biography

Unveils new facts behind Gregory Rasputin's life, controversial relationships, and much-discussed death. Fuhrmann unearths previously unknown details from Rasputin's childhood and his early years as a farmer and itinerant preacher and his decade-long relationship with the Romanovs.

Gerda Hartwich Robinson narrates her story as a German survivor of World War II. She tells how her life's journey included hunger, fear, neglect, and physical and emotional abuse, and how she carried these injustices in her mind and body for many years, leading to debilitating back pain, headaches, panic attacks, depression, and feelings of inadequacy. Robinson shows that the tragedies of war don't end when the last bomb is dropped or the last prisoner freed; they continue in subtle but devastating ways. Like many German citizens during and after the war, Robinson was simply trying to survive a terrifying situation.

As a young boy, Awais Reza's family moved from Indian Kashmir to Lahore in Pakistan after Partition. Now middle-aged, Awais is a shopkeeper in the Anarkali Bazaar. Married, with three sons, he looks back on his journey from idealistic young nationalist to increasingly watchful and anxious member of the mercantile class at the heart of Pakistani life. Awais's eldest son has drifted, but returned to help his father run the shop; the middle one is involved in radical Islamist politics; and the youngest is a law student who believes that a secular future is Pakistan's last and only hope. Their lives unfold against an increasingly turbulent and violent background as suicide bombers enter the life of urban Lahore with devastating consequences. Haroon K. Ullah's portrait of a middle class family oppressed by a state falling apart around them shows that Radical Islam is confronted not only in distant mountain passes by the armed forces, but most personally and tellingly across the kitchen table as families like the Rezas debate their future.

Fanya Gottesfeld Heller was born into a traditional Jewish family in a small Ukrainian village. She was able to evade the Nazi death squads with the help of a small group of Christian rescuers. Beset by hunger, and faced with the constant threat of execution, she miraculously survived. Today she shares her story and dedicates her life to furthering the cause of tolerance and hope.

In 1991, Shaka Senghor was sent to prison for second-degree murder. Today he is a lecturer at universities, a leading voice on criminal justice reform, and an inspiration to thousands. As he says "In life, it's not how you start that matters. It's how you finish.".

The story of a child who, at the age of twelve, lost everything: hope, home, and even his own identity. Like so many Holocaust victims, Felix Weinberg's early childhood years were idyllic. That changed in 1938 when his father traveled to England, hoping to arrange for his family to emigrate there. His efforts came too late. Over the following years Felix survived five concentration camps. He lost his mother and brother in the camps and was liberated at Buchenwald. At the age of seventeen he was finally reunited with his father in Britain where they built a new life together.

Lee Smith has written fiction for forty-five years and now she tells her own story. Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of her childhood was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy's dimestore. Because of that dimestore, where she would listen to customers and invent adventures for the store's dolls, she became a storyteller. Smith has created a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one's heritage.

Wounded in Iraq, Navy SEAL Eric Greitens returns home to find that his fellow veterans all want the same thing: to continue to serve their country. He founded The Mission Continues to provide paid public service fellowships for wounded veterans. Under this umbrella organization, former Marine sergeant Jake Wood began Team Rubicon, organizing post-9/11 veterans for dangerous disaster relief projects around the world. Drawing on the military's emphasis on discipline and selflessness, these veterans are helping to build a more vigorous nation and world.

On March 15, 1697, Abenaki warriors, in service to the French, raided the English frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. They killed twenty-seven men, women, and children and took thirteen captives, including thirty-nine-year-old Hannah Duston and her week-old daughter, Martha. Her daughter was murdered a short distance from the village, and Hannah resolved to get even. Two weeks into their captivity near present-day Concord, New Hampshire, Hannah Duston, and two of her companions, moved among the sleeping Abenaki with tomahawks and knives, killing two men, two women, and six children. Hannah and the others then escaped down the Merrimack River in a stolen canoe and returned to English civilization. Her courageous story gave hope to the English settlers, whose domain the French hoped to occupy, as the French and English continued to battle over dominance in the new world.

Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of America's richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion, a Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband---a French merchant---and almost lost it to her second---notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, the battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court---twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel's real story---so unique that it surpasses any invention---has yet to be told, until now.