The Chicken From Minsk

The Chicken From Minsk
Author: Yuri B. Chernyak
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1995-05-05
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN:

The brainy and infuriatingly fun-to-solve problems that have kept the best Russian math and physics students biting their pencils as far back as the time of the czars.

Jewish Soul Food

Jewish Soul Food
Author: Janna Gur
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0805243097

The author of the acclaimed The Book of New Israeli Food returns with a cookbook devoted to the culinary masterpieces of Jewish grandmothers from Minsk to Marrakesh: recipes that have traveled across continents and cultural borders and are now brought to life for a new generation. For more than two thousand years, Jews all over the world developed cuisines that were suited to their needs (kashruth, holidays, Shabbat) but that also reflected the influences of their neighbors and that carried memories from their past wanderings. These cuisines may now be on the verge of extinction, however, because almost none of the Jewish communities in which they developed and thrived still exist. But they continue to be viable in Israel, where there are still cooks from the immigrant generations who know and love these dishes. Israel has become a living laboratory for this beloved and endangered Jewish food. The more than one hundred original, wide-ranging recipes in Jewish Soul Food—from Kubaneh, a surprising Yemenite version of a brioche, to Ushpa-lau, a hearty Bukharan pilaf—were chosen not by an editor or a chef but, rather, by what Janna Gur calls “natural selection.” These are the dishes that, though rooted in their original Diaspora provenance, have been embraced by Israelis and have become part of the country’s culinary landscape. The premise of Jewish Soul Food is that the only way to preserve traditional cuisine for future generations is to cook it, and Janna Gur gives us recipes that continue to charm with their practicality, relevance, and deliciousness. Here are the best of the best: recipes from a fascinatingly diverse food culture that will give you a chance to enrich your own cooking repertoire and to preserve a valuable element of the Jewish heritage and of its collective soul. (With full-color photographs throughout.)

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
Author: Dara Horn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0393531570

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA

The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA
Author: Doug Mack
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0393247619

"To truly understand the United States, one must understand the 'not-quite states of America." —Mark Stein, best-selling author of How the States Got Their Shapes Everyone knows that America is 50 states and…some other stuff. Scattered shards in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the not-quite states—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and their 4 million people are often forgotten, even by most Americans. But they’re filled with American flags, U.S. post offices, and Little League baseball games. How did these territories come to be part of the United States? What are they like? And why aren’t they states? When Doug Mack realized just how little he knew about the territories, he set off on a globe-hopping quest covering more than 30,000 miles to see them all. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mack examines the Founding Fathers’ arguments over expansion. He explores Polynesia’s outsize influence on American culture, from tiki bars to tattoos, in American Samoa. He tours Guam with members of a military veterans’ motorcycle club, who offer personal stories about the territory’s role in World War II and its present-day importance for the American military. In the Northern Mariana Islands, he learns about star-guided seafaring from one of the ancient tradition’s last practitioners. And everywhere he goes in Puerto Rico, he listens in on the lively debate over political status—independence, statehood, or the status quo. The Not-Quite States of America is an entertaining account of the territories’ place in the USA, and it raises fascinating questions about the nature of empire. As Mack shows, the territories aren’t mere footnotes to American history; they are a crucial part of the story.

Sparring with Charlie

Sparring with Charlie
Author: Christopher Hunt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 1997
Genre: Ho Chi Minh Trail
ISBN: 9780553505528

Hunt's account of his search for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. On a rickety Russian-made motorbike, he set off to explore what was once the supply route for the North Vietnamese Army. Roaming the countryside, he soon found that being an American in Vietnam conjured constant reminders of the past.

An Alternative Approach To Special Relativity

An Alternative Approach To Special Relativity
Author: Thomas A. Orofino, Ph.D.
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2011-06-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1462023517

This book is about the Theory of Special Relatively (SR), the introductory parts of which, and other general comments on science and physics preceding it, would be of interest to the general reader. The alternative description of SR proposed and developed in the book is essentially that of Newton’s classical physics, except for the critical additional of a step properly expressing the travel time of light signals conveying information to the observer. The form of that step, in turn, is dictated by the requirements of SR as expressed through its essence, the Lorentz transformation. Conventional interpretations of SR phenomena are as the observer perceives them, in altered descriptions of space and time. The altered versions differ from those associated with the phenomena at the location of the event creating them, because the light signals, conveying the information from source to observer, involve certain travel times of the signals themselves. Thus, until deciphered, they are not a simple representation of times in the event of interest. When the alternative approach to representation of SR developed in this book is applied, the same results as those from the conventional approaches of SR are obtained. The expressions for quantities such as energy and momentum differ from the corresponding quantities in Newton’s model for space and time. The alternative approach in the book simply provides a more intuitive route to and a logical explanation of the relativistic process.

Savage Feast

Savage Feast
Author: Boris Fishman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062867911

The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told recipe-filled memoir. A story of family, immigration, and love—and an epic meal—Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle. A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected. Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate. Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Combinatorial Mathematics

Combinatorial Mathematics
Author: Douglas B. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 990
Release: 2021
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1107058589

This is the most readable and thorough graduate textbook and reference for combinatorics, covering enumeration, graphs, sets, and methods.

A Replacement Life

A Replacement Life
Author: Boris Fishman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062287893

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York. Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has—as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”? High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him—Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American—but he wants to be a lionized writer even more. Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family. A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.