Excellent… A poignant – and scientifically lucid – portrait – The New York Times Book Review

 

Shortlisted for the NIKE Award, Poland’s highest literary prize
Winner of 2003 Koret Jewish Book Award in Fiction

 

 

Wojciech Jagielski has already achieved recognition for his reporting from the most inflamed points on our globe. [This latest work] will only confirm his reputation. – Ryszard Kapuscinski

 

Kapucinski saw more, and more clearly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction... When the last page of this book is turned, note how much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone. – Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review

 

Looking at the concept of the Other through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and considering its formative significance for his work, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the age of enlightenment to the postmodern global village.

 

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization in occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve its history for posterity. The book tells the gripping story of a determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression. A stunning revelation of the enduring spirit of the decimated residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. – Rita Kohn, NUVO Weekly, August 8, 2007

 

It is best through personal stories that we can grasp the world of our fathers which the Nazis destroyed. Mayer Kirshenblatt has a unique gift for evocation of the past in his simple and beautiful paintings. Each one tells a story. Together they make up a world. – Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: A joyous and deeply satisfying immersion in the lost world of prewar Poland Jewry. – Ann Kirschner, author of Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

 

A tour of Western thought by one of the world's most eminent philosophers – in a book that fits in the palm of your hand. How can we know anything? Why is there evil in the world? What is the source of truth? Is it possible for God not to exist? Here Leszek Kolakowski explores the essence of these ideas, introducing figures from Socrates to Thomas Aquinas, Descartes to Nietzsche, by concentrating on one single important philosophical question from each.

 

Powerful, unadorned prose…a few simple words create thousands of indelible images. - Boston Globe

 

The book, based on the author's memoirs, relates the odyssey of a 13-year old boy in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during World War II, who had joined the Resistance movement, later surviving several hair-raising escapes, until his liberation.

 

It is absolutely one of the best eye-witness accounts of WWII Poland that I’ve ever read.
- Alan Furst, author of The Foreign Correspondent and The Spies of Warsaw