Plunkett Press: 164 books

In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust by Hillel Levine (130,000 words, 19 illustrations) Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania, honored in 1984 by Yad Vashem as a “Righteous Among the Nations,”...

Born in 1920 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Junius Scales, whose great-uncle had been governor of the state, grew up in the privileged environment of his family’s estate. The only black people he knew were the servants. Wanting to improve the lot of workers, mainly African-American, he joined the...

The Ailing Empire: Germany from Bismarck to Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Jean Steinberg; 57,000 words) Using his skills as a journalist, historian, and memoirist, Sebastian Haffner (author of The Meaning of Hitler) traces the development of the German Empire (1871-1945)...

Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (Book Two) by Chaim Weizmann Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal account of his life in the Zionist movement. Book One, completed in 1941, covers the years 1874-1917 and Book Two covers the years 1918-1948. Weizmann...

In his memoirs, John Kenneth Galbraith recalls amusingly, even brilliantly, the important and low moments in his life, the men and women he met who were great, only interesting, entertaining or even absurd. Galbraith studied agriculture in his native Canada and agricultural economics at UC-Berkeley....

Shmuel Katz’s detailed and comprehensive biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) is an unabashedly partisan defense of one of the most complex Zionists of the early 20th century. Jabotinsky was a Russian poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist as well as the founder of Revisionist Zionism...

Vera Chatzman was born on November 27, 1881, in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. She was a medical student soon to become a pediatrician when, in 1906, she married Chaim Weizmann, a chemist already involved in the Zionist movement. For the next 46 years of their marriage, Vera was his companion,...

This biography of Lise Meitner (1878-1968), the Austrian Jewish female physicist at the heart of the discovery of nuclear fission, also looks at major developments in physics during her life. Meitner was a colleague and friend of many giants of 20th century physics: Max Planck, her Berlin mentor,...

“There can be no question that [*Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life*] is a triumph of research and organization, clear, precise and comprehensive. Mr. Mason has quoted copiously from Brandeis’ speeches, letters and judicial opinions. He has delved deeply into corporation finances and legal technicalities....

Born into a wealthy, secular New York Jewish family, a student of the Ethical Culture School in New York, later educated in theoretical physics at Harvard, Cambridge (UK) and Göttingen (Germany), appointed professor at UC-Berkeley and Caltech, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was on the forefront...

In this biography of Enrico Fermi (1901-54), who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938 for his work on radioactivity by neutron bombardment and his discovery of transuranic elements and who achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago in 1942, his student, collaborator, fellow...

Born in Italy to a well-to-do Jewish family, Emilio Segrè (1905-1989) became Enrico Fermi’s first graduate student in 1928, contributed to the discovery of slow neutrons and was appointed director of the University of Palermo’s physics laboratory in 1936. While visiting the Radiation Laboratory...

Near the end of World War II, as Allied armies swept across battle-torn Germany and leading scientists at Los Alamos were racing to assemble the atomic bombs America would drop over Japan later that summer, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, established Alsos, a unit...

James Chadwick (1891-1974) came from a humble background: his father was a cotton spinner. He was accepted in the physics department of Sir Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University in 1908 on a scholarship, and soon started publishing new findings about radioactivity. This led to a traveling scholarship...