Close to the Machine

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Brad Meltzer

Presents an illustrated biography of the conservationist and scientist known for her work with chimpanzees and her championing of animal rights.

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Tamara Chalabi

Relates the author's entrance into Iraq in 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad, to investigate the rich history of her family, who held a privileged place in Iraqi society until the 1950s, when they were forced to flee.

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Raul Hilberg

Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg relates in The Politics of Memory, both the manuscript and its subject matter were refused by major publishers and university presses. When at last his monumental study was published, to extraordinary acclaim, the author found himself facing a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews had been less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. For Mr. Hilberg not only documented unsparingly the process that destroyed the Jews; he also showed how the Jews had sometimes collaborated in their own destruction. How his work was used and abused - especially by Hannah Arendt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nora Levin - draws Mr. Hilberg's attention and comprises one of the most censorious passages of his book. The Politics of Memory begins in Vienna, where Mr. Hilberg spent his early years before fleeing with his family in 1939. It continues in New York City and later in Burlington, Vermont, where he spent most of his academic life. This poignant memoir brings full circle a scholarly undertaking that in many ways has been a terrible calling.

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Eugene Straus

This authorized biography of Rosalyn Yalow is the life story of one of the few Nobel Prize-winning women in science. An outspoken woman and a complex hero in an age of superficial celebrity worship, this is the complete tale of her remarkable rise from child of uneducated immigrant parents to shining star in a male-dominated profession and world. As this story unfolds - as told by a respected physician who was her scientific colleague and friend - we learn of a young girl who against all odds grew up into one of the most venerated women in science. Her life story is related intermittently against the backdrop of her later years, when, after having won the Nobel Prize and suddenly felled by a stroke, she was brought to a hospital where, soiled with blood and unrecognized, she was "dumped" as a charity case onto another hospital. From a long line of strong women, Rosalyn emerged from being the daughter of immigrant parents struggling to make ends meet, to the young, determined woman who made it her destiny to break all barriers. Young and energetic, she broke into the sciences as a lone female graduate student in physics, outshining her male classmates. She refused to accept a conventional career as a physics teacher, and instead pioneered in the new field of nuclear medicine. Along with Solomon Berson - her brilliant and charismatic partner - she created a mom and pop scientific laboratory that rivaled and surpassed the giants in bringing new understanding to diagnosing human disease. Did breaking the gender barrier in building a world class laboratory and struggling to make a great discovery take its toll on her personal life? Straus investigates that question through first-hand interviews with Yalow, and her family, friends, and colleagues, not glossing over her complex relationship with her daughter nor the suicide of her much overshadowed brother.