Edited and with an Introduction by Aron Rodrigue with Sarah Abrevaya Stein; Translation, Transliteration, and Glossary by Isaac Jerusalmi

This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the long-ascendant fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority-Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars. Sa'adi was himself a prominent journalist and publisher, one of the most significant creators of modern Sephardic print culture. He was also a rebel, accusing the Jewish leadership of Salonica of being corrupt, abusive, and fanatical; that leadership, in turn, excommunicated him from the Jewish community. The experience of excommunication pervades Sa'adi's memoir, which documents a world that its author was himself actively involved in changing.

Now that flying has become routine -- an affair of tray tables, carry-ons, and Homeland Security checkpoints -- it is easy to forget that little more than a hundred years ago, every attempt to build a working airplane had failed and space travel was inconceivable except as fantasy. Realizing the dream of flight required astonishing ingenuity, daring, and heroic sacrifice. Each advance opened new and scarcely imag-inable vistas, transforming not only distance but war, commerce, and our sense of our place in the universe.

Into the Blue revisits the remarkable trajectory of Americans in the air, gathering sixty of the most vivid and compelling pieces on aviation and spaceflight, from Benjamin Franklin's letters on the first balloons to Chris Jones's account of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station.

Here are those who made flight happen: Orville and Wilbur Wright, self-taught pioneers whose home-spun inventions stunned the world; World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, whose memoirs (excerpted here for the first time from the original manuscript) describe the frightening novelties of aerial combat; and daredevils like Texas barnstormers Hart Stilwell and Slats Rodgers and test pilot Jimmy Collins. Ernest Hemingway offers a vivid dispatch on a 1922 flight over France, and Gertrude Stein muses on the look of America from the air; Charles A. Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart narrate their groundbreaking transatlantic flights; Ralph Ellison tells the story of an African American airman at Tuskegee; William F. Buckley Jr. recounts his mishaps as an amateur pilot; Wernher von Braun envisions a space station of the future, and astronauts John Glenn, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin provide firsthand recollections of the conquest of space.

Here, too, are scenes and episodes in the development of commercial aviation, from the hiring of the first stewardesses and the high-stress lives of air traffic controllers to the new ubiquity of what Walter Kirn calls "Airworld."

The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War.

Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral, and private sources, Burned Bridge reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light. Historian Edith Sheffer's unprecedented, in-depth account focuses on Burned Bridge-the intersection between two sister cities, Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany's largest divided population outside Berlin. Sheffer demonstrates that as Soviet and American forces occupied each city after the Second World War, townspeople who historically had much in common quickly formed opposing interests and identities. The border walled off irreconcilable realities: the differences of freedom and captivity, rich and poor, peace and bloodshed, and past and present. Sheffer describes how smuggling, kidnapping, rape, and killing in the early postwar years led citizens to demand greater border control on both sides--long before East Germany fortified its 1,393 kilometer border with West Germany. It was in fact the American military that built the first barriers at Burned Bridge, which preceded East Germany's borderland crackdown by many years. Indeed, Sheffer shows that the physical border between East and West was not simply imposed by Cold War superpowers, but was in some part an improvised outgrowth of an anxious postwar society.

The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the U.S. economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life. Their discriminatory rates sparked broad opposition and a new antimonopoly politics.

With characteristic originality, range, and authority, Richard White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success. 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations