A major fall Palgrave Macmillan title is Jews & Money: The Story of a Stereotype by Abraham H. Foxman, longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, published last week. The book is a cultural and political survey of the caricatures of Jews as greedy global capitalists, wealthy secret communists and cheapskates who use money to control the economy, the media and society. The roots of these wildly contradictory stereotypes are deep-seated and pervasive anti-Semitism, Foxman argues. In fact, Jewish tradition, religious teaching, the Hebrew Scriptures and the concept of tzedaka, or charity and justice that is "a social obligation to our fellow humans," are the opposite of the stereotype. In Jews & Money, he writes, "Among the world's great religions, Judiasm is the one that places the greatest emphasis on moral behavior in relation to money."
The idea for Jews & Money came during a conversation that Stuart and Foxman had over lunch, after Stuart saw a 60 Minutes story about a Florida community destroyed in the Bernie Madoff scandal. "People didn't want to talk about the disaster because it was fodder for the stereotype," she said. "It was so touchy and upsetting to them and they feared what it meant for the Jewish people." Foxman, who had published The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control with Palgrave Macmillan in 2007, eagerly undertook the project.
"It's a timely topic and Abraham Foxman is the right person to address it," Stuart said, which has come up yet again in the past several years because of Madoff, the collapse on Wall Street and "the way people see President Obama and Israel."
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Another major fall title is Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home by David Philipps, which was published last week.
Philipps, a features writer for the Colorado Springs Gazette, details the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on the 506th Infantry Regiment, the famous "Band of Brothers" who renamed themselves "Lethal Warriors" after two particularly harrowing tours of duty in Iraq. Of the 500 men in the battalion who returned to Fort Carson in Colorado from those tours, 10 were arrested for murder, attempted murder and manslaughter; others for violent crimes. Several more committed suicide. In an effort to understand why this happened, Philipps interviewed "soldiers, sergeants, officers, mothers and fathers, brothers, lawyers, and police. I listened to the stories of men in prisons, trailer parks, parents' basements, and wherever they had washed up after combat."
Philipps emphasizes that while many combat veterans from previous wars have struggled with what has been called variously shell shock, battle fatigue and combat stress, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan take even greater emotional tolls on soldiers than warfare in the past. "Real enemies on this unconditional battlefield are hard to identify, and every target appears in a cloud of doubt. Enemy or innocent?" he writes. "Many soldiers understandably begin to mistrust and hate the people they are charged with protecting, extending their fears to the entire population." In addition, improvements in armor, equipment and medical care have meant that many fewer wounded soldiers die compared to past wars and that many soldiers survive traumatic experiences on the battlefield physically unscathed. But treatment for emotional problems lags. One measure of these trends: "By 2009," he writes, "while the United States was engaged in two separate wars, more soldiers died from suicide, drugs, and alcohol than died by the hand of the enemy."
Philipps's conclusion: "The nation needs to press for the safety, well-being, and healing of combat veterans, even after the bullets have stopped flying. Doing this for the sake of the soldiers themselves would be enough to justify the cost and effort, but as the story of the Lethal Warriors shows, it is not just the soldiers who pay the ultimate price for neglect. We all do."
Lethal Warriors is based on the author's Casualties of War series that ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette and won the Livingston Prize for National Reporting and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The book was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
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My Family, A Symphony: A Memoir of Global Adoption by Aaron Eske (December).
While the author was growing up in Nebraska, his parents adopted four children from India and Korea, all of whom had various major disabilities and traumatic experiences before they were adopted. Eske, who admits to having had mixed feelings about his adopted siblings, went off to study at the London School of Economics, where he received a master's degree in global politics and development. Afterward, in an effort to understand his siblings back home better, Eske traveled to the orphanages where they had lived, spoke with people who knew them, then met with others involved in international adoptions. In My Family, A Symphony, Eske tells of his findings and his new insights into the lives of his siblings. The book is "very honest and very realistic," Stuart said.
Eske is donating 25% of his royalties from My Family, A Symphony to the orphaned children in Holt International's care.
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The Shah by Abbas Milani (January 2011).
The head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and a board member of MIT's Iranian Study Group, Milani spent a decade working on this biography of Mohammed-Reza Shah Pahlevi, the much-reviled last Shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979 and died in 1980. The book recounts how Iran became a global power under the Shah, his nationalization of industries, his modernization programs and his social reforms that included increased equality for women. The author also traces the Shah's political intolerance and his indecisiveness at key moments. As Milani writes, "For the Shah, character was destiny and many of his weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being." In the end, Milani finds the Shah "deeply paranoid but with his heart in the right place," Stuart said.
Milani also highlights many contradictions in Iran, in particular how repressive regimes continue to rule in such an open, rich culture.
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Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation by Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly (January 2011).
Jones was the writer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. He was also a longtime advisor to King. Here he tells the behind-the-scenes story of the speech as well as how the civil rights movement developed. As Stuart noted, "There is so much more to this book than the speech." She stressed, too, that this is Jones's first public discussion of the era, saying, "It's amazing he hasn't written about this before."
Jones is now scholar-in-residence and visiting professor at Stanford's Martin Luther King Jr. Institute. Connelly is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker and blogs on the Huffington Post.
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How Italian Food Conquered the World by John F. Mariani, with a foreword by Lidia Bastianich (March 2011).
Entertaining, stylish and informative, How Italian Food Conquered the World is a history of "the rise of Italian cuisine in America, from red sauce to haute cuisine," as Stuart described it. It includes dollops of recipes and many spicy, engaging stories of important people in the business--restaurateurs, food and wine critics--who, Stuart said, "all know and love Mariani."
Mariani is quite the foodie: he is food and travel correspondent for Esquire, wine columnist and reporter for Bloomberg News, a contributing editor at Wine Spectator and food columnist for Diversion. He also has a newsletter with more than 40,000 subscribers. He's well-connected in the food world and is, as Stuart said, "a colorful character, a veteran and kind of controversial figure."
In his introduction, Mariani calls himself "an attentive witness [during the past 40 years] to the rise in status of Italian food from a low-class, coarse ethnic food to the most recognizable, stylish, and influential in the world. How that happened has as much to do with changing ideas of ethnicity and a surging interest in wholesome ingredients as it does with taste and fashion. And it is a story full of suffering, endurance, acceptance, and triumph well beyond the basic sustenance of people for whom food must nurture the soul as well as the body."
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One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Shaped America by Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach (May 2011).
One Nation Under Sex covers a hot subject with serious intent, telling how the sometimes convoluted sex lives of presidents and their wives changed the course of history. At the same time, the book traces "the evolution of American morality and tells some amazing stories," Stuart said. "Yes, it's Larry Flynt, but it's real solid history."
Among the highlights: during World War I, Warren G. Harding had an affair with a German spy who blackmailed the Republican Party when he ran for president, and a love affair between President James Buchanan and Senator William King aided the secession movement in the years just before the Civil War.
The always provocative Larry Flynt is the founder and president of Larry Flynt Publications and founder of Hustler magazine and has fought several extensive First Amendment legal battles. Eisenbach is a historian, professor and the host of a show on the History Channel. He makes regular appearances on other shows and was the host and writer of The Beltway Unbuckled, a special on how the sex lives of several U.S. presidents shaped history.