Showing results for "Adults" in Historical

The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai who, for most of the 20th century, were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that ‘one loved money, one loved power and one loved her country’, but there was far more to the Soong sisters than these caricatures. As China battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, each sister played an important, sometimes critical role and left an indelible mark on history.

Mendel (Manny) Steinberg spent his teens in Nazi extermination camps in Germany and Poland, miraculously surviving while millions perished. This is his story. Born in 1925 in the Jewish ghetto in Radom, Poland, Manny soon realized that people of Jewish faith were increasingly being regarded as outsiders. In September 1939 the Nazis invaded, and the nightmare started. The city's Jewish population had no chance of escaping and was faced with starvation, torture, sexual abuse and ultimately deportation.

Finding your place in a family tree that has only one branch, the other shorn by the Holocaust, is a tricky business. Gail Weiss Gaspar grew up believing that her worth was tied to busyness and productivity, with achievement and education prized above all other accomplishments.

This book is considered to be the best account of the Civil War ever written from the Confederate point of view. It is also the one most frequently cited by historians of the Western campaigns. Sam Watkins, a high private in the Army of Tennessee, brings a vividness and detail to his story unmatched in the genre.

In this classic tale of adventure, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, was captured by a band of nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. Thus begins an epic adventure of survival and a quest for freedom that takes him across the Sahara desert.

Winner of the 1982 National Book Award for Biography, Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as a masterpiece by Newsday, it is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma, and his struggle to manhood.

Narrow escapes and bold decisions define the life of teenager Morris Schnitzer. Fleeing from Nazi Germany before the onset of World War II, Morris ends up in the Netherlands only to watch the country be invaded by the Nazis. With his father’s warning to never set foot in a concentration camp echoing in his mind, Morris resolves to fight—and survive.

Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving nearly three years in the ghetto, where thousands from the Jewish community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis’ next victims. But there is no escape from the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family are taken to Kaufering, a brutal subcamp of the notorious Dachau concentration camp.

The Education of Henry Adams is among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. Henry Adams was the grandson of a president and the great-grandson of another one. He was also the son of the American Ambassador to England, and his secretery. As such he rubbed elbows, literally, with Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and with many of the great figures of his time.

Here are the life stories of eight remarkable people who were born and grew up in America and who made their mark upon American history. They represent the remarkable individuality and sense of enterprise and courage that has marked the American hero.