Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  The Use of Reason

  Colm Tóibín

  Part of the "Mothers and Sons" collection, this book tells the story of a small time criminal who finds himself in too deep by stealing not just cash or jewellery - easy to take, easy to get rid of quickly - but four extremely valuable paintings. How do you quickly get rid of a Rembrandt, Gainborough and two Guard's without getting caught?

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  The Irish Famine

  Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter

  "This volume, comprising Colm Toibin's acclaimed short overview and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of Ireland's leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of one of history's most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes."--Jacket.

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  Walking along the Border

  Colm Tóibín and Tony O'Shea

  A book that manages to cover one of the most exhaustively chronicled of subjects, the strife in the North of Ireland, without once lapsing into cliche'.

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  A Beggar in Jerusalem: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  This haunting novel takes place in the days following the Six-Day War. A Holocaust survivor visits the newly reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening, and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present. Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and paradox, Wiesel bids the reader to join him on a spiritual journey back and forth in time, always returning to Jerusalem.

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  After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust

  Elie Wiesel

  In his first book, Night, Elie Wiesel described his concentration camp experience, but he has rarely written directly about the Holocaust since then. Now, as the last generation of survivors is passing and a new generation must be introduced to mankind’s darkest hour, Wiesel sums up the most important aspects of Hitler’s years in power and provides a fitting memorial to those who suffered and perished. He writes about the creation of the Third Reich, Western acquiescence, the gas chambers, and memory. He criticizes Churchill and Roosevelt for what they knew and ignored, and he praises little-known Jewish heroes. Augmenting Wiesel’s text are testimonies from survivors, who recall, among other moments and events: the establishment of the Nurembourg Laws, Kristallnacht, transport to the camps, and liberation.

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  A Jew Today

  Elie Wiesel

  What does it mean to be a Jew today -- in America, in Europe, in Israel? Elie Wiesel addresses himself to the question from the unique perspective of one whose whole life has been informed by the sense of his Jewishness -- from his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania, when he lived through Jewish history with each year's holidays and learned that "to be a Jew meant creating links, a network of continuity," through his adolescence in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where to be a Jew meant to be marked for extermination, to the present, when some people are already denying the reality of the Holocaust and when Israel inspires both ultimate fear and ultimate hope.

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  All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

  Elie Wiesel

  Wiesel recounts his life's story, from his childhood in the Carpathian mountains, to his imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, to his career as a journalist, and winning the Nobel Peace prize.

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  A Mad Desire to Dance: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Doriel, a European expatriate living in New York, suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die in an accident, together with his father, soon after. Doriel was a child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books—but it is enough. Doriel’s parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him filled with longing but unable to experience the most basic joys in life. He plunges into an intense study of Judaism, but instead of finding solace, he comes to believe that he is possessed by a dybbuk.
  
  Surrounded by ghosts, spurred on by demons, Doriel finally turns to Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, a psychoanalyst who finds herself particularly intrigued by her patient. The two enter into an uneasy relationship based on exchange: of dreams, histories, and secrets. Despite Doriel’s initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps to bring him to a crossroads—and to a shocking denouement.

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  And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-

  Elie Wiesel

  As this concluding volume of his moving and revealing memoirs begins, Elie Wiesel is forty years old, a writer of international repute. Determined to speak out more actively for both Holocaust survivors and the disenfranchised everywhere, he sets himself a challenge: "I will become militant. I will teach, share, bear witness. I will reveal and try to mitigate the victims' solitude." He makes words his weapon, and in these pages we relive with him his unstinting battles. We see him meet with world leaders and travel to regions ruled by war, dictatorship, racism, and exclusion in order to engage the most pressing issues of the day. We see him in the Soviet Union defending persecuted Jews and dissidents; in South Africa battling apartheid and supporting Mandela's ascension; in Cambodia and in Bosnia, calling on the world to face the atrocities; in refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia as an emissary for President Clinton. He chastises Ronald Reagan for his visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg. He supports Lech Walesa but challenges some of his views. He confronts Francois Mitterrand over the misrepresentation of his activities in Vichy France. He does battle with Holocaust deniers. He joins tens of thousands of young Austrians demonstrating against renascent fascism in their country. He receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Through it all, Wiesel remains deeply involved with his beloved Israel, its leaders and its people, and laments its internal conflicts. He recounts the behind-the-scenes events that led to the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He shares the feelings evoked by his return to Auschwitz, by his recollections of Yitzhak Rabin, and by his memories of his own vanished family.

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  Dawn

  Elie Wiesel

  Deals with the conflicts and thoughts of a young Jewish concentration-camp veteran as he prepares to assassinate a British hostage in occupied Palestine.

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  Day: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  In its opening paragraphs, a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi. Consequently, most of Wiesel's masterful portrayal of one man's exploration of the historical tragedy that befell him, his family, and his people transpires in the thoughts, daydreams, and memories of the novel's narrator. Torn between choosing life or death, Day again and again returns to the guiding questions that inform Wiesel's trilogy: the meaning and worth of surviving the annihilation of a race, the effects of the Holocaust upon the modern character of the Jewish people, and the loss of one's religious faith in the face of mass murder and human extermination.

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  Five Biblical Portraits: Saul, Jonah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Joshua

  Elie Wiesel

  Illuminates the stories of five major figures in Jewish history, giving us their humanity in mysterious and fascinating complexity.

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  Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle Against Melancholy

  Elie Wiesel

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  From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences

  Elie Wiesel

  Elie Wiesel weaves together memories of his life before the Holocaust and his great struggle to find meaning afterwards.

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  Hostage: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  It's 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg, a professional storyteller and writer, has been taken hostage. He has been abducted from his home in Brooklyn, New York, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don't explain why Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling stories to himself and to the men who hold his fate in their hands. A Communist brother and a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis in a cellar, the kindness of liberating Russian soldiers, the unrest of the 1960s are some of the memories that unfold during his captivity, as the outside world breathlessly follows his disappearance and the police move toward a final confrontation with his captors. The author builds the world of Shaltiel's memories, haunted by the Holocaust and a Europe in the midst of radical change. This story is both a thriller and a meditation on the power of memory to connect us to the past and our shared need for resolution.

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  King Solomon and His Magic Ring

  Elie Wiesel

  Recounts some of the stories of the wisdom and folly in the life of the legendary King Solomon.

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  Legends of Our Time

  Elie Wiesel

  A collection of tales immortalizing the heroic deeds and visions of people Wiesel knew during and after World War II.

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  Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends

  Elie Wiesel

  Discusses the Biblical stories of Adam, Job, Jacob, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Joseph, and Moses.

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  Night

  Elie Wiesel

  Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. This book is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man.

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  One Generation After

  Elie Wiesel

  Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch—a bar mitzvah gift—he had buried in his backyard before they left.

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  Open Heart

  Elie Wiesel

  Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage and children and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and the survivors? His ongoing questioning of God—where has it led? Is there hope for mankind? The world’s tireless ambassador of tolerance and justice has given us this luminous account of hope and despair, an exploration of the love, regrets and abiding faith of a remarkable man.

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  Passover Haggadah

  Elie Wiesel

  With this Passover Haggadah, Elie Wiesel and his friend Mark Podwal invite you to join them for the Passover Seder - the most festive event of the Jewish calendar. Read each year at the Seder table, the Haggadah recounts the miraculous tale of the liberation of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, with a celebration of prayer, ritual, and song. Wiesel and Podwal guide you through the Haggadah and share their understanding and faith in a special illustrated edition that will be treasured for years to come. Accompanying the traditional Haggadah text (which appears here in an accessible new translation) are Elie Wiesel's poetic interpretations, reminiscences, and instructive retelling of ancient legends. The Nobel laureate interweaves past and present as the symbolism of the Seder is explored. Wiesel's commentaries may be read aloud in their entirety or selected passages may be read each year to illuminate the timeless message of this beloved book of redemption.

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  Rashi (Jewish Encounters)

  Elie Wiesel

  Wiesel brilliantly evokes the world of medieval European Jewry, a world of profound scholars and closed communities ravaged by outbursts of anti-Semitism and decimated by the Crusades. The incomparable scholar Rashi, whose phrase-by-phrase explication of the oral law has been included in every printing of the Talmud since the fifteenth century, was also a spiritual and religious leader: His perspective, encompassing both the mundane and the profound, is timeless.
  
  Wiesel’s Rashi is a heartbroken witness to the suffering of his people, and through his responses to major religious questions of the day we see still another side of this greatest of all interpreters of the sacred writings.

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  Sages and Dreamers: Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Portraits and Legends

  Elie Wiesel

  Reflections by the Nobel-winning philosopher and novelist on the prophets, scribes, and rebbes who comprise the histories and myths of Jewish folklore. Most of these essays were originally given as lectures at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and even in written form they preserve the tone and tempo of extemporary speech. The style is anecdotal rather than scholarly, and Wiesel does not hesitate to bring his opinions to bear (such as on the story of Jephthah, for instance, of which he declares, ``This story is...so frightening that I wish it could be erased from Scripture'').

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  Somewhere a Master: Hasidic Portraits and Legends

  Elie Wiesel

  The compassion of Reb Moshe-Leib, the vision of the Seer of Lublin, the wisdom of Reb Pinhas, the warmth of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the humor of Reb Naphtali–to their followers these sages appeared as kings, judges, and prophets. They communicated joy and wonder and fervor to the men and women who came to them in the depths of despair. They brought love and compassion to the persecuted Jews of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. For Jews who felt abandoned and forsaken by God, these Hasidic masters incarnated an irresistible call to help and salvation. The Rebbe combats sorrow with exuberance. He defeats resignation by exalting belief. He creates happiness so as not to yield to the sadness around him. He tells stories to escape the temptations of irreducible silence.
  
  It is Elie Wiesel’s unique gift to make the lives and tales of these great teachers as compelling now as they were in a different time and place. In the tradition of Hasidism itself, he leaves others to struggle with questions of justice, mercy, and vengeance, providing us instead with eternal truths and unshakable faith.