Kirjahaku

Scholars usually date Yiddish from the 11th century, when modern linguists believed the language began as a German dialect spoken by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from France and Northern Italy living along the Rhine. Over time, it became an actual language incorporating elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, and the Slavic and Romance languages. As the story proceeds through the centuries, Karlen highlights the intertwining fates of Judaism and Yiddish. The language would reach literary heights in the 19th century and 20th centuries.Yet in the middle of the 20th century, while the language and culture was at its zenith, Yiddish faced two of its gravest enemies - the genocidal Nazis and the early, proud Zionists who founded Israel in the wake of the Holocaust and decided that with a new Jewish homeland, there would also have to new kind of Jew, speaking a different kind of language. It wasn't until roughly a decade ago that a new generation has begun to work zealously to recapture Yiddish before it disappears.

A treasury of family secrets exposes the seamy underbelly of Minneapolis--gangsters, gambling, brothels, and the social life of organized crime.

The Casey Award-winning account of life in the minor leagues, celebrating the game, the characters who love it, and the magic that can happen when a town, a team, and a ball player get a second chance.

A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock's greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote "3 Chains o' Gold," Prince's "rock video opera," as well as the star's last testament, which may be buried with Prince's will underneath Prince's vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fianc e Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was "the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like." Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar's life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis's mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen's grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can't be understood without first understanding '70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince's best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of "mamma jammas."