Margalit Fox's Books

The Confidence Men

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

By: Margalit Fox

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The Confidence Men

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

By: Margalit Fox

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time. FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom. A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.

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353

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Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

1984853856

ISBN 13

9781984853851

The Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

By: Margalit Fox

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The Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

By: Margalit Fox

The discovery and deciphering of Europe’s earliest known written language is recounted with “almost nail-biting suspense” in this prize-winning account (Booklist, starred review). In 1900, famed archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered the ruins of Knossos, a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece’s Classical Age. The massive discovery included a cache of ancient tablets, Europe’s earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain an enigma. Award–winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox follows this intellectual mystery from the Bronze Age Aegean to a legendary archeological dig at the turn of the twentieth century, and on to the brilliant decipherers who finally cracked the code in the 1950s. These include Michael Ventris, the amateur linguist who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of his findings; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code. Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

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248

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062228889

ISBN 13

9780062228888

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

By: Margalit Fox

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The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

By: Margalit Fox

America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum. “A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country. But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.

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337

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Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593243854

ISBN 13

9780593243855

The Confidence Men

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

By: Margalit Fox

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The Confidence Men

How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

By: Margalit Fox

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353

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Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

1984853856

ISBN 13

9781984853851

Conan Doyle for the Defense

How Sherlock Holmes's Creator Turned Real-Life Detective and Freed a Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Murder

By: Margalit Fox

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Conan Doyle for the Defense

How Sherlock Holmes's Creator Turned Real-Life Detective and Freed a Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Murder

By: Margalit Fox

“A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man behind Sherlock Holmes . . . Like all the best historical true crime books, it’s about so much more than crime.”—Tana French, author of In the Woods A sensational Edwardian murder. A scandalous wrongful conviction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the rescue—a true story. After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater’s freedom. With “an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research” (The Wall Street Journal), Margalit Fox immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in its history, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method. Praise for Conan Doyle for the Defense “Artful and compelling . . . [Fox’s] narrative momentum never flags. . . . Conan Doyle for the Defense will captivate almost any reader while being pure catnip for the devotee of true-crime writing.”—The Washington Post “Developed with brio . . . [Fox] is excellent in linking the 19th-century creation of policing and detection with the development of both detective fiction and the science of forensics—ballistics, fingerprints, toxicology and serology—as well as the quasi science of ‘criminal anthropology.’”—The New York Times Book Review “[Fox] has an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping . . . The book works on two levels, much like a good Holmes case. First, it is a fluid story of a crime. . . . Second, and more pertinently, it is a deeper story of how prejudice against a class of people, the covering up of sloppy police work and a poisonous political atmosphere can doom an innocent. We should all heed Holmes’s salutary lesson: rationally follow the facts to find the truth.”—Time

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386

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0399589473

ISBN 13

9780399589478

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

By: Margalit Fox

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The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

By: Margalit Fox

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337

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Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593243854

ISBN 13

9780593243855

Talking Hands

What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind

By: Margalit Fox

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Talking Hands

What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind

By: Margalit Fox

Documents life in a remote Bedouin village in Israel whose residents communicate through a unique method of sign language used by both hearing and non-hearing citizens, in an account that offers insight into the relationship between language and the human mind. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

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Page Count

371

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0743247132

ISBN 13

9780743247139

Energy, Cities and Sustainability

An historical approach

By: Harry Margalit

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Energy, Cities and Sustainability

An historical approach

By: Harry Margalit

According to some estimates, humanity has now passed the point at which city dwellers outnumber country dwellers. This simple fact encapsulates a multitude of historical trends and contentions, not the least being "is this sustainable"? Energy, Cities and Sustainability aims to illuminate this question by tracing the evolution of the modern city, the energy sources that power it and the motivations behind increasing urbanisation. The book examines changing energy use across history, analysing the origins and significance of the Industrial Revolution to reveal how the modern city came into being. Transport, population size, housing, electricity use and growing consumption are each discussed, showing how the cultural aspects of energy use have influenced urban form in the developed world and developing countries. Finally, in contemplating the future, it is considered whether this model of modern urban life is sustainable. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, academics and policy-makers in the areas of planning, energy policy and environment and sustainability.

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204

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317528158

ISBN 13

9781317528159

Lonely Children and Adolescents

Self-Perceptions, Social Exclusion, and Hope

By: Malka Margalit

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Lonely Children and Adolescents

Self-Perceptions, Social Exclusion, and Hope

By: Malka Margalit

From texting and social networking sites to after-school activities, young people have many opportunities to interact with one another, and yet loneliness and isolation trouble today’s youth in increasing numbers. Many children and teens report feeling lonely even in the midst of family and friends, and childhood loneliness is a prime risk factor for adult alienation. Lonely Children and Adolescents: Self-Perceptions, Social Exclusion, and Hope illuminates seldom-explored experiences of social isolation among young people as well as the frustrations of the parents and teachers who wish to help. This groundbreaking book conceptualizes loneliness not simply as the absence of social connections, but as a continuum of developmental experience, often growing out of the conflict between opposite needs: to be like one’s peers yet be one’s unique self. The author draws clear distinctions between loneliness and solitude and identifies genetic and environmental characteristics (i.e., social, psychological, familial, and educational) that can be reinforced to help children become more resilient and less isolated. In addition, therapeutic approaches are described that challenge loneliness by encouraging empowerment, resilience, and hope, from proven strategies to promising tech-based interventions. Highlights include: • Developmental perspectives on loneliness. • Schools and the role of teachers, from preschool to high school. • Peer relations (e.g., cliques, bullies, exclusion, and popularity). • Lonely children, lonely parents: models of coping. • Loneliness in the virtual world. • Prevention and intervention strategies at home, at school, in therapy. Asking its readers to rethink many of their assumptions about social competence and isolation, this volume is essential reading for researchers and professionals in clinical child, school, developmental, and educational psychology; allied education disciplines; social work; and social and personality psychology.

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309

Publisher

Springer Science & Business Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441962840

ISBN 13

9781441962843

Normal Rationality

Decisions and Social Order

By: Edna Ullmann-Margalit

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Normal Rationality

Decisions and Social Order

By: Edna Ullmann-Margalit

Normal Rationality is a selection of the most important work of Edna Ullmann-Margalit, presenting some influential and widely admired essays alongside some that are not well known. She was an unorthodox and deeply original philosopher whose work illuminated the largest mysteries of human life. Much of her writing focuses on two fundamental questions. (1) How do people proceed when they cannot act on the basis of reasons, or project likely consequences? (2) How is social order possible? Ullmann-Margalit's answers, emphasizing what might be called biased rationality, are important not only for philosophy, but also for political science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, economics (including behavioral economics), law, and even public policy. Ullmann-Margalit demonstrates that people have identifiable strategies for making difficult decisions, whether the question is small (what to buy at a supermarket) or big (whether to transform one's life in some large-scale way). She also shows that social dilemmas are solved by norms; that invisible-hand explanations take two identifiable (and dramatically different) forms; that trust can emerge in seemingly unpromising situations; and that considerateness is the foundation on which our relationships are organized in both the thin context of the public space and the intimate context of the family. One of the distinguishing features of Ullmann-Margalit's work is its close attention to the details of human experience, and its use of those details to offer fresh understandings of social phenomena. Her essays cast new light on a diverse assortment of problems in philosophy, social science, and individual lives.

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310

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198802439

ISBN 13

9780198802433

Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

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Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

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177

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101099410

ISBN 13

9781101099414

On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

By: Avishai Margalit

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On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

By: Avishai Margalit

A searching examination of the moral limits of political compromise When is political compromise acceptable--and when is it fundamentally rotten, something we should never accept, come what may? What if a rotten compromise is politically necessary? Compromise is a great political virtue, especially for the sake of peace. But, as Avishai Margalit argues, there are moral limits to acceptable compromise even for peace. But just what are those limits? At what point does peace secured with compromise become unjust? Focusing attention on vitally important questions that have received surprisingly little attention, Margalit argues that we should be concerned not only with what makes a just war, but also with what kind of compromise allows for a just peace. Examining a wide range of examples, including the Munich Agreement, the Yalta Conference, and Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, Margalit provides a searching examination of the nature of political compromise in its various forms. Combining philosophy, politics, and history, and written in a vivid and accessible style, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises is full of surprising new insights about war, peace, justice, and sectarianism.

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234

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691158126

ISBN 13

9780691158129

Concepts in Wine Chemistry

By: Yair Margalit, Ph.D.

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Concepts in Wine Chemistry

By: Yair Margalit, Ph.D.

More than 150 years after Louis Pasteur attributed fermentation to a living organism, the field of wine microbiology and chemistry is vibrant with discovery. The last decade alone has seen great strides in our understanding of the biochemistry involved in vinification. In this new edition of his classic text, Yair Margalit gives the complete and current picture of the basic and advanced science behind these processes, making the updated Concepts in Wine Chemistry the broadest and most meticulous book on the topic in print. Organized to track the sequence of the winemaking process, chapters cover must and wine composition, fermentation, phenolic compounds, wine oxidation, oak products, sulfur dioxide, cellar processes, and wine defects. Margalit ends with chapters detailing the regulations and legal requirements in the production of wine, and the history of wine chemistry and winemaking practices of old.

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504

Publisher

Board and Bench Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1935879529

ISBN 13

9781935879527

Loneliness Among Children With Special Needs

Theory, Research, Coping, and Intervention

By: Malka Margalit

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Loneliness Among Children With Special Needs

Theory, Research, Coping, and Intervention

By: Malka Margalit

Loneliness Among Children With Special Needs is a groundbreaking volume that examines this vitally important, but heretofore neglected topic. Based on the shared view, from both clinical experience and research, that children with disabilities experience more loneliness than nondisabled children. This book integrates the existing knowledge, research, and applications in order to provide a model for the examination and understanding of the loneliness experiences of children with learning disabilities, behavior disorders, mild mental retardation, and emotional difficulties. Divided into five sections, the first attempts to clarify the characteristics of the lonely child, followed by a section with chapters devoted to environments and interpersonal relations. The third section is concerned with the subtyping of loneliness and adjustment and the fourth section discusses the outcomes comes of loneliness through coping and interventions. The final section provides a summary of the research using the proposed loneliness model for children with disabilities. This volume is essential reading for all researchers, clinicians, educators and students who work with children with special needs and who, as stated in the Preface, "see the importance of companionship for promoting growth of children with special needs and the costs of loneliness for current life and future adjustment.

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Page Count

227

Publisher

Springer Science & Business Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1461226228

ISBN 13

9781461226222

A Primer on Mapping Class Groups

By: Benson Farb,Dan Margalit

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A Primer on Mapping Class Groups

By: Benson Farb,Dan Margalit

The study of the mapping class group Mod(S) is a classical topic that is experiencing a renaissance. It lies at the juncture of geometry, topology, and group theory. This book explains as many important theorems, examples, and techniques as possible, quickly and directly, while at the same time giving full details and keeping the text nearly self-contained. The book is suitable for graduate students. A Primer on Mapping Class Groups begins by explaining the main group-theoretical properties of Mod(S), from finite generation by Dehn twists and low-dimensional homology to the Dehn-Nielsen-Baer theorem. Along the way, central objects and tools are introduced, such as the Birman exact sequence, the complex of curves, the braid group, the symplectic representation, and the Torelli group. The book then introduces Teichmüller space and its geometry, and uses the action of Mod(S) on it to prove the Nielsen-Thurston classification of surface homeomorphisms. Topics include the topology of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, the connection with surface bundles, pseudo-Anosov theory, and Thurston's approach to the classification.

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Page Count

490

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691147949

ISBN 13

9780691147949

Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation

By: Margalit Fox

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Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation

By: Margalit Fox

The decoding of Linear B is one of the world's greatest stories: from the discovery of a cache of ancient tablets recording a lost prehistoric language to the dramatic solution of the riddle nearly seventy years later, it exerts a mesmerising pull on the imagination. But this captivating story is missing a crucial piece. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans, the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who produced a solution. But there was a third figure: Alice Kober, without whose painstaking work, recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets and magazines and stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft, Linear B might still remain a mystery. Drawing on Kober's own papers - only made available recently - Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma, and along the way reveals how you decipher a language when you know neither its grammar nor its alphabet as well as the stories behind other ancient languages, like the dancing-man Rongorongo of Easter Island.

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