On a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, an 18-year-old German Jewish girl was pried from the arms of the Catholic Frenchman she loved and promised to marry.  As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read through her tears

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The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague. Barbara Tuchman reveals the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as she examines everything from political assassinations, sea battles, corruption, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, to lawyers,...

"Born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867, Marie Curie was forbidden to attend the male-only University of Warsaw, so she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study physics and mathematics. There she met a professor named Pierre Curie, and the two soon married, forming one of the most famous scientific partnerships in history. Together they discovered two elements and won a Nobel Prize in 1903. (Marie later won another Nobel for chemistry in 1911.)...

Russell Freedman's thrilling account of a daring young French nobleman who helped bring victory at Yorktown and who became a lifelong friend of President Washington will fascinate young historians. When the Marquis de Lafayette ran off to join the American Revolution against the explicit orders of the king of France, he was a strong-willed nineteen-year-old who had never set foot on a battlefield. Although the U.S. Congress granted him an honorary...