Fateful Months

An important concern in understanding the "machinery" of the Holocaust is the timing of the decision to put into effect the Final Solution, the systematic murder of the European Jews. This book explores the crucial first steps in implementing the mass murder, including Hitler's role in the decision-making process. The participation of middle and lower middle echelon Germans, and the development of the technology of destruction, in particular, the gas van for use in the death camps. Looking at events from summer 1941 to Spring 1942, Christopher Browning sheds important new light on the historians' debate about how the policy of systematic mass murder emerged.

Examines Nazi policy regarding the Jews in fall 1941-spring 1942, and suggests a shift away from a Hitlerocentric focus to study the views and actions of middle- and lower-echelon Germans involved in the destruction process. Browning defines himself as a "moderate functionalist" in ch. 1 (pp. 8-38), "The Decision Concerning the Final Solution". Pp. 39-85 describe the participation of the Wehrmacht and the SS in the destruction of the Jews of Serbia.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

On the 1975-1977 national emergency in India.

Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China. China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China’s art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a “yellow peril” that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise. Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America’s conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.

A picaresque series of tales about an ordinary man's successful quest to survive, and a funny but unrelentingly savage assault on the very idea of bureaucratic officialdom as a human enterprise conferring benefits on those who live under its control, and on the various justifications bureaucracies offer for their own existence.

In 1940 the world was on a knife-edge. The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined. In Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw re-creates the ten critical decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain chose not to surrender, and December 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe’s Jews, showing how these choices would recast the entire course of history.

“A lucid and meticulously reported book by one of the Wall Street Journal’s ace reporters” (George Anders, Forbes contributor and author of The Rare Find). In 1938, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a small agency called Fannie Mae. Intended to make home loans more accessible, the agency was born of the Great Depression and a government desperate to revive housing construction. It was a minor detail of the New Deal, barely recorded by the newspapers of the day. Over the next seventy years, Fannie Mae evolved into one of the largest financial companies in the world, owned by private shareholders but with its nearly $1 trillion of debt effectively guaranteed by the government. Almost from the beginning, critics repeatedly warned that Fannie was an accident waiting to happen. Then, in 2008, the housing market collapsed. Amid a wave of foreclosures, the company’s capital began to run out, and the US Treasury seized control. From the New Deal to President Obama’s administration, James R. Hagerty explains this fascinating but little-understood saga. Based on the author’s reporting for the Wall Street Journal, personal research, and interviews with executives, regulators, and congressional leaders, The Fateful History of Fannie Mae, he explains the politics, economics, and human frailties behind seven decades of missed opportunities to prevent a financial disaster.

The Fateful Year is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it. Here, among a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, are suffragettes, armed with axes, and celebrity aviators thrilling spectators by looping the loop. With the coming of war, England is beset by spy hysteria and fears of invasion. Patriotic women hand out white feathers to men who have failed to rush to their country's defence. And as 1914 fades out, England prepares itself for the prospect of a war of long duration.

In 1905 more than seven hundred Russian sailors mutinied against their officers aboard the battleship Potemkin, one of the most powerful battleships in the world. Led by the charismatic firebrand Matyushenko, they risked their lives to take control of their ship and fly the red flag of revolution. What followed was a violent port-to-port chase that spanned eleven harrowing days and came to symbolize the Russian Revolution itself. This pulse-pounding story alternates between the opulent court of Nicholas II and the drama on the high seas. Neal Bascomb combines extensive research and fresh information from Soviet archives to tell the true story of the deadliest naval mutiny in history. Red Mutiny is a terrific adventure filled with epic naval battles, heroic sacrifices, treachery, bloodlust, and the rallying cries of freedom.