What would have happened if Hitler had won World War II?

"A joy to read, in fact, a book so good one doesn't want it to end…. Kempe has written a piece of contemporary history as it should be written, in clear, engaging prose, and with judicious and sensible arguments. He has expertly handled the history of modern Germany, and given us insights into the German soul, including his own, that are crucial for an understanding of our modern world." -Kirkus Reviews "While Kempe does not sugarcoat Germany's current problems-its dyspeptic tolerance of immigrants, its pervasive bureaucracy and pedantry, the viciousness of the neo-Nazis-he argues that young Germans are right to no longer feel guilt for the Holocaust, as long as they learn its lessons." -Newsday "This is a fascinating and important book for anyone interested in the New and Old Germany. Fred Kempe, a distinguished foreign correspondent who has reported from many countries, turns in Father/Land to a different land-the mysteries and dark secrets of his German family that lay shrouded since the Third Reich. As painful as it is, this is a search that Kempe could no longer refuse if he was to bring some sense to his American character and German roots. As he interweaves his family's history with that of the German nation, his personal quest becomes a window not only into the German past but also into Germany's future." -Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and coauthor of The Commanding Heights "Father/Land takes us on a spellbinding journey into Germany's past and present that begins with a musty olive trunk of old papers Fred Kempe inherited from his father. Inside that trunk lies the enduring mystery of the German people. Kempe's lively writing makes us see the paradox of modern Germany in small things-such as the trashcans at the Frankfurt airport or the personal quirks of Kempe's teammates on an amateur basketball team in Berlin. When Kempe finally discovers the horrific story that lies buried in his own family's history, the reader has the shock of experiencing the nightmare of Nazism from the inside." -David Ignatius, columnist, The Washington Post, and author of A Firing Offense "From a skilled American reporter's search for his German ancestry emerges a rich and rewarding portrait of a nation moving toward a promising future even as it remains tied to an inescapable past." -Ronald Steel, author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century "No foreign correspondent knows Germany as well as Frederick Kempe. He understands us sometimes better than we understand ourselves. His book is a refreshing, human look at where Germany is going, and it shows deep understanding for where it has been." -Volker RÃ1⁄4he, former defense minister of Germany Father/Land is a brilliant, unorthodox work of observation, insight, and commentary, a provocative book that will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand modern Germany. And it is something more. For in researching the past, Kempe discovered that the ghosts of Germany's past were not limited to others, that the contradictory threads of good and evil wove through his own family as well. After years of denying his own Germanness, he would have to confront it at last. During a pilgrimage to Germany with his father, Fred Kempe promised him he would write about modern Germany. Twelve years later, as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal Europe, Kempe began a long journey of exploration in an attempt to answer questions that haunted him about his father's land: "How could such an apparently good people with such a rich cultural history have done such evil things? What causes evil, and what breeds good? After only half a century of reeducation and reconstruction, could the strength of German democracy and liberalism be as great as it seemed?" In this book, Fred Kempe delves into Germany's demographic change, its modern military, its youth, and America's role in the remaking of Germany after the war. He also looks at German pre-war history and how that history plays into shaping the future of the newly intact Germany. While searching modern Germany for the answers to his philosophical questions, Kempe finds himself in a parallel search for the roots of his own German heritage. Through seeking out relatives and searching documents that might enlighten him about the unspoken mysteries of his family's past, he discovers more than he bargained for, and at the same time learns a great deal about himself. The journey that began as the fulfillment of a promise to his father, led him as he had hoped, to a greater understanding his father's Heimat. In the last chapter of his book, Kempe calls modern Germany "America's Stepchild." He theorizes that Germans, because of their past atrocities, feel a great responsibility to their European neighbors as well as to the world. In their process of atonement, they have become a kinder and gentler people, while their strength remains. Their role as a world leader beckons them to heights to which they no longer aspire. Reaching great heights makes the world seem conquerable. This is the mistake they must avoid. Reaching out makes the world more united. This is the direction they know they must go.

The acclaimed second collection of poetry by Patricia Lockwood, Booker Prize finalist author of the novel No One Is Talking About This and the memoir Priestdaddy SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The Strand * Barnes & Noble * BuzzFeed * Flavorwire “A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.” – The New York Times Book Review Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, like: Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history in this “marvelous” novel (Los Angeles Times). For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to stay, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He’s wrong—but he survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family during the Second World War. Anna and her father reconnect late in his life, when she finally has a family of her own, but it is only when she discovers his extensive journals that she is able to fully understand him and the reasons for his absences. The Distant Land of My Father is a “beautiful” novel “for everyone who has ever felt himself in exile from any beloved place, or a time that can never return” (The Washington Post Book World). “Seamlessly weaves together Anna’s own memories with those of her father, gleaned from the journals . . . An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.” —Kirkus Reviews “Vivid with details of prewar Shanghai and Los Angeles.” —Publishers Weekly “Lush and epic.” —San Jose Mercury News “Remarkable . . . A moving tale of love and the possibility of forgiveness.” —Library Journal

This study of Argentine Catholicism offers an important perspective to the country's turbulent political history. Church-state relations show a number of crisis points whereby the constitutionally-established Catholic Church underwent progressive disenfranchisement by various governments. In response, church elites struggled to maintain the institution's historic rights and privileges and to speak as the moral conscience of the nation. Three critical periods in church-state relations are examined: the anticlerical period of the 1880s; the rise of Perónism in the 1940s; and the series of events beginning with the upsurge of the revolutionary left in the 1960s. These events shaped the Argentine Church, while at the same time Catholicism, often imbued with a fervent nationalism, provided many groups competing for power the myths, symbols, and language necessary to articulate a vision for a new Argentina

Smith Morrill: Almost every land-grant college or university in the United States has a building named for him; but are his contributions truly recognized and understood? Here is the first biography on this renowned statesman in six decades. Representative and then senator from Vermont, Morrill began his tenure in Congress in 1855 and served continuously for forty-three years. His thirty- one years in the upper chamber alone earned him the title "Father of the Senate." Coy F. Cross reveals a complex and influential political figure who, as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and then the Senate Finance Committee, influenced American economic policy for nearly fifty years. Morrill's most-recognized achievements are the pieces of legislation that bear his name: the Morrill land-grant college acts of 1862 and 1890. His legacy, inspired by the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated electorate, revolutionized American higher education. Prior to this legislation, colleges and universities were open primarily to affluent white men and studies were limited largely to medicine, theology, and philosophy. Morrill's land-grant acts eventually opened American higher education to the working class, women, minorities, and immigrants. Since 1862, more than 20 million people have graduated from the 104 land-grant colleges and universities spawned by his grand vision. In this long-overdue study, Cross shows the "Father of Land-Grant Colleges" to be one of America's formative nineteenth- century political figures.

From extensive research, including a remarkable interview with the unrepentant chief of Hitler’s Women’s Bureau, this book traces the roles played by women – as followers, victims and resisters – in the rise of Nazism. Originally publishing in 1987, it is an important contribution to the understanding of women’s status, culpability, resistance and victimisation at all levels of German society, and a record of astonishing ironies and paradoxical morality, of compromise and courage, of submission and survival.