Trevor Noah, the funny guy who hosts The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist--and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a...

Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) is an amazing, but in some ways very typical figure in Russian history: a prince from an old family who became a revolutionary, a scholar and encyclopedist immersed in politics, an anarchist who sharply criticized violence and the ‘Red Terror’. He became famous as a geographer and explorer of the North, a historian and philosopher, a literary critic and...

Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism...

‘Welch ein Anblick für die Welt’, notierte Joseph Goebbels geschockt in seinem Tagebuch. ‘Ein geistig zerrütteter zweiter Mann nach dem Führer. Grauenhaft und unausdenkbar.’ Da war Rudolf Hess soeben zu seinem mysteriösen Flug nach England aufgebrochen, um im Alleingang Frieden zu stiften. Wer war dieser von Rätseln umgebene Mann, der wie ein Schatten Hitlers wirkte, in Nürnberg zu lebenslanger...

Bismarcks »Gedanken und Erinnerungen« sind das bedeutendste Zeugnis politischer Memoirenliteratur in der deutschen Geschichte. Nicht als geschlossene Darstellung seiner politischen Laufbahn oder kontinuierliche Schilderung der historischen Ereignisse entfaltet dieses außergewöhnliche Werk seine Wirkung, sondern als große staatspolitische Reflexion und als brillant erzähltes Erinnerungsbuch, das...

Heinrich Breloer hat mit seinem TV-Mehrteiler »Die Manns« unser Bild von Thomas Mann geprägt wie niemand sonst. Marcel Reich-Ranicki bezeichnete die Filme als »Glanzstück« und »Höhepunkt der deutschen Filmkunst«. In »Ein tadelloses Glück« erzählt Breloer nun die ereignisreiche Vorgeschichte aus den Jahren vor Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs: Von Thomas Mann als ehrgeizigem jungen Schriftsteller,...

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

This book is the third in a documentary series about the fates of Soviet writers. The first, ‘The Knot. Poets of Friendship and Breaks,’ is dedicated to the 1920s and 1930s. The second, ‘Noah’s Ark of Writers,’ is about the evacuation of Soviet writers and their families during the war to Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Chistopol, and Yelabuga. Together, these books create a kind of fresco of Soviet...

This is her first book of non-fiction - a collection of essays, memoirs and reflections on memory and forgetting, music and love, emigration and connection to Belarus through the ghostly identity of a man who once believed that music was stronger than death and lyrics were more important than life.

The author of this book considers himself a professor of emigration. But his life is full of typos, as he himself admitted. He left Minsk for Kyiv, from there to Warsaw, and ended up in Berlin. Why did it happen? How much does glass and aluminum containers cost in Germany? What does an eye prosthesis look like? How to avoid a madhouse when faced with German bureaucracy? What does Leopoldplatz...

Am 8. November 1939 explodierte im Münchner Bürgerbräukeller eine Bombe. Eigentlich hätte sie Adolf Hitler töten sollen. Wenn dieser Plan aufgegangen wäre, hätte die Weltgeschichte einen anderen Verlauf genommen. Doch der »Führer« verließ vorzeitig den Saal und kam mit dem Leben davon. Dieses Buch erzählt die Geschichte des Mannes, der die Tat ganz allein plante und ausführte: Johann Georg Elser.