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Compelled by her dying father, Elena McMahon finds herself in a 'situation' in Central America, knowing neither what to expect, what to demand, nor what to call achievement.

"In China, a woman is nothing." Thus begins this harrowing dual memoir that braids the story of Chinese-American Pang-Mei's own search for identity with the dramatic tale of her great-aunt, Chang Yuyi, born at the turn of the century in tradition-bound China. In alternating voices, Pang-Mei captivates the reader as she tells the story of Yuyi's battle with her mother to stop the painful foot-binding process, the first in a series of rebellions that marked her extraordinary life. This deeply textured portrait of Chinese life in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution captures, above all, the struggle of fiercely independent women emerging from centuries of customs and ideals, both subtle and pronounced.

In pitch-perfect prose and vivid detail, "Bound Feet And Western Dress" is about the power of storytelling as Yuyi confides her innermost dreams and demons with her brilliant and assimilated American-born niece in this splendiferous literary debut.

It is 1942. Germany controls almost the entire resources of continental Europe and is poised to move into the Middle East. Japan has wiped out the western colonial presence in East Asia in a couple of months and is threatening northern India and Australia. The Soviet Union has lost the heart of its industry, and the United States is not yet armed. Democracy has had its day. The Allied victory in 1945 has since come to seem inevitable. It was not. In Richard Overy's incisive analysis, we see exactly how the Allies regained military superiority and why they were able to do it. Overy offers a brilliant analysis of the decisive campaigns: the war at sea, the crucial battles on the eastern front, the air war, and the vast amphibious assault on Europe. The eastern front was critical. Having lost four million men and tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft in the first six months of fighting, the Soviet Union was able to relocate its industrial base to the east, intensify its industrial production, and defeat the German forces at Stalingrad and Kursk. This was the turning point, the victory of one authoritarian system over another. Overy also explores the deeper factors affecting military success and failure: industrial strength, fighting ability, the quality of leadership, and the moral dimensions of the war.

Ghosts. Unearthly presences. Things that go bump in the night. St. Augustine, America's oldest city, has them all. The unique and often turbulent history of the Ancient City has spawned more than four hundred years' worth of shadowy figures of the dark hours. Come walk through misty, cobblestone streets, down shaded alleys, along the wall of the old stone fort. Smell the smoke of ancient fires, the musty corners of old houses, the garlic and olive oil of Majorcan kitchens. Listen to the tinkling of wine glasses long shattered, the strum of Spanish guitars long broken, and the laughter of a dozen foreign tongues long dead. Awaken to the midnight howling of the city's prowling cats; seek sleep between nightmares lulled by the lapping waters of the Matanzas Bay-named for the massacre of the French Huguenots by the Spanish here in 1565. Author Dave Lapham has collected twenty-four stories from St. Augustine's rich oral history into a light, yet sometimes hair-raising peek at the spooky side of the Oldest City.

The Dance of Legislation has long been considered a classic description of the legislative process. In it, Eric Redman draws on his two years as a member of Senator Warren Magnuson's staff to trace the drafting and passing of a piece of legislation -- S.4106, the National Health Service Bill -- with all the maneuvers, plots, counterplots, frustrations, triumphs, and sheer work and dedication involved. He provides a vivid picture of the bureaucratic infighting, political prerogatives, and Congressional courtesies necessary to make something happen on Capitol Hill. In a Postscript to the 2000 edition, Redman reflects on how that process has, and has not, changed in the thirty years since the book was first published.

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Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages--documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years.

Hidden away in a former girls' school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode more than twenty-five thousand intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the unbreakable Soviet code, a breakthrough leading eventually to the decryption of nearly three thousand of the messages, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg's espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; startling proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American industrial, scientific, military, and diplomatic secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide in this book the clearest, most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage and the Americans who abetted it in the early Cold War years.