Chat: New Books

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Nayeri examines what it means to be a refugee through her own childhood escape from Iran, and through the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis.

Many Americans imagine refugees as threatening outsiders who will steal jobs or be a drain on the economy. But across the country, refugees are rebuilding and maintaining the American Dream. In City of Refugees, journalist Susan Hartman shows how an influx of refugees helped revive Utica, New York, an old upstate manufacturing town that was nearly destroyed by depopulation and arson.

The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America. After the Last Border situates a dramatic, character-driven story within a larger history-- revealing not just how America’s changing attitudes towards refugees has influenced policies and laws, but also the profound effect on human lives.

Call Me American is the true story of Abdi’s heroic survival in a war-ravaged Mogadishu and his incredible journey to a new life in America.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers from around the world to explore and illuminate their experiences. The Displaced is a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge.

Father Patrick Desbois documents the task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII.

The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's last days during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English, with a foreword from American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. Renia Spiegel was a young girl from an upper-middle class Jewish family living on an estate in Stawki, Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (nee Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland. Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry.

Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. While his work discusses a specific reserve unit during World War II, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.

Growing up in post-World War II America, Becky always knew who she was- the daughter of a Holocaust survivor- and yet a label that had never really defined her because of how her father was. The only survivor in his family, Becky's father had always refused to talk about the past, having spent his entire adult life internalizing his pain and suffering rather than coming to terms with it. It's because of this that her relationship with her father has always been one of tumult and discord. But what if her father was not really whom he said he was? What if he was someone else? What if Becky's entire life turned out to be a lie?

"A gripping account of the infamous Nazi doctor, from a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate. One of the most notorious war criminals of all time, Dr. Josef Mengele has come to symbolize both the evil of the Nazi regime and the failure of justice in the postwar world. Drawing on new scholarship and sources, historian David G. Marwell examines Mengele's life and career, chronicling his university studies, which led to two PhDs and a promising career as a scientist; his wartime service, in combat and at Auschwitz, where his "selections" determined the fate of countless innocents and his "scientific" pursuits resulted in the traumatization and death of thousands more; and his postwar refuge in Germany and South America.

When a cancer nurse becomes a cancer patient, she has to confront the most critical, terrified, sometimes furious patient she's ever encountered: herself. A frank look at struggling with illness while navigating the health care maze.

They save our lives every day, and we've never heard their stories. The life-or-death intensity of working on the front lines, from America's greatest unsung heroes.

Practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites readers to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a hospital cancer ward.