Hitler remains a blot on Germany, nay the century's moral landscape - a scar embedded deep on a people. That man could do thus to man defied all sense of logic, reasoning, raising questions --has the human world really progressed? Hitler by Ian Kershaw is again one of those many attempts to study what made Hitler the man he was -but without trying to make it a psychobiography. In this first of a proposed two-volume work, the professor of history at the University of Sheffield in England, traces the life and times of the dictator from his birth to the order to German troops to remilitarise the Rhineland in 1936. It is a vast canvas as he delineates both that movement and that embrace, says B Ashu

The pursuit of truth, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, is "the quest for language that can match reality." He believes that the nature of that quest has never quite been fully understood; Truth aims to fill the void. He identifies four key methods of determining the truth--what we feel, what we are told, what we figure out, and what we observe--which are given poetic names such as "the hairy ball--teeth optional" and "the cage of wild birds." These four methods always exist together in every culture, although each one may be differently valued in different places at different times. Book description

Can one trace the semantics of the feminist movement through dance history? Yes, if one were to believe Sally Banes. Fairy godmothers, witches, tyrannical witches, avenging spirits - are all given a new hue through an analytical interpretation of the various women's images - both positive and negative - as they existed then and as it continues to do even today. We have come across these women in all the stories that have been enacted through ballet/dance on stage, but not often tried to look beyond the tale as reflective of the spirit of our times, writes B Ashu

Bobby Northington had nothing to lose but his chains. A $5.50-an-hour production worker at Hambleton-Hill Publishing in Nashville, Tenn., Northington had been on the job three days. Early in the afternoon of July 12, 1995, he rose from his seat, walked about ten feet to a colleague to give her a piece of chewing gum and immediately returned to his workstation. His supervisor then approached him with a chain and padlocked him to his desk. Amused, she laughed and said that she should now finally be able to get some production out of him. He was kept that way for 40 minutes, a fitting image of life on the job today. Excerpts

Jason Goodwin, a young English journalist, writes history as if it were today's breaking news, and with Lords of the Horizon, he delivers an anecdote-filled and breezy account of the long, troubled career of the Ottoman Empire. That empire endured for nearly 600 years and embraced not only a large territory--stretching, at one point, from the border of Iran to the gates of Vienna--but also hundreds of ethnic groups and three dozen nations, says Amazon.com