Farmington, one of Detroit's oldest suburbs, was originally inhabited by the Potawatomi and was ceded to the government for sale to settlers beginning in 1820. Established as Quakertown and incorporated as Farmington, this "Crossroads Community" developed around a literal railroad stop, flourishing from an agricultural center to a thriving business district. A sense of community, family, and home inspired residents to overcome natural and social obstacles to carve a substantial and influential niche in the Michigan landscape.

The story of a notable children's institution founded at the turn of the twentieth century, this book looks at the lives of troubled children and those who helped them, and illuminates major shifts in America's child welfare system.

Winner of the Hammett Prize and the Nero Award From the wealthy suburbs to the remains of Detroit’s bankrupt factory districts, August Snow is a fast-paced tale of murder, greed, sex, economic cyber-terrorism, race and urban decay. Tough, smart, and struggling to stay alive, August Snow is the embodiment of Detroit. The son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother, August grew up in the city’s Mexicantown and joined the police force only to be drummed out by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12 million wrongful dismissal settlement that left him low on friends. He has just returned to the house he grew up in after a year away, and quickly learns he has many scores to settle. It’s not long before he’s summoned to the palatial Grosse Pointe Estates home of business magnate Eleanore Paget. Powerful and manipulative, Paget wants August to investigate the increasingly unusual happenings at her private wealth management bank. But detective work is no longer August’s beat, and he declines. A day later, Paget is dead of an apparent suicide—which August isn’t buying for a minute. What begins as an inquiry into Eleanore Paget’s death soon drags August into a rat’s nest of Detroit’s most dangerous criminals, from corporate embezzlers to tattooed mercenaries.

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto—a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach—The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

"The Kindertransport Quilts are a form of folk art which allows multiple artists, each with their own artistic expression, to produce a work with a unifying theme. Each square expresses its creator's view of the Kindertransport experience: pictures of the past, fears and nightmares, memorials to lost family. They express traumatic childhood experiences, as recalled with the perspective of maturity ... We are grateful to Kirsten Grosz for having produced these quilts, touching and artistic reminders of the Holocaust."--p. 7

As part of my practice, I defend doctors, fellow attorneys, executives, senior military officers, teachers, professional and college athletes, airline pilots, and the good hard working people of Michigan who find themselves charged with a drunk driving offense. I currently live in Ann Arbor with my wife and my kids, and prior to entering private practice, I was an Assistant District Attorney in New York City, and an Oakland County (Michigan) Prosecutor. As a prosecutor, I successfully prosecuted thousands of high profile felony, misdemeanor and drunk driving cases. During my career as a prosecutor, I never lost a trial, and had a 100 percent conviction rate. This was a major accomplishment as the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office is the busiest in the entire country, and Oakland County has a reputation as having some of the best criminal defense attorneys in the State of Michigan. I was pretty good at prosecuting people, but now I'm on the other side of the table using that experience for your benefit. I'm currently a criminal defense attorney at Kelly & Kelly, P.C., a well established and Better Business Bureaus Accredited law firm that has been fighting for clients for the past twenty-five years. While I'm usually the lead attorney on criminal cases, I use a team approach, which gives the client multiple legal minds working on their case, and helping the client get the absolute best outcome. Since leaving my career as a prosecutor, I've been selected and recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 by Super Lawyers Magazine; the prestigious magazine selects the top 2.5 percent of attorneys in Michigan, and in my opinion is the gold standard for attorney rankings. My selection by Super Lawyers Magazine was featured in Hour Detroit Magazine and the New York Times. My work as a Michigan criminal defense lawyer has also earned me a "Superb" 10.0 Avvo Rating. I'm licensed to practice law in Michigan and New York. I graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, and I'm not at all shy about bragging that I graduated from one of the best law schools in the world. My educational background and my experience as a prosecutor have pushed me to the forefront of criminal defense attorneys in Michigan. I currently serve as the criminal law co-chair for the Washtenaw County Bar Association and I'm a member of the Oakland County Criminal Law Committee.