“I was born in a small town in Germany at the wrong time in history, the beginning of the Nazi era.” Altura recalls how one early November evening, about forty Schutztaffel men break down the door of their home, destroy all their belongings, and drag her father out onto the street where they proceed to beat him nearly to death. He is then placed in a prison cell before being shipped off to Dachau concentration camp. That traumatic experience, the first of several Altura would soon endure, marked the end of her childhood, just two weeks after her seventh birthday; and signified the beginning of ten agonizing years of surviving the Holocaust. More fortunate than most, however, her family is ultimately reunited and immigrate to “golden America.” Shortly after settling in the United States, her mother—the family’s saving grace—succumbs to brain cancer, leaving Altura in profound sadness. After a painful past, she finally finds a sense of purpose and fulfillment working in a lab where she meets her future husband, Burt, who introduces her to the joys of living.

WINNER • 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY Winner • 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award [Writing] The “stunning” (David W. Blight) untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America. Just as The Color of Law provided a vital understanding of redlining and racial segregation, Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise investigates the complex interrelationship between black communities and America’s largest, most popular fast food chain. Taking us from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power—economic and political—and despair for African Americans. As she contends, fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for racial justice.

Odnoetazhnya Amerika (One-Storied America) First published in the U.S.S.R. 1936. Little Golden America. First published in England in 1944. Translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth This is one of the most popular books ever published in the Soviet Union. It remains popular in Russia today. We Americans cannot figure out what makes it so popular. It is a good book, interesting and well written, but does not contain anything so outstanding as to make it the most popular book ever written. Yet almost every Russian seems to have read or to be familiar with “Little Golden America”.It describes the adventures of the two authors, Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov, who arrived in New York City on the passenger ship Normandie. After one month in New York, they bought a car and started traveling around the United States. They went to Chicago and San Francisco and then swept back through the Southern States. When they arrived back in New York to return to Europe, they said that they had traveled ten thousand miles.