Books published by publisher Ivan R. Dee

It's been more than thirty years since the appearance of a collection from America's laureate of light verse. Ogden Nash first gathered together an anthology of thirty years of his published works in 1959. In 1973 his daughters gathered more than four hundred of his poems and called it I Wouldn't Have Missed It, a quote from one of his verses. Now more poems have come to light, so his daughters have once again produced The Best of Ogden Nash, the definitive Nash anthology. The poems display the talent of the man whose verse entranced America from the time of the Great Depression until his death in 1971. The Best of Ogden Nash should delight old fans and introduce new readers to a unique talent.

Adam Czerniakow was a Polish Jew who killed himself on July 23, 1942—on the face of it not an uncommon occurrence in those times. But there is more to the story than the tragic death of one man among so many millions. Czerniakow was for almost three years the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat—a Jew, devoted to his people, who served as the Nazi-sponsored “mayor” of the Warsaw Ghetto. His personal dealings with the German authorities bring to this daily record of events a depth of knowledge, accuracy of detail, and panorama of view that was possible to no other participant in the epic prelude to the final doom of the largest captive Jewish community in Eastern Europe. This secret journal is not only the testimony of an unbearable personal burden but the documentary of the Ghetto’s terminal agony. It is the most important diary to emerge from the Holocaust.

One of the most widely read poems of our time, John Brown's Body is Stephen Vincent Benét's masterful retelling of the Civil War. A book of great energy and sweep, it swings into view the entire course of that terrible and decisive war, lighting up the lives of soldiers, leaders, and civilians, North and South, amidst the conflict. Generations of readers have found the book a compelling and moving experience. "Magnificently readable."―New Statesman. "It is not one of your tours de forces of intellect and technique, to be admired and then tucked away on the library shelf. It is a library of storytelling itself, a poem extraordinarily rich in action as well as actors, vivid, varied, and so expressive of many men and moods that prose could never have carried its electric burden."―Saturday Review. "A remarkable piece of imaginative reporting; and one in which not only the forces which make history are embodied in the speech and action of very diverse men and women but the ideas also of which these forces were the driving power."―London Times Literary Supplement.

It's been more than thirty years since the appearance of a collection from America's laureate of light verse. Ogden Nash first gathered together an anthology of thirty years of his published works in 1959. In 1973 his daughters gathered more than four hundred of his poems and called it I Wouldn't Have Missed It, a quote from one of his verses. Now more poems have come to light, so his daughters have once again produced The Best of Ogden Nash, the definitive Nash anthology. The poems display the talent of the man whose verse entranced America from the time of the Great Depression until his death in 1971. The Best of Ogden Nash should delight old fans and introduce new readers to a unique talent.

"The best book about a single baseball team in a single year I have ever read."―Donald Honig. Here is the story of perhaps the greatest team in baseball history and of one of the game's most remarkable seasons. With Babe Ruth having retired but Lou Gehrig still in his prime, the Yankees in 1939 won their fourth consecutive World Series―and forever established the Yankee legend. The dramatic story of the 1939 season is one of turning points: Gehrig takes himself out of the lineup and is soon found to be terribly ill; Joe DiMaggio, the rising star and replacement for Ruth, has perhaps his greatest year; baseball opens its Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York; the first major league baseball game is televised, and Yankee games are broadcast over the radio for the first time; night baseball comes to the American League. Richard Tofel has written an original work of history, based on considerable research. His compelling narrative includes a good many usually overlooked findings―for example, that players in 1939 were actually very well paid; that Manager Joe McCarthy pressed Gehrig to end his consecutive game streak as his health deteriorated; that baseball segregation in 1939 was not so much a Jim Crow system but simply out of mind in an atmosphere of casual bigotry; that McCarthy was perhaps the greatest manager in baseball history, and why. But the strength of Mr. Tofel's book lies in his serious treatment of the sport in its social and historical context. Baseball fans will find A Legend in the Making one of the finest baseball books of our time. With 12 black-and-white photographs.

In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished. Faced with a shortage of manpower in armaments factories, the Third Reich sent concentration camp prisoners to work as slaves. While the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies continued at extermination camps, numerous outside "Kommandos" were set up in the vicinity of the large concentration camps. The Dora Camp, located in the center of Germany, was one of the most notorious. Originally a mere Kommando attached to Buchenwald, it became one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. There prisoners were put to work in a huge underground factory, building V-2 rockets, the secret weapon developed by German scientists in an attempt to reverse the course of the war, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. In this dispassionate but powerful account, André Sellier, himself a former prisoner at Dora, tells the dramatic story of the camp, the tunnel factory, and the underground work sites. He has utilized all available documents as well as unpublished testimony from several dozen fellow prisoners. He recounts the horrors of everyday life at Dora—prisoners dying by the hundreds and indescribable suffering—and the murderous "evacuation" of the camp by railroad convoys and death marches, which took place in early 1945 and led to the death of thousands of prisoners. Illustrated with 20 pages of photographs and drawings, and 24 maps.

In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished. Faced with a shortage of manpower in armaments factories, the Third Reich sent concentration camp prisoners to work as slaves. While the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies continued at extermination camps, numerous outside "Kommandos" were set up in the vicinity of the large concentration camps. The Dora Camp, located in the center of Germany, was one of the most notorious. Originally a mere Kommando attached to Buchenwald, it became one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. There prisoners were put to work in a huge underground factory, building V-2 rockets, the secret weapon developed by German scientists in an attempt to reverse the course of the war, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. In this dispassionate but powerful account, André Sellier, himself a former prisoner at Dora, tells the dramatic story of the camp, the tunnel factory, and the underground work sites. He has utilized all available documents as well as unpublished testimony from several dozen fellow prisoners. He recounts the horrors of everyday life at Dora—prisoners dying by the hundreds and indescribable suffering—and the murderous "evacuation" of the camp by railroad convoys and death marches, which took place in early 1945 and led to the death of thousands of prisoners. Illustrated with 20 pages of photographs and drawings, and 24 maps.

The story of perhaps the greatest team in baseball history, narrated against a background of one of the game's most remarkable seasons—an original work of history based on considerable research. Mr. Tofel presents a good many usually overlooked findings and sets the sport in its social and historical context. The best book about a single baseball team in a single year I have ever read. —Donald Honig

The Cold War came to broadcasting in 1950. In that year, just as the Korean War was about to erupt, there appeared from a small publisher a booklet called Red Channels, which listed 151 suspected Communist sympathizers in broadcasting. Within months the blacklist in radio and TV began. The purge of the airwaves, distinct from the better-known blacklist in the movie industry, provoked one of the American media's great free-speech controversies. It affected scores of writers, directors, and actors, yet it was instigated by only a handful of anti-Red watchdogs—three ex-FBI agents, a former naval intelligence officer, and a grocer from Syracuse. A Shadow of Red follows the efforts of these five guardians of the broadcast media in a revealing history of the period, based on interviews, personal correspondence, FBI reports, and court transcripts. The conflict has routinely been portrayed as a simplistic morality tale of persecutors and the persecuted, the standard witch-hunt narrative of right-wing fanatics hounding political innocents whom they insisted were agents of the Communist devil. But, as David Everitt makes clear, the blacklisters, though excessive and destructive, were not deluded hunters of an imaginary menace. Their crusade is best understood as the culmination of a long-standing ideological struggle in broadcasting, in which neither side would indulge its adversaries. Ultimately the conflict would be decided in a historic and dramatic libel trial that brought all the issues, and all the old grievances, into the open. A Shadow of Red is brilliant history, a cautionary tale about civil liberties in a time of emergency, and a vivid example of the polarized political battle over who controls the media, a battle that continues to this day.

Lunch at the 5 & 10 is the story of the Greensboro sit-ins―how four African-American college students sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in North Carolina and ignited the civil rights movement in America. The year was 1960, but the racial sensibilities of Americans were light years removed from what they are today. Mr. Wolff's even-handed account of this pivotal event in our race relations has been widely praised since it was first published in 1970. In this new edition, the author adds a new conclusion, written after the 30th anniversary commemoration of the event where the Greensboro Four met once again. August Meier's introduction places the Greensboro sit-in in historical context and explains its importance in the course of the civil rights movement. "A remarkable account...reads like a novel. Wolff has recaptured these days with a sense of their drama, with deft characterizations of the principals, and with a sure feeling for the mood....An extraordinary accomplishment."―Book World.

One of the most accomplished novelists and screenwriters of our time (What Makes Sammy Run?, On the Waterfront), Budd Schulberg is a master of the art of the short story, as he proved in his early collection Some Faces in the Crowd. The crowd is the American landscape: indelible characters drawn coast-to-coast from the teeming streets of New York to tables at Hollywood's legendary nightclub, Ciro's. In these sparkling stories, Schulberg brings us vivid, restless people haunted by abrupt failure in the wake of rapid success. In "The Arkansas Traveler" he gives us Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes's down-home stories of Riddle, Arkansas, which later became the stuff of the celebrated movie A Face in the Crowd. "Schulberg's characters have to take the responsibility for what they do. They have to pay moral costs and face defeats."―New York Times. "Packed with verisimilitude.