Using a vast range of primary sources, this substantial and important volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the division and near-collapse of Habsburg authority during the 1550s. The principal episodes of this period (the death of Charles V, the accession of Philip II, and the latter's marriage to Mary Tudor) are well known in outline, but Dr Rodriguez-Salgado provides much that is new and original, both on the internal history of Spain, and on the highly complex diplomacy of the period. Why did Charles V and Philip I go to war against France, and Papacy and Islam, and how did the multinational empire survive the huge financial demands such wars placed upon it? Spanish relations with England and France are examined in detail, and The Changing Face of Empire does a great deal to illuminate the breakdown in relations with the Netherlands that was to culminate in the Dutch Revolt.
Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara's eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister's death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II. Chicago, 1944: twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, the California concentration camp where they have been interned by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier as a forerunner of the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family's reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train. Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose's death a suicide, in
A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . . Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba―the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz, a man determined to warn the world and pass on a truth too few were willing to hear―elevating him to his rightful place in the annals of World War II alongside Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Oskar Schindler and casting a new light on the Holocaust and its aftermath. “Awe-inspiring, exciting and poignant, this is a thrilling read, a piece of redemptive storytelling and a work of important Holocaust historical research.”―Simon Sebag MontefiorePeople won’t believe what they can’t imagine . . . In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz―one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world―and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited t
