Where To Buy Along the Tracks Sandpiper paperbacks by Tamar Bergman At The Lowest Price?

Why Buy A Along the Tracks Sandpiper paperbacks by Tamar Bergman?
Based on a true story, Along the Tracks tells the tale of Yankele, a Polish boy who is separated from his mother during the German invasion of Poland in World War II.

Over 4 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Best book ever!!!
I loved this book! It totally sucked me in from the moment I opened it. It’s about a young boy’s experiences being separated from his family during the Holocaust. His adventures are amazing! He has to overcome his friends dying, hunger, disease, poverty, separation, and even love. And I can’t believe it all really happened to a real person!!!

An Intriguing Tale
This heartwarming story is about a Jewish boy who loses his family during an air raid on a train. His father is in the war, and he must learn to survive “along the tracks” by stealing and sleeping in coal piles (for warmth) until he finds his family. Setting: Poland

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The Glory A Novel by Herman Wouk – Save 25% Today!

Why Buy A The Glory A Novel by Herman Wouk?
Like no other novelist at work today, Herman Wouk has managed to capture the sweep of history in novels rich in character and alive with drama. In The Hope, which opens in 1948 and culminates in the miraculous triumph of 1967s Six-Day War, Wouk plunges the reader into the story of a nation struggling for its birth and then its survival. As the tale resumes in The Glory, Wouk portrays the young nation once again pushed to the brink of annihilationand sets the stage for todays ongoing struggle for peace. Taking us from the Sinai to the Jerusalem, from dust-choking battles to the Entebbe raid, from Camp David to the inner lives of such historical figures as Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Anwar Sadat, these extraordinary novels have the authenticity and authority of Wouks finest fictionand together strike a resounding chord of hope for all humanity. The first trade paperback editions of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Wouks epic novels of World War II, were recently released by Back Bay Books.

Over 16 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Awesome, Wouk continues the Saga
I LOVED EVERY HERMAN WOUK BOOK I HAVE READ AND CAN’T WAIT TO READ ANOTHER. MORE HISTORICAL FICTION, THE HOPE/GLORY WERE GREAT AND GAVE ME A TREMENDOUS INSITE INTO ISRAEL’S SHORT HISTORY. THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN’S AND RUSSIAN’S IS FASCINATING.

The human dimension brings any good story to life
In his historical notes at this book’s end, Herman Wouk tells his readers that The Hope and The Glory started as one book and wound up being written as two. He knew how he wanted to end this story – another Wouk epic! – from the beginning, with an event in Israel’s history for which he was present. As a writer, I find that interesting. As a reader, I thoroughly enjoyed both books and found that they do, indeed, tell one story. The Glory picks up that story in 1967, and concludes it in 1988 – 40 years after the War for Independence in 1948, where The Hope began.

Wouk understands what makes his characters tick, and their growing and changing processes unfold naturally. That’s what makes both books a pleasure to read. He brings the events of modern Israel’s history to life by experiencing them with his characters, and his depictions of real people (people like Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Menachem Begin) ring true for a reader who remembers watching those events and those real people move across the world’s stage during the years that The Glory covers. It’s hard to believe his fictional creations are not just as real. He even gets the women right, exactly right for the context of their times. Too much like a “movie of the week,” as some reviewers state? Maybe. But it’s the human dimension that brings any good story to life, and at doing that Wouk excels.

–Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of 2005 EPPIE winner REGS

Glory: A historical novel
This book and it’s prequil, The Hope, tells the story of the birth of Israel and will leave you wanting the book to never end.

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Where To Buy Brother Number One A Political Biography Of Pol Pot by David P Chandler At The Lowest Price?

Why Buy A Brother Number One A Political Biography Of Pol Pot by David P Chandler?
In Cambodias recent, tragic past, no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. Yet information about his life and career is largely inaccessible. In this first book-length study of the man, the historian David P. Chandler casts light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot, illuminating the ideas and behavior of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history. In this revised edition, Chandler provides new information on the state of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge following the death of Pol Pot in 1997.

Over 8 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

The way to make friends is not to kill people
Prof. Chandler discovered the real face behind Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), the initially enigmatic leader of the Red Khmer in Cambodia. He wrote a hallucinatory and tragic biography.

The background of Pol Pot is common for many Communist Party (CP) members. He was recruited by the local CP when he studied in a foreign country. For Pol Pot, it was in France where the CP was totally controlled by the USSR and her Stalinist doctrine. The USSR recruited foreign members everywhere in order to use them as antennas all over the world.

When Pol Pot took power in Cambodia, he applied the Stalinist doctrine ruthlessly.
The similarities with Stalin are eminently striking: power struggle at the top of the party and liquidation of the old fellows, savage party purges, murderous goulags, indiscriminate collectivization, ethnic cleansing, deportation, show trials, forced confessions under torture, affectionate with little daughter, considering as enemies of the State those Khmer who came from a foreign country, fear of assassination, suspicious, dictatorial (didn’t accept the slightest form of criticism).
Under Pol Pot, it went even so far that people who ‘knew’ an enemy where executed. The result: a genocide. Even children and BABIES were put to death.

David Chandler shows us that Pol Pot was really a dedicated communist, a party man, an organization man, a utopian thinker who believed in his killer’s utopia till the end: “I did everything for my country”.
A blatant lie: he did it only for his Khmer country and only for those Khmer who (were forced to) agree(d) with him. In other words, his utopia was more than nationalism, it was racism. For Pol Pot knew that ‘Class and hatred had produced the victory. So hatred had to be maintained’.

This book contains excellent explanations of the background of the Cambodian conflict with Vietnam, and how Cambodia became a chess piece in a world conflict between the US, China and the USSR. Pol Pot’s regime was supported by the US, because Cambodia was an enemy of Vietnam, who was an ally of the USSR.
This book stresses also the disastrous role of the feudalist king Norodom Sihanouk and the decisive influence of the US bombings of Cambodia, which turned part of the Khmer peasantry in favour of the Red Khmer.

Pol Pot’s regime is a shame for Western intelligentsia, because some of his cronies (Khieu Samphan) studied like Pol Pot at Western universities.

This terrible biography is a reminder of the deadly dangers of utopian doctrines, if they can be implemented by a totally convinced individual who possesses a dictatorial power in a single ountry. As David Chandler states: the genocide would have continued, if Pol Pot had stayed in power.

A must read.

Brother Number One
I thought that this book was extremely well written and intellectually stimulating. While providing as many details about Pol Pot’s life as can be found, Chandler also integrates this information into the recent history of Cambodia. He seems to believe that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can only be understood in the context of the times, and this definitely rings true after reading the book. True, he does offer a lot of interpretation and conjecture on Pol Pot’s life and motives, but this is the job of the historian. Rarely do historical documents, especially documents about the Khmer Rouge, provide such information. Those who intend to understand and write about these events, are therefore forced to do this kind of interpretive work. So do not listen the first review given on this page. This book is awesome.

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Where To Buy Hucksters VHS starring Clark Gable Deborah Kerr Sydney Greenstreet Adolphe Menjou Ava Gardner At The Lowest Price?

Why Buy A Hucksters VHS starring Clark Gable Deborah Kerr Sydney Greenstreet Adolphe Menjou Ava Gardner?
As Victor Norman, Clark Gable plays a returning World War II vet looking for a job with an advertising agency. He succeeds, landing a good position with a nice salary, but soon finds out that ethics and integrity are in short supply in the rarefied world of corporate advertising. With a big soap account on the brink of leaving the ad agency, things get a bit desperate as the agency struggles to hang onto the companys business. They round up a war widow for an endorsement, and their client is temporarily happy, but soon Gable finds the man to be a harsh and demanding taskmaster. This acerbic comedy may seem a little thin by todays standards, but some of the commentary on the gullibility of the American buying public is still pretty fresh half a century later. Sydney Greenstreet excels as the tyrannical, somewhat disgusting head of the soap firm, and Deborah Kerr makes her American screen debut as Gables war-widow love interest. –Jerry Renshaw

Over 7 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Absorbing drama
“The Hucksters” is a refreshingly adult drama with themes that resonate even today. Clark Gable plays an advertising agent (a “huckster”) who is basically a decent man, but who finds himself increasingly compromising his principles in order to satisfy a despotic soap magnate played by Sydney Greenstreet, who obviously relishes in playing such a despicable, larger than life character.

As part of a promotion for his client’s product, Gable convinces a lovely society war widow (sensitively played by Deborah Kerr) to endorse Greenstreet’s beauty soap. Gable is immediately attracted to Kerr and vice versa.

But Gable and Kerr’s characters are polar opposites. He is a driven sometimes ruthlessly ambitious businessman. She is a very proper, rather sheltered, but highly moral mother of two small children and a widow of a war hero.

In 1947, the year of this film’s release, there was still a strong sense of morality in movies (something absent in most of today’s films). The idea of having sex outside of marriage was not considered lightly. And in “The Hucksters”, this issue is tastefully dealt with minus the vulgarity and gratuitous sexuality that permeate most of today’s films. (Call me old fashioned, but I think we could do without so many explicit sex scenes in movies today.)

There are other contemporary topics in this film such as the power of big business to control the media and the dilemma of “getting ahead” in your profession by any means, ethical or not.

Even though this movie is over 50 years old, it holds up extremely well. It makes for an absorbing two hours of entertainment.

“And Mr. Evans, Your Ad is Not Clean.”
The summation of ad man Clark Gable’s reading of the riot act to soap magnate Sydney Greenstreet is just great in this a-one movie about the post-war radio advertising world. Gable has just hung up his uniform–literally–when the show begins, and is ready to resume his radio ad man career. Along the way, he has to tangle with Greenstreet, a really dopey Keenan Wynn, and decide which of two lovely ladies he wants to pursue. Quite a dilemma: the upper-crust war widow Deborah Kerr who seems like she’d be made of ice but is surprisingly warm to the touch, or sultry torch singer Ava Gardner, who might seem like a live wire but secretly yearns for an apron and a man in slippers. For those who are as confused as Gable as regards the woman issue, have no fear–just check out “Mogambo” where once again Gable has to choose between a lady (this time, Grace Kelly) and a, well, not so much of a lady (Gardner again). See both movies together, and you can play out both scenarios.

Really wonderful supporting work by Greenstreet as the overbearing soap dictator, used to making everyone alternately jump and grovel, and by Adolphe Menjou as the beleagured head of the ad agency, who has lost so many of his scruples that he embarrasses his wife in a terribly effective drunk scene in a nightclub double date with Gable/Kerr. Smaller role for veteran Edward Arnold, but just as solid as usual, playing a man who trusts Gable a little more than he ought.

If you’re in the mood for great post-war King Gable and a bevy of top-rate supporting players, make a bee line for “The Hucksters”–and that’s no soft soap.

Devastating 1940s Classic on the Advertising Game — Why No DVD?
Every veteran of the advertising industry is sure to find lots to enjoy and ponder in this Clark Gable-Debra Kerr classic. The Hucksters was an adaptation of Frederic Wakeman’s devastating novel — rumored to be a roman a clef — about big-bucks corporate thuggery and Mad Ave skullduggery in the 1940s.

Returning ad executive Clark Gable and impoverished war-widow socialite Debra Kerr try to hang onto their integrity and each other in the freewheeling, utterly unprincipled world of Madison Avenue in the years after World War 2. They negotiate a minefield of high-stakes ad campaigns, sexually exploitative art directors, abusive CEOs, lickspittle corporate toadies (literally!), and cutthroat ad-agency politics where senior executives are FBI informants who destroy their rivals by ratting them out to the feds.

The media, mores, and strategies of advertising have changed completely since 1947, but the personalities remain the same. Scenes with Adolphe Menjou as the ad agency owner and unforgettable Sidney Greenstreet as a troglodyte soap tycoon all ring true, even today. Frederic Wakeman’s bestselling novel “The Hucksters” was reportedly drawn from life — years on the corporate floor of the American Brands Company. His pungent characters emerge intact in this film, and shake the viewer with their authenticity, even now.

The film has some flaws in pacing and it’s deliberately morally ambiguous, but it really deserves a DVD release. What’s the problem?

A Compelling Movie of Chesslike Stratagems
The Hucksters does an excellent job of portraying the cut throat business that advertising is. Clark Gable, playing the suave but ethical advertising man, is the protagonist and he is pitted against the larger than life business tycoon Sydney Greenstreet. Both are pitted against one another in this real life chess match, each making strategic moves of cunning, self-pride and power–Gable, in an attempt at making the advertising business a respectable one and Greenstreet by instilling fear into the bumbling idiots who surround him. Greenstreet operates as though his customers are mindless sheep easily persuaded by fancy packaging and jingles of no substance whereas Gable is convinced that the customer is intelligent and is looking for more than bells and whistles when purchasing a product.

Most interesting however is the internal struggle Gable, Kerr, and Gardner are each battling. Gable, basically a good man, is somewhat of a player and finds himself in love with Kerr. Kerr, a widow with children, is a righteous woman deeply attracted to Gable but cannot reconcile with his lifestyle. Gardner, a sultry singer of a sordid background, longs to settle down as a respectable housewife and mother and his her net set for Gable. All three do a magnificent job of portraying the internal struggles of their characters.

In the end Gable buckles but does not break before the formidable Greenstreet. Realizing that he cannot continue on working for this tyrant without compromising his standards, Gable passes on the company?s lucrative offer and walks, but not before he has publicly humiliated Greenstreet.

Of course, Gable does get the girl in the end. Which one? Watch the movie and find out!

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Red Gold A Novel by Alan Furst – Save 20% Today!

Why Buy A Red Gold A Novel by Alan Furst?
If you enjoy mysteries set against the rich background of World War II Europe (Philip Kerrs Berlin Noir trilogy and the fine French series by J. Robert Janes are prime examples), you should also know about Alan Furst. He began by writing such excellent, original books as Dark Star and Night Soldiers, all set in Eastern Europe. The locale then moved to Paris for The World at Night, where we first met the enigmatic film producer and reluctant Resistance hero Jean Casson.

Casson returns in fascinating form in Red Gold, washing up broke and depressed in his home city, now totally ground down by its German occupiers. Recruited by a sympathetic cop, Casson joins a group of officers working undercover inside the Vichy government to help de Gaulle. Cassons job is to convince justifiably skeptical French communists to cooperate; to do so he must organize a complicated, extremely dangerous transfer of weapons. Theres nothing glamorous about the work or its result, but Furst is such a persuasive writer that we come to realize what a success it is for Casson just to stay alive. This innovative and gripping novel eloquently transports us back to a different era and a different world. –Dick Adler

Over 21 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Another winner for Furst
I recently read The Spies of Warsaw and now am reading all the Alan Furst I can get my hands on. Red Gold is another great one- the author writes so well about this time period. What sets Furst apart is the very ordinariness of some of the events and characters- the Gestapo occasionally screw up and let prisoners escape, and not every Resistance operation ends in Hollywood-worthy pyrotechnics. And Jean Casson makes a great world-weary hero.

“Red Gold” — A Platinum Spy Thriller From a Master of the Genre
Alan Furst is a master of the spy novel and, given the texture and substance he gives his characters, we are often left wondering what ultimately happened to them. In this case (and perhaps only this case), the life of a main character continues into a second novel. “Red Gold” picks up where “The World at Night” left off and quenches our thirst for further details of the life of French filmmaker Jean Casson.

In truth, “Red Gold” is the better novel. While “The World at Night” is unmatched in its physical description of wartime France, “Red Gold” carefully details the intricate political situation — Gaullist and renegade militarist resistance groups; pro-Moscow, anti-Moscow, and former Communists; pro-Nazi French with pictures of Petain on their pianos. Add to this stew the war profiteers and black marketers, and you have a very different, and very ambiguous, picture of World War II-era France — far different from the post-war propoganda of monolithic French resistance. Casson himself is a complex character without any definite political orientation. He is committed to fighting the Gestapo for personal reasons that amount to simple patriotism. While in “The World At Night” Casson almost seemed drawn into resistance efforts despite himself, by the time “Red Gold” opens Casson has grown as a human being and, while his motives are still ambiguous, his support for the cause is unquestionable.

You can read “Red Gold” without first reading “The World At Night,” but I recommend against doing so. If you jump around Furst’s novels, you generally lose nothing but an understanding of a wry reference to “The Brasserie Heininger” (which seems to appear in each one — it is apparently THE PLACE TO BE SEEN in Furst’s novelization of wartime Paris.) Reading the two Casson-related novels out of order, however, will cause you to miss important background information and will prevent you from understanding how some minor characters fit into the picture.

I have read Furst’s novels in order, starting with “Night Soldiers,” and have not found one that deserves fewer than five stars. “Red Gold” is no exception.

Great Sense of Time and Place
Furst is one of my favorite novelists. I have read or listened to all of his books. He writes about a fascinating time; the run up to and the progress of WWII. His characters are three dimensional with flaws, weaknesses, strengths and courage. He takes us to Hungary, Bulgaria, The Soviet Union, Checkslovakia, Poland, Germany and France. I got a very different view of the times, places and protagonists. These novels would make wonderful Film Noir movies.

He peoples the novels with writers, movie producers, diplomats all caught up in the WWII intrigues. All become agents one way or another so you also get a view into the various secret services.

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