"A tremendous book, the biography of a city which charts the multifarious pathways from bacilli to burgomaster." - Roy Porter, London Review of Books Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the “cholera years” is, in Richard Evans’s hands, tragically revealing of the age’s social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world’s public-health landscape today, including the current coronavirus crisis.

Death in Hamburg presents a graphic portrayal of a great European city struck by one of the greatest urban disasters of the century: a cholera epidemic that within six weeks left ten thousand people dead and many more suffering the appalling symptoms of this terrible disease. In seeking to discover why Hamburg alone was hit by an epidemic of such proportions, Evans ushers readers into hte often unfamiliar terrain of environmental pollution, social inequality, municipal administration, and medical science in 19th-century Europe.

"The "Indiana Jones" of virus hunters reveals the complex interactions between humans and viruses, and the threat from viruses that jump from species to species"-- Provided by publisher.

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk. A high ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. Through Krall's adroit and journalistic style, her reader is thrown into a world where love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear in places where we least expect them, illuminating the implacable logic of the surreal. "It is precisely the difficult path [Krall] takes toward her topic that has made some of these texts masterpieces." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (on Dancing at Other People's Weddings) "Heartbreaking, strange . . . and marvelously told." -- Die Zeit (on Proofs of Existence)

A celebration of love and commitment, these stories from renowned figures span the bridge from love at first sight to a reluctant proposal acceptance – sometimes in the same relationship. These are love stories of legend told in photos by Mort Hamburg and life stories of people destined to be with one another for the long haul, written by Kashmir Hill.

During the final weeks of World War II, the American army discovered multiple atrocity sites and mass graves containing the dead bodies of Jews, slave laborers, POWs and other victims of Nazi genocide and mass murder. Instead of simply reburying these victims, American Military Government carried out a series of highly ritualized “forced confrontations” towards German civilians centered on the dead bodies themselves. The Americans forced nearby German townspeople to witness the atrocity site, disinter the bodies, place them in coffins, parade these bodies through the town and lay them to rest in town cemeteries. At the conclusion of the ceremony in the cemetery in the presence of dead bodies, the Americans accused the assembled German civilians and Germany as whole of collective guilt for the crimes of the Nazi regime. This landmark study places American forced confrontations into the emerging field of dead body politics or necropolitics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Katherine Verdery and others, the book argues that forced confrontation represented a politicization of dead bodies aimed at the ideological goals of accusing Germans and Germany of collective guilt for the war, Nazism and Nazi genocide. These were not top-down Allied policy decisions. Instead, they were initiated and carried out at the field command level and by ordinary U.S. field officers and soldiers appalled and angered by the level of violence and killing they discovered in small German towns in April and May 1945. This study of the experience of war and forced confrontations around dead bodies compels readers to rethink the nature of the American soldier fighting in Germany in 1945 and the evolution, practice and purpose of American political and ideological ideas of German collective guilt.