It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their...

California is the most multicultural state in the nation. As John Mack Faragher argues in this concise and lively history, that is nothing new. California's natural variety has always supported diversity, including Native peoples speaking dozens of distinct languages, Spanish and Mexican colonists, gold seekers from all corners of the globe, and successive migrant waves from the eastern states, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands....

Today, Europe's fastest growing Jewish population is in Berlin. Germany is considered one of the most democratic societies in the world, assuming the position of moral leader of Europe as they embrace hundreds of thousands of refugees. This development couldn't have been imagined in 1945. Through personal stories Germans & Jews explores Germany's transformation as a society, from silence about the Holocaust to facing it head on. Unexpectedly, a nuanced...

Traces the evolution of the belief that Jerusalem is the center of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious worlds and argues that this fixation is a main cause of the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century. Since its publication in 1947, it has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world. It remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Restored in this Definitive Edition are diary entries that were omitted from the original edition. These passages, which constitute 30 percent more material,...

"As Californians battle over Prop. 8's hotly contested ban on same-sex marriage, ACLU veterans Elinson (coauthor of The Development Debacle) and Yogi (co-editor of Highway 99) offer crucial perspective on the history of minority rights in a state long considered a political trendsetter. Beginning in the mid-19th century--amid the expulsion of Chinese communities from hundreds of California towns and state-sponsored genocidal campaigns against indigenous...

Following her National Book Awardnominated Veronica, here is Mary Gaitskills most poignant and powerful work yetthe story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her. Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul, who...

Examines the diversity of peoples who inhabit California, including ethnic groups and immigrants, and profiles such successful Californians as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Shirley Temple, and Ralph Bunche.