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Robertson Dean

Robertson Dean

  • This compelling memoir takes listeners through the eyes of a child surviving World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland. As a nine-year-old, the author witnessed his father being herded into a truck—never to be seen again. He, his mother, and sister fled to Warsaw to live in disguise as Catholics under the noses of the Nazi SS, constantly fearful of discovery and persecution. A sobering reminder of the personal toll of the Holocaust on Jews during World War II, this book is a harrowing portrait of one child’s loss of innocence.

  • This is not just another book about Pearl Harbor. It is the story of Joseph Grew, America’s ambassador to Japan, and his frantic effort in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack to orchestrate an agreement between Japan and the United States to avoid the war he saw coming. It is a story filled with hope and heartache, with complex and fascinating characters, and with a drama befitting the momentous decisions at stake.

    And more than that, it is a story that has never been told.

    In those months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan and the United States were locked in a battle of wills. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic sanctions were crippling Japan. America’s noose was tightening around Japan’s neck—but the country’s leaders refused to yield to American demands. 

    In this cauldron of boiling tensions, Joseph Grew offered many recommendations to break the deadlock. Having resided and worked in Tokyo for almost ten years, Grew understood what Roosevelt and his administration back home did not: that the Japanese would rather face annihilation than endure the humiliation of surrendering to American pressure. 

    The President and his administration saw little need to accept their ambassador’s recommendations. The administration’s policies, they believed, were sure to succeed. And so, with increasing urgency, Grew tried to explain to the President and his administration that Japan’s mindset could not be gauged by Western standards of logic and that the administration’s policies could lead Japan to embark on a suicidal war with the United States “with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”

    Relying on Grew’s diaries, letters and memos, interviews with members of the families of Grew and his staff, and an abundance of other primary source materials, Lew Paper presents the gripping story of Grew’s effort to halt the downward spiral of Japan’s relations with the United States. Grew had to wrestle with an American government that would not listen to him—and simultaneously confront an increasingly hostile environment in Japan, where pervasive surveillance, arbitrary arrest, and even unspeakable torture by Japan’s secret police were constant threats. 

    In the Cauldron reads like a novel, but it is based on fact. And it is sure to raise questions whether the Pearl Harbor attack could have been avoided.

  • The definitive masterpiece of the hard-boiled detective genre, The Maltese Falcon first appeared in the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1929 and was almost immediately acknowledged as not only a great crime novel but an enduring masterpiece of American fiction.

    Tough, cynical PI Sam Spade—a man who, as his creator explained, is “able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with”—is hired by the story’s irresistible femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, to locate the client’s sister by tailing her companion. Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, takes on the assignment, and quickly both he and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner’s death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters—all of them after a legendary statuette of a falcon fashioned long ago for King Charles V of Spain.

    Made of gold and encrusted with jewels, the falcon is worth a fortune. Missing for centuries, it resurfaced in Paris in 1911, covered in black enamel to disguise its value, and then disappeared again until it was traced to Constantinople—and now, it would seem, to Spade’s own backyard.

  • Free Play is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art in the widest sense comes from. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms.

    Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us; how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life; and how it can finally be liberated—how we can be liberated—to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice.

    The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. It brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.

  • A critically acclaimed musician and teacher presents a guide to the dynamics of improvisation

    It’s easy to assume that Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous and endlessly influential “I Have a Dream” speech was prescripted, vetted by others, written, and rewritten. It was not. Instead it was given on the fly, when from the audience singer Mahalia Jackson urged King off his prepared text. The result has inspired millions.

    The Art of Is contains breath-of-fresh-air thinking about how to cultivate the kind of game-changing creativity everyone seeks. Stephen Nachmanovitch shows exactly how the passion and immediacy of improvisation can be cultivated and how, in fact, we all improvise all the time—whether we are driving or deep in conversation. He explores ideas about being in the moment and reacting to people as they are, finding gold in unexpected distractions and roadblocks, and not only accepting but also celebrating imperfections in everyday practices. This creative mindfulness also makes innovation the province not of solitary geniuses but the result of engagement and interaction—and makes clear that improvising, creating, innovating are only of value when rooted in an ethical and social foundation. The results, Nachmanovitch shows, foster meaningful change and invention—and may just ignite a dream.

  • It’s a rare and secret profession, comprising a few dozen people around the world equipped with a mysterious mixture of knowledge and innate sensibility. Summoned to Swiss bank vaults, Fifth Avenue apartments, and Tokyo storerooms, they are entrusted by collectors, dealers, and museums to decide if a coveted picture is real or fake and to determine if it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael. The Eye lifts the veil on the rarified world of connoisseurs devoted to the authentication and discovery of Old Master artworks.

    This is an art adventure story and a memoir all in one, written by a leading expert on the Renaissance whose métier is a high-stakes detective game involving massive amounts of money and frenetic activity in the service of the art market and scholarship alike. It’s also an eloquent argument for the enduring value of visual creativity, told with passion, brilliance, and surprising candor.

  • In Soldiers of a Different Cloth, New York Times bestselling author and military historian John Wukovits tells the inspiring story of thirty-five chaplains and missionaries who, while garnering little acclaim, performed extraordinary feats of courage and persistence during World War II. Ranging in age from twenty-two to fifty-three, these University of Notre Dame priests and nuns were counselor, friend, parent, and older sibling to the young soldiers they served. These chaplains experienced the horrors of the Death March in the Philippines and the filthy holds of the infamous Hell Ships. They dangled from a parachute while descending toward German fire at Normandy and shivered in Belgium’s frigid snows during the Battle of the Bulge. They languished in German and Japanese prison camps, and stood speechless at Dachau.

    Based on a vast collection of letters, papers, records, and photographs in the archives of the University of Notre Dame, as well as other contemporary sources, Wukovits brings to life these nearly forgotten heroes who served wherever duty sent them and wherever the war dictated. Wukovits intertwines their stories on the battlefronts with their memories of Notre Dame. In their letters to their superior in South Bend, Indiana, they often asked about the campus, the Grotto, and the football team. Their love for Notre Dame helped buttress them during their wartime tribulations, and their return to campus was akin to a warm homecoming. Soldiers of a Different Cloth will fascinate and engage all listeners interested in the history of World War II and alumni, friends, and fans of the Fighting Irish.

  • Based on a series of lectures by Leonard Peikoff and edited by Marlene Trollope, Discovering Great Plays provides the ability to understand, judge, and savor the values offered by great drama. Listeners will discover plot-theme as the key to a play; see Antigone as a great heroine and Iago as the darkest villain in literature; learn about the Cornelian hero; see how Schiller’s “Grand Inquisitor” scene is the most dramatic and philosophic in all of theater; and discover Shaw’s brilliance in presenting the genius against society.

    Plays discussed include: Antigone by Sophocles; Othello by Shakespeare; Le Cid by Corneille; Don Carlos by Schiller; An Enemy of the People by Ibsen; Saint Joan by Shaw; Monna Vanna by Maeterlinck, and Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand.

  • This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than eighty never-before-published poems.

    Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of readers, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever.

    The Essential Rumi continues to be the bestselling of all Rumi books, and the definitive selection of his beautiful, mystical poetry.

  • Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color’s ubiquity, we don’t know much about it. Authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one of the most intriguing and least-understood aspects of everyday experience.

    Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In ten wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations. Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the extraordinary ways in which color appears and matters in our lives. This is a remarkably smart, entertaining, and fascinating guide to an elusive topic.

    Ranging from Homer to Picasso to The Wizard of Oz, this spirited and radiant book awakens us anew to the role of color in our world.

  • Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery: In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, “Powers of Darkness”), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker’s preface to the book. However, no one looked beyond the preface and deeper into Ásmundsson’s story.

    In 2014, literary researcher Hans de Roos dove into the full text of Makt Myrkranna, only to discover that Ásmundsson hadn’t merely translated Dracula but had penned an entirely new version of the story, with all new characters and a totally reworked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and perhaps even more suspenseful than Stoker’s Dracula. Incredibly, Makt Myrkranna has never been translated or even read outside of Iceland until now.

    Powers of Darkness presents the first ever translation into English of Stoker and Ásmundsson’s Makt Myrkranna. With a foreword by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and bestselling author, and an afterword by Dracula scholar John Edgar Browning, Powers of Darkness will amaze and entertain legions of fans of Gothic literature, horror, and vampire fiction.

  • This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends.

    The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom—amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution.

    The Quest for Cosmic Justice is the summation of a lifetime of study and thought about where we as a society are headed—and why we need to change course before we do irretrievable damage.

  • On the morning of August 15, 1945, Captain Jerry Yellin flew the last combat mission of World War II out of Iwo Jima. Today, Captain Yellin is a sharp, engaging, ninety-three-year-old veteran whose story is brought to life by bestselling author Don Brown (Treason).

    From April to August of 1945, Captain Jerry Yellin and a small group of fellow fighter pilots flew dangerous bombing and strafing missions out of Iwo Jima over Japan. Even days after America dropped the atomic bombs—on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9—the pilots continued to fly. Though Japan had suffered unimaginable devastation, the emperor still refused to surrender.

    Bestselling author Don Brown sits down with Yellin to tell the incredible true story of the final combat mission of World War II. Nine days after Hiroshima, on the morning of August 15, Yellin and his wingman First Lieutenant Philip Schlamberg took off from Iwo Jima to bomb Tokyo. By the time Yellin returned to Iwo Jima, the war was officially over—but his young friend Schlamberg would never get to hear the news. The Last Fighter Pilot is a harrowing first-person account of war from one of America’s last living World War II veterans.

  • At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland—the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover—follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

    In the weeks after Esther and Myrle’s disappearance, their siblings desperately search for the sisters, combing the stark farmlands, their neighbors’ houses, and the unfamiliar world of far-off Chicago. Have the girls run away to another farm? Have they gone to the city to seek a new life? Or were they abducted? Ostracized, misunderstood, and increasingly isolated in their tightly knit small town in the wake of the war, the Hesses fear the worst. Told in the voices of the family patriarch and his children, this is a haunting literary mystery that spans decades before its resolution. Hoover deftly examines the intrepid ways a person can forge a life of their own despite the dangerous obstacles of prejudice and oppression.

  • The first and only biography of intrepid attorney James B. Donovan, who was recruited by the CIA during the Cold War to broker near-impossible negotiations—now the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Cold War film, Bridge of Spies

    Charming, bold, and good-humored, James Donovan was a larger-than-life figure who led a fascinating and magnificently varied career, primarily as a negotiator on behalf of prisoners. When fresh out of law school, Donovan enrolled in the United States Navy during World War II and, toward the end of the war, was charged with collecting and recording evidence of Nazi atrocities, a role that then transitioned into his becoming a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Once returned to the United States he set up a private legal practice, and his reputation grew rapidly.

    In 1957 he became involved with defending the captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel, and then rapidly became embroiled in a much larger international political melee as he attempted to secure the release of the captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Working privately but sanctioned by the CIA, he made many trips to East Berlin, until his eventual success.

    His career would then see another twist as he was entrusted with negotiating directly with Fidel Castro over the fate of the prisoners from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the midst of his international negotiating career he found time to run for the US Senate and become a university president.

  • John Griffith “Jack” London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen,” and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel.

    This collection includes “Love of Life,” “A Day’s Lodging,” “The White Man’s Way,” “The Story of Keesh,” “The Unexpected,” “Brown Wolf,” “The Sun-Dog Trail,” and “Negore, the Coward.”

  • Fifteen years ago, Bronx-born plumber Tommy Rosa died in a hit-and-run incident. Lying by the road, he felt a tug whisking him off into a tunnel of light to meet his divine teacher in heaven. After several weeks in a coma, Tommy returned to earth to walk again with a heightened sense of connection to one and all.

    Around the same time, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist, was dismantling the prevailing ideas of preventive pharmacology with his holistic approach to treatment. In their first encounter, Tommy got the intuitive message that Dr. Sinatra had an infection in his hip. Tommy’s insight confirmed Dr. Sinatra’s own suspicion. When Tommy shared with Dr. Sinatra the divine revelations of healing that he had learned, Dr. Sinatra was shocked—the keys to solving the imbalance of energy that he had identified as the cause of most chronic illnesses were the same as those Tommy was relating.

    From this intersection of the divine and the scientific, Tommy Rosa and Dr. Sinatra began writing a prescriptive guide for healthy living. In Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth, Tommy Rosa reveals the eight revelations, gleaned from God, that will lead you toward revitalized health, a newfound sense of purpose, and spiritual balance—fully corroborated by Dr. Sinatra’s four decades of medical expertise—bringing heaven and earth a little bit closer.

  • Celebrated historian Winston Groom tells the intertwined and uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall—from the World War I battle that shaped them to their greatest achievement: leading the allies to victory in World War II.

    These three remarkable men-of-arms, who rose from the gruesome hell of the First World War to become the finest generals of their generation during World War II, redefined America’s ideas of military leadership and brought forth a new generation of American soldier. Their efforts revealed to the world the grit and determination that would become synonymous with America in the postwar years.

    Virginian George Marshall led his class at the Virginia Military Institute to become the principal planner of the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the greatest American operation, which ended the conflict. Afterward, he rose to become the Army’s chief of staff, where he balanced the volatility of generals such as Patton and MacArthur for the good of the country. Like Marshall, George Patton, who is remembered as one of the most heroic and controversial generals in American history, overcame early academic difficulties to graduate at the top of his class at West Point. He would build and command the Army’s burgeoning tank division, lead the successful invasion of North Africa during World War II, and die under mysterious circumstances in 1945. Douglas MacArthur also graduated at the top of his West Point class and became known as the “bravest man in the US Army” during the First World War, where he was commissioned as the youngest general in the armed forces. He commanded in the Pacific in World War II, where his strategy famously defeated the Empire of Japan.

    Filled with novel-worthy twists and turns, and set against the backdrop of the most dramatic moments of the twentieth century, The Generals is a powerful, action-packed book filled with marvelous surprises and insights into the lives of America’s most celebrated warriors.

  • A chilling reenactment of the federal government’s anti-Communist investigations

    The testimony that Eric Bentley has gleaned for this book from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC’s treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly dramatic and compelling collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a “dignified” manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. Thirty Years of Treason serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record.

  • Winner of the National Book Award and now considered a classic, The House of Morgan is the most ambitious history ever written about an American banking dynasty. Acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as “brilliantly researched and written,” the book tells the rich, panoramic story of four generations of Morgans and the powerful, secretive firms they spawned. It is the definitive account of the rise of the modern financial world.

    A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P. Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece, a compelling account of a remarkable institution and the men who ran it, and an essential book for understanding the money and power behind the major historical events of the last 150 years.

  • Jimmy Keene grew up outside of Chicago and was destined for greatness on the football field. By the time he reached his twenties, he was rubbing shoulders with famous actors, porn stars, and the children of powerful politicians. He had it all: cars, girls, and houses up and down the Gold Coast. But behind his well-connected star athlete façade was the man who paid for it all: a money-obsessed drug dealer desperate to make the big score that will get him out of the business. Soon a few costly mistakes left Keene with a ten-year prison term and no chance of parole.

    At that point it seemed the only lessons he would learn would be about navigating convict society as deftly as he had the world of drugs. Instead, less than a year into his sentence, Keene was offered a chance to regain his freedom in return for going undercover in the nation's highest security prison for the criminally insane. His task was to get friendly with Larry Hall, a suspected serial rapist and murderer, obtain his confession, and find out where the body of one of his victim's was buried. If he succeeded, Keene would get an unconditional release. If he failed, he'd have no choice but to ride out his term. If he was found out, he could also be killed.

    For nearly a year, Keene walked the line between the part he played and the self he hoped to redeem, all the while dodging punches from deranged inmates, currying favor with imprisoned Mafia dons, and staying beneath the radar of Larry's oddly protective psychiatrist.

  • Is there life beyond the grave? Is it reasonable to believe in the afterlife? If so, how should we act on those beliefs? Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza undertakes an unprecedented voyage of intellectual discovery to reveal the truth about life, death, and beyond.

    Dinesh D'Souza, the bestselling author of What's So Great about Christianity, offers an illuminating discussion of the most universal belief in all religions: that of a life beyond this one. Unlike many books about the afterlife, Life after Death makes no appeal to religious faith, divine revelation, or sacred texts to make it's case. Drawing on some of the most powerful theories and trends in physics, evolutionary biology, science, philosophy, and psychology, D'Souza shows why the atheist critique of immortality is irrational—and draws the striking conclusion that it is reasonable to believe in life after death. He concludes by showing how a belief in life after death can give depth and significance to this life, a path to happiness, and reason for hope.

  • The basis for the film starring Academy Award nominee Will Smith, I Am Legend is a classic of horror and suspense.

    In I Am Legend, a terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville’s blood. By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?

    Richard Matheson’s chilling tale is a white-knuckle ride into a world of darkness and terror.

  • The earliest extant heroic epic in any European vernacular, Beowulf is considered the most important poem in Old English. The title character is a warrior of superhuman strength who accomplishes glorious deeds to honor his king. He also represents the ideal lord and vassal, generous to his own men while fulfilling all the forms of courtesy at court. The narrative itself falls into two parts: Beowulf first rescues the royal house of Denmark from two marauding monsters; then, after having ruled his people peacefully for fifty years, he is called upon to combat a dragon that is terrorizing the countryside.

    Combining mythical elements with actual historical figures and events, the narrative ranges from fierce action sequences to detailed portrayals of court life and earnest considerations of social and moral dilemmas, all in a tone of sustained grandeur.