The past never left her and the indelible marks of her traumatic life kept haunting her even as she forayed into a beautiful present and an even more beautiful future. Her thoughts, her actions and her metrics to measure herself were constantly determined by what had been meted out to her in a dark time. Life was now opening up, love was beckoning and yet in the back of her impressionable mind was the shadow of a love story gone wrong and a fairy tale shattered. She wanted to embrace the future with open arms, yet from the corner of her eyes she saw a little girl who held her hands out to rejection and pain.

Objects can carry romantic myths, embody dangerous curses, or provide links to our past. Some mysterious items, like the Hope Diamond, can still be found today, while others, like the Philosophers’ Stone, have vanished into the mists of time. Gifted and sensitive psychometrists can apparently pick up an object and learn many things about its past and its previous owners. The World’s Most Mysterious Objects provides a glimpse into these enigmas, exploring everything from psychic weapons and spiritual icons to alchemical experiments and strange devices. With this intriguing book, find out what secrets the world could be hiding.

Few people realize that being Gypsy in 1943 Poland was as dangerous and frightening as being a Jew. It is guessed that between five hundred thousand to one million Gypsies perished during the Holocaust, the Porraimos (the devouring) as the Gypsies called it. Gypsy Spirit is the story of fifteen year-old Zilka Sucuri, a Gypsy girl who is thrust into the horrors of the Holocaust. Her life of traveling from town to town, singing and dancing the Gypsy way comes to an unconscionable stop when a SS death squad shoot every man, woman, and child in her kumpania. If she had not literally been up a tree, she would have been among those lying dead in a mass grave. Her lungo drom (the long road) takes her across Poland, Austria, and Germany in a driving struggle to help an American pilot return safely to his unit so he can return to bomb the many concentration, work, and death camps all across Poland and Germany. Her efforts reveal the truths of Belzec, the challenges of the partisans, and the burning desire to survive to be a living witness of what truly happened to the non-Aryans of Hitler’s Germany. Gypsy Spirit is a story of the driving spirit of a Gypsy girl, who took it upon herself to document the truth. Her strength and determination brings to light a story of magnanimity and the fears and atrocities such a Gypsy girl might have lived through.

Now that the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Romani Routes provides a timely and insightful view into Romani communities both in their home countries and in the diaspora. Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos, feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman notes, Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people. In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis of how Romani musicians address the challenges of discrimination. Focusing on southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora, her book examines the music within Romani communities, the lives and careers of outstanding musicians, and the marketing of music in the electronic media and "world music" concert circuit. Silverman touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities--adaptability, cultural hybridity, transnationalism--that are taken to characterize late modern experience. And rather than just celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the many constraints that inform their lives.