In the Dutch countryside the war seems far away. For most people, at least. But not for Ed, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland trying to find some safe sanctuary. Compelled to go into hiding in the rural province of Zeeland, he is taken in by a seemingly benevolent family of farmers. But, as Ed comes to realize, the Van 't Westeindes are not what they seem. Camiel, the son of the house, is still in mourning for his best friend, a German soldier who committed suicide the year before. And Camiel's fiery, unstable sister Mariete begins to nurse a growing unrequited passion for their young guest, just as Ed realizes his own attraction to Camiel. As time goes by, Ed is drawn into the domestic intrigues around him, and the farmhouse that had begun as his refuge slowly becomes his prison.

What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the “legalization” of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans’ deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.

Collects jokes under such headings as "collegiate chowderheads," "national knuckeheads," and "foreign fatheads"

The work includes many of Dr. Eckardt's own fanciful stories, essays, and verses as well as material derived from student malapropisms, from children, and from professional humorists and comedians. Appearing at a time of burgeoning scholarly and popular interest in the domain of humor, Sitting in the Earth and Laughing shows how humor and laughter lie within the realm of human mysteries--together with tragedy, suffering, and love--that can be comprehended and relished.

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.