persecuted. They repeatedly defied authorities and risked their lives, their...
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Average Rating:
3.3 stars
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"Rebecca Frankel's Into the Forest is a gripping story of love, escape, and survival, from wartime Poland to a wedding in Connecticut. In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods-through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids-until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After...
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
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In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While there, she reached out to the trapped Jewish families, going from door to door and asking the parents to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling them out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen,...
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"Anne Frank's life has been studied by many scholars, but the story of Bep Voskuijl has remained untold--until now. As the youngest of the five Dutch people who hid the Frank family, Bep was Anne's closest confidante during the 761 excruciating days she spent hidden in the Secret Annex. Bep, who was just twenty-three when the Franks went into hiding, risked her life to protect them, plunging into Amsterdam's black market to source food and medicine...
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"The "mesmerizing and inspirational" (Judy Batalion) true story of two Holocaust survivors who fell in love in Auschwitz, only to be separated upon liberation and lead remarkable lives apart following the war--and then find each other again more than 70 years later. Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia were captivated by each other from the moment they first exchanged glances across the work floor. It was the beginning of a love story that could have happened...
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Average Rating:
3 stars
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"The definitive biography of the beloved-often controversial-co-creator of many legendary superheroes, A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee presents the origin of "Stan the Man," who spun a storytelling web of comic book heroic adventures into a pop culture phenomenon: the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee was the most famous American comic book creator who ever lived. Thanks, especially, to his many cameos in Marvel movies and TV shows, Lee was-and...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges--some of the worst largely unknown until now--by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back. Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind without parallel: while still in his 20's, he was half of a lucrative hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country....