The true story of the extraordinary life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of the largest underground resistance group in Berlin who was executed on Hitler’s direct orders-uncovered by her great-great-niece in this riveting, deeply researched account.
ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS:
The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
by Rebecca Donner
Little, Brown, May 2021
(chez Sterling Lord Literistic)
What do you do when you suddenly find yourself confronted with a mortal threat to your society’s fundamental, stabilizing principles? Mildred Harnack chose to stand. Milwaukee-born, she was the leader of the largest anti-Nazi resistance group in Germany, and the only American woman to be put to death on Hitler’s orders. Despite its unmatched vastness, the record of World War II atrocity and nobility will forever remain incomplete. This ever-expanding volume of belligerence and courage is perhaps the most gravely gendered historical document we have; a war perpetrated, suffered and recounted by men. There are periodically polite acknowledgments of the roles played by woman in ‘aiding’ the war effort, but these usually have the hollow ring of tokenism. Mildred Harnack’s short but monumental life shows us just how incomplete that record remains. From 1933-42, with her German husband, Arvid, Mildred led a cell that couriered top secret military intelligence to the Allies, helped dissidents and persecuted minorities escape Germany, and distributed literature that encouraged civil disobedience and exposed Nazi plans. Fusing elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
Rebecca Donner is the author of the novel, Sunset Terrace, and a graphic novel, Burnout. Her essays, reportage and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Guernica, and other publications. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.
Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family—a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan’s mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, and events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan’s half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother’s penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives. As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal. Evoking a generous and humane spirit, and a story that ranges over three continents, SECRETS OF HAPPINESS elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.
Gen Z changes everything. Today’s businesses are not built to sell and market the way Gen Z shops and buys, or to recruit and employ Gen Z the way they find and keep jobs. Leaders need answers now as Gen Z is the fastest growing generation of employees and the most important group of consumer trendsetters. The companies that quickly and comprehensively adapt to Gen Z thinking will be the winners for the next twenty years. Those that don’t will be the losers or become extinct. ZCONOMY is the comprehensive survival guide on how leaders must understand and embrace Generation Z. Researched and written by Dr. Denise Villa and Jason Dorsey from The Center for Generational Kinetics, the insights in ZCONOMY are based on their extensive research—they’ve led more than 60 generational studies—and their work with more than 500 companies around the world. In ZCONOMY, Dr. Villa and Dorsey answer: Who is Gen Z? What do employers, marketers, and sales leaders need to know? And, most importantly, what should leaders do now?
In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—”the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology”—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy,” then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. FOSSIL MEN is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world’s greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn’t bother going home at night to devote more hours to science