With animal names for these "guests, " and human names for the animals, it's no wonder that the zoo's code name became "The House Under a Crazy Star. Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story—sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife, " while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism.

. Winner of the 2008 Orion Award. The new york times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain. A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. After their zoo was bombed, polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages.

.

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

Named one of the best books of 1999 by the los angeles Times, The Pianist is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody Son of Sam. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. The pianist won the cannes Film Festival's most prestigious prize—the Palme d'Or.

On september 23, 1939, wladyslaw szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano.

A Natural History of the Senses

Diane ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. Delightful. Gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.

The new york Times.

Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto

Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, hid children in coffins, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings.

. Irena’s children, is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, keeping My Family, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, and redemption. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish.

While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. From the new york times bestselling author of the widow clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2, 500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. But irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden.

Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, ghetto residents, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis.

Soft Rain: A Story of the Cherokee Trail of Tears

Praise for soft rain: "An eye-opening introduction to this painful period of American history. Publisher's weekly "the characters themselves transform a sorrowful story of adversity into a tale of human resilience. Kirkus reviews "This gentle child's-eye view will move readers enormously. Jane yolen .

Her courage and hope are restored when she is reunited with her father, a leader on the Trail, chosen to bring her people safely to their new land. Soft rain is confident that her family will not have to move, because they have just planted corn for the next harvest but soon thereafter, Soft Rain, and her mother to walk the Trail of Tears, soldiers arrive to take nine-year-old, leaving the rest of her family behind.

Because soft rain knows some of the white man's language, she soon learns that they must travel across rivers, valleys, and mountains. It all begins when soft rain's teacher reads a letter stating that as of May 23, 1838, all Cherokee people are to leave their land and move to what many Cherokees called "the land of darkness".

. The west. On the journey, she is forced to eat the white man's food and sees many of her people die.

The Book Thief

With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, author of I Am the Messenger, award-winning author Markus Zusak, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

It is 1939. The kind of book that can be life-changing. The new york times “deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Usa today. The country is holding its breath. Liesel meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books.

Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. When death has a story to tell, you listen. Nominated as one of america's best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. The extraordinary #1 new york times bestseller that is now a major motion picture, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.

Don’t miss bridge of clay, markus zusak’s first novel since the book thief. Nazi Germany.

The Lighthouse Road: A Novel

The apothecary, smuggler for grimm’s whiskey trade, eventually growing up under Grimm’s influence to be a fisherman, takes the infant into his household and the boy is raised more or less by the entire town, Grimm, and a boat builder. Befriended by a local businessman and apothecary with secrets of his own, she obtains work as a cook in the nearby logging camp.

She delivers the baby in a blinding snowstorm the next fall, attended by her original benefactor and his daughter” who is also the town’s surgeon and midwife, but she soon dies of childbirth complications. The story moves back and forth in time from the arrival of thea from her isolated village in arctic Norway in search of a new life in the near wilderness of a small town and logging camp on the shore of Lake Superior to the travails of her orphaned son, Odd, some twenty years later.

Still, he struggles to find himself and to reconcile the loss of his mother, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Grimm’s criminal enterprises and dirty secrets until an unlikely love affair puts everything on a collision course. While living through one of the coldest and threatening winters in memory, she is raped by an itinerant peddler and petty criminal.

When thea’s aunt and uncle do not meet her boat as planned, she’s initially left abandoned with no money or prospects and without speaking the language.

A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France The Resistance Quartet Book 1

Caroline moorehead, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers of mitchell zuckoff’s lost in shangri-la, a distinguished biographer, human rights journalist, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken will find an essential addition to our retelling of the history of World War II—a riveting, and the author of Dancing to the Precipice and Human Cargo, Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, rediscovered story of courageous women who sacrificed everything to combat the march of evil across the world.

. In january 1943, 230 women of the french Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, survival, told in full for the first time—a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, and the power of friendship.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

The #1 new york times bestsellerthe phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Before john glenn orbited the earth, or neil armstrong walked on the moon, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, into space.

Henson, janelle monae, Kirsten Dunst, Octavia Spencer, and Kevin Costner. Originally relegated to teaching math in the south’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff.

It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future. . Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Even as virginia’s jim crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in world war ii and moving through to the cold war, the civil rights movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, Mary Jackson, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes.

Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation.

Women of Mayo Clinic: The Founding Generation

Maud mellish wilson established the library and burnished the clinic's standing through widely distributed publications about its innovations. William worrall Mayo to take on the hospital project. It also begins with the women who joined the growing practice as physicians, education, as developers of radium therapy and cancer treatments, as laboratory researchers, and as innovators in virtually all aspects of patient care, and research.

The story of mayo clinic begins on the Minnesota prairie following a devastating tornado in 1883. Edith graham was the first professionally trained nurse to work at the practice. Virginia wright-peterson tells the stories of these and other talented, dedicated pioneers through institutional records and clippings from the period, introducing a welcome new perspective on the history of both Mayo Clinic and women in medicine.

Mother alfred Moes persuaded Dr. Alice magaw developed a national reputation administering anesthesia in the operating rooms there. While these women contributed to the clinic's origins and success, their roles have not been widely celebrated—until now. Women of mayo clinic traces those early days from the perspectives of more than forty women—nurses, social workers, librarians, sisters, mothers, and wives—who were instrumental in the world-renowned medical center's development.

.

One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

Deeply rewarding to readers of all kinds, accessible insight into the science and medicine of brain injury, Ackerman has given us a literary love story, and invaluable spiritual sustenance in the face of life’s myriad physical sufferings. In narrating the recovery of her husband, paul West, from a stroke that reduced his vast vocabulary to a single syllable, she evokes the joy and mystery of the brain’s ability to find and connect words.

In this extraordinary memoir, she opens a window into the experience of wordlessness—the language paralysis called aphasia. Finalist for the pulitzer prizefinalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award"A testament to the power of creativity in language, life—and love. Heller mcalpin, washington postNo other writer can blend the science of the brain with the love of language like Diane Ackerman.

.