Amir Zaki, Building and Becoming

As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper and in the Emmy-award-winning New York Times documentary, the gripping true story of a Jewish teenager who became "The Forger of Paris" for the French Resistance. 

At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

"At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." —Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times

"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." —Jewish Book Council

"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." —Foreword Reviews

A frontline eyewitness account of the Syrian Revolution from prizewinning journalist and activist Hadi Abdullah, who broke the story of Assad's alliance with Hezbollah, a fact that changed the course and severity of the war. 

"This is Hadi al-Abdullah. A few years ago, he was studying to be a nurse. But when war broke out in Syria, he took a different path. He chose to join antigovernment protests and tell the world the story of an uprising that became a civil war. Years of conflict turned him from an eyewitness into a frontline war reporter. This new role of his brought added risk, for himself, and for his friends and colleagues. Sometimes they would go towards the bombs, sometimes the bombs would come towards them."
—New York Times documentary "Dying to Be Heard: Reporting Syria's War"

Abdullah became a trusted voice on social media, where he joined the ranks of cyber-dissenters and reported from the field. His memoir tracks his experience as a first responder during the Arab Spring uprisings, through the liberation of Syria in December 2024, by which time as a war reporter he had lost many of his closest friends, two of whom were his cameramen. After the brutal siege of Homs, Abdullah fled north to Idlib Province among the rebel factions, which posed their own dangers to young reporters. Astonishing for its rendering of friendships forged during the emotional impacts of war, and using creative language and style, Critical Conditions explores not only the political concerns of the author and his closest friends who all risked capture, prison, torture, or death every day, but gives centrality to their feelings during the life-changing mission they undertook by challenging the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Critically injured in an assassination attempt in Aleppo in 2016, Abdullah spent months in recovery in Turkey, where he was interviewed for a multimedia feature on The New York Times and by Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes. Later that year, he won the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize. Abdullah's new Afterword gives breathtaking detail to the Liberation of Syria the first week of December 2024 and remarks on the challenges for Syrians that lie ahead.

A rare 1947 catalogue of modern furniture making use of a revolutionary cast aluminum process reveals the splendid art of a designer who worked anonymously in the same factory for 50 years — the world class nature of his work revealed in this book and accompanying exhibition for the first time.

A rich, complex story of conflict between design and industry, John Leonard's Project X successfully launched a flood of striking chairs and desks into British and American schools, but his most beautiful design, the X202 "Armchair" remains unknown. By contrast, the paired "Student Chair," the X200, sold over a million copies, the most successful chair in British history. The central mystery of the chairs’ contrasting fates involves his boss's dismissal as 'unfit' at the peak of success, the revolutionary WWII Mosquito fighter/bomber, obsession with a winning racecar, mysterious double lives, a financial scandal, and the eternal battle between art and business. As Wyeth details Leonard's double life and the unprecedented achievement of Project X, he reveals James Leonard to be a singularly talented designer.

Grieving his father’s sudden passing, a film scholar and father of two boys finds solace in the picturesque idyll of Ireland's East Clare region, where he discovers and adopts an enigmatic border collie from an abandoned farm.

What is the essence of a sheepdog? As much a part of Ireland’s traditional and rural life as the countryside itself, working animals are known to be incredibly smart, loyal, with distinct personalities. Dara Waldron’s memoir about the wandering border collie he adopted the year after his father died is both an animal rescue story and a deep reflection on place, with a happy ending. To make a family pet of Oscar, Waldron enacts the daily ritual of walking the rugged hills and rivers of Ireland's woodlands in its intemperate weather—rain, sleet, and snow. Oscar’s instinct, as a sheepdog, is to run away and return to his handler. Testing the limits of Waldron’s tolerance and trying his fragile trust, days with Oscar are defined by the author's attempts to process his grief. Slowly it seeps into his consciousness: Oscar is asking him to understand a creature who lives for another, who will always return. In lyrical description of Ireland's mystical landscape, along with meditations on art, philosophy, and animal rights, this exquisitely wrought memoir about one man and his dog experiencing a symbiotic calling foregrounds the healing terrain of nature, and the true purpose and breadth of life.

Illustrated throughout with black and white stills in a cinema verité style.

"We Bring You an Hour of Darkness is my favorite kind of mystery – one that combines urgent social themes with smart dialogue and a page-turning thrill.” —Lauren Nossett, author of The Resemblance and The Professor

It’s 1993, and the ski company that runs Franklin, Colorado, plans to build a massive new resort in a pristine wilderness home to an endangered wildcat. When eco-terrorists begin a series of attacks on infrastructure and property, the FBI sets up a national task force. While the local police and politicians are melting down, five intrepid reporters at the town’s struggling, woman-owned newspaper must step in to solve the crime. With her newspaper on the brink of collapse, editor Tish Threadgill, still mourning the death of her brother and business partner, is under pressure from a rival publication to sell. But a local literary malcontent turns out to have a ringside seat to the eco-terrorist plot. While trying to stave off the town’s power brokers who would very much like her pesky paper gone, Tish soon finds the mystery at the heart of the attacks is far too close to home.

An illustrated chronicle like no other of Ukraine at war, examining expressions of the Ukrainian people on the street, in graffiti, murals, and quotidian life.

On his travels to wartime Ukraine, where even the feeling of relaxation is dangerous, Mitja Velikonja observed thousands of images of the culture of war in what he saw on the street and everyday life, from bakeries, road signs, billboards and murals, to unsanctioned graffiti. This street iconography, invested with a patriotic vocabulary, was also informed by his conversations with people, the scenes of destruction, misery, and above all, the strong will to resist, from which everyday heroism emerges.

The author went twice to the war zones of Ukraine and took more than 3,000 photographs of the street iconography of the state of war. Although all nationalists are equally foreign to him, when he talks to people, he asks himself how he would feel in their shoes, how he would react. When war creeps up to our front door, it affects everyone: leftists and right-wingers, nationalists and pacifists, patriots and those who don't care what flag they live under.

"Thus, while driving or waiting anywhere, I took a small test: how long does it take to come across images of war, warrior iconography, vocabulary of emphatic patriotism, the sound of a national awakening song, footage from battlefields. Mostly it was a matter of seconds."

Through these pieces of the culture and a people holding themselves together against an invader through a self-defensive nationalism, Velikonja sees that nationalism hides poverty — the more severe, the bigger the flags. In Ukrainian Vignettes, Velikonja compiles the images, words, impressions and voices of everyday life in war, to help us understand how clearly politics and ideology are displayed directly on the street. His philosophical approach of essays as vignettes allows him to have a critical eye even as he struggles to understand tragic events, and despite his affection for those closest to him. The author remains critical of both sides in his analysis, despite his sympathy for those closer to him.