As Hitler’s bombs threatened London during World War Two, eight-year-old David Merron was removed from his family and close-knit Jewish community in the East End and evacuated to the safety of the English countryside. Placed into the car of strangers, life was sometimes unpredictable and lonely. But, with time, the rural world became an exciting adventure playground in which he flourished. Set against a dramatic wartime backdrop, Goodbye East End is about the conflict between a London boy’s unexpected love of the countryside and his guilt about not missing home as much as he might. It’s the moving story of a childhood experience that changed a young boy’s life forever.

A powerful memoir of a young boy's evacuation from the East End of London during World War II. As Hitler's bombs threatened London during World War Two, eight-year-old David Merron was removed from his family and close-knit Jewish community in the East End and evacuated to the safety of the English countryside. Placed into the car of strangers, life was sometimes unpredictable and lonely. But, with time, the rural world became an exciting adventure playground in which he flourished. Set against a dramatic wartime backdrop, "Goodbye East End" is about the conflict between a London boy's unexpected love of the countryside and his guilt about not missing home as much as he might. It's the moving story of a childhood experience that changed a young boy's life forever.

Stan Cribb begins work aged just fourteen when, much to the reluctance of his father, he joins the family business as an apprentice undertaker. The young Stan is soon burying victims of London's Blitz. His fascinating and at times hilarious memoir describes the East End way of death during the Second World War and the years after, when horses worked in partnership with their owners and funeral rites hadn't changed much since Victorian times. Stan takes us through ups and downs of the trade, with all its quirks and characters, and gives us a tour that is both memorable and moving.

In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering. Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today.

A compassionate exploration of all the ways animals, including humans, grieve

An East End Legacy is a memorial volume for William J Fishman, whose seminal works on the East End of London in the late nineteenth century have served as a vital starting point for much of the later work on the various complex web of relations in that quarter of the capital. A variety of leading scholars utilise the insight of Fishman’s work to present a wide range of insights into the historical characters and events of the East End. The book’s themes include local politics; anti-alienism, anti-Semitism and war; and culture and society. In pursuing these topics, the volume examines in great depth the social, political, religious and cultural changes that have taken place in the area over the past 120 years, many of which remain both significant and relevant. In addition, it illustrates East London’s links with other parts of the world including Europe and America and those territories "beyond the oceans." This book will prove valuable reading for researchers and readers interested in Victorian and twentieth century British history, politics and culture.

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.