Jane Kramer

A collection of short biographies of individual Europeans provide a portrait of Europe today.

Presents profiles of four families; a Yugoslav worker in Sweden, an Indian in London, a French-Algerian family in Provence, and an Italian Communist who represent a new social class in Europe.

Allen Ginsberg came to national attention when his poem "Howl" was the subject of a San Francisco obscenity trial in 1956. Since then, millions of copies of the poem have been read on college campuses and elsewhere all over America. His powerful imagination, political agitation, and magnetic charisma have made him a symbol of the cultural transformation of the past fifty years. Jane Kramer's book is an incisive and passionately human portrayal of Ginsberg's world and the people in it, whirling across America from San Francisco to Midwest college towns, from New York's East Village to California be-ins. Since his passing in 1997, Ginsberg has come to be recognized as a key figure in the American literary pantheon.

Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg relates in The Politics of Memory, both the manuscript and its subject matter were refused by major publishers and university presses. When at last his monumental study was published, to extraordinary acclaim, the author found himself facing a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews had been less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. For Mr. Hilberg not only documented unsparingly the process that destroyed the Jews; he also showed how the Jews had sometimes collaborated in their own destruction. How his work was used and abused - especially by Hannah Arendt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nora Levin - draws Mr. Hilberg's attention and comprises one of the most censorious passages of his book. The Politics of Memory begins in Vienna, where Mr. Hilberg spent his early years before fleeing with his family in 1939. It continues in New York City and later in Burlington, Vermont, where he spent most of his academic life. This poignant memoir brings full circle a scholarly undertaking that in many ways has been a terrible calling.

All housekeeper Felicia Markowski wanted was the baby she thought she could never have. But the unexpected prediction from a carnival fortune-teller gave her a sense of hope she'd lost long ago — and led her straight into the arms of cattle wrangler Jackson North. Felicia believed the rugged loner-next-door was the man who would give her the child she so desired. But Jackson was hiding a painful past, and though he found solace in Felicia's embrace, he was afraid to take a chance on a new life. To make her dreams come true, Felicia had to help the man she loved face the truth — and heal his shattered heart.

"Jane Kramer started cooking when she started writing. Her first dish, a tinned-tuna curry, was assembled on a tiny stove in her graduate student apartment while she pondered her first writing assignment. From there, whether her travels took her to a tent settlement in the Sahara for an afternoon interview with an old Berber woman toiling over goat stew, or to the great London restaurateur and author Yotam Ottolenghi's Notting Hill apartment, where they assembled a buttered phylo-and-cheese tower called a mutabbaq, Jane always returned from the field with a new recipe, and usually, a friend. For the first time, Jane's beloved food pieces from The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1964, are arranged in one place--a collection of definitive chef profiles, personal essays, and gastronomic history that is at once deeply personal and humane. The Reporter's Kitchen follows Jane everywhere, and throughout her career--from her summer writing retreat in Umbria, where Jane and her anthropologist husband host memorable expat Thanksgivings--in July--to the Nordic coast, where Jane and acclaimed Danish chef Rene Redzepi, of Noma, forage for edible sea-grass. The Reporter's Kitchen is an important record of culture distilled through food around the world. It's welcoming and inevitably surprising"--