By Any Name

From the award-winning author of Homecoming and Dicey's Song comes a heartfelt adult novel perfect for readers of Judy Blume. Rida is an orphan out of California who dances for the troops in the USO. Spencer is a naval officer with roots deep in New England’s upper crust. They meet during World War II at an Officer’s Club dance, and Spencer might have been dissuaded if he saw just one engagement ring on her finger, but instead, he sees four. The courtship is easy, Rida wins him and wears his ring alone. But Rida is a wild card, and Spencer’s family can’t accept her unconventional approach to marriage, motherhood, and life. Even Rida’s four daughters struggle to understand her, but for them it becomes a quest—to untangle the mystery of their stubborn, off-beat, clear-sighted, loving, and above all mesmerizing mother. Award-winning author Cynthia Voigt has penned a novel for readers who grew up loving her Newbery Award-winning novels for children and young adults. By Any Name features an indelible woman who sees lines as meant to be crossed, changing the lives of all who come into contact with her indefatigable spirit.

"With ornate vintage art and photographs, A Rose by Any Name unearths the roots of rose lore-debunking myths and exposing long-standing rumors - and reveals how people, communities, and cultures across the globe and throughout the ages have identified the living things that matter to them most."--BOOK JACKET.

‘Fascinating...I’ll never look at a rose in quite the same way again.’ Adrian Tinniswood The rose is bursting with meaning. Over the centuries it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death and the mystical unknown. Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life’s seminal moments. Grown in the Middle East two thousand years ago for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, it has become one of the most adored flowers across cultures, no longer selected by nature, but by us. The rose is well-versed at enchanting human hearts. From Shakespeare’s sonnets to Bulgaria’s Rose Valley to the thriving rose trade in Africa and the Far East, via museums, high fashion, Victorian England and Belle Epoque France, we meet an astonishing array of species and hybrids of remarkably different provenance. This is the story of a hardy, thorny flower and how, by beauty and charm, it came to seduce the world.

For each name Osborn provides a history, number, astrological sign, color, stone, element, and herb.

Found bloodstained, naked, and running barefoot down a motorway, a man suffering from trauma-induced amnesia is admitted to a local psychiatric ward from which he escapes, abducting Dr. Elizabeth Santer and entangling her in a deadly game of high-level government intrigue, treachery, and cover-up.

Winner, 2019 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society A groundbreaking history of the practice of Jewish name changing in the 20th century, showcasing just how much is in a name Our thinking about Jewish name changing tends to focus on clichés: ambitious movie stars who adopted glamorous new names or insensitive Ellis Island officials who changed immigrants’ names for them. But as Kirsten Fermaglich elegantly reveals, the real story is much more profound. Scratching below the surface, Fermaglich examines previously unexplored name change petitions to upend the clichés, revealing that in twentieth-century New York City, Jewish name changing was actually a broad-based and voluntary behavior: thousands of ordinary Jewish men, women, and children legally changed their names in order to respond to an upsurge of antisemitism. Rather than trying to escape their heritage or “pass” as non-Jewish, most name-changers remained active members of the Jewish community. While name changing allowed Jewish families to avoid antisemitism and achieve white middle-class status, the practice also created pain within families and became a stigmatized, forgotten aspect of American Jewish culture. This first history of name changing in the United States offers a previously unexplored window into American Jewish life throughout the twentieth century. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name demonstrates how historical debates about immigration, antisemitism and race, class mobility, gender and family, the boundaries of the Jewish community, and the power of government are reshaped when name changing becomes part of the conversation. Mining court documents, oral histories, archival records, and contemporary literature, Fermaglich argues convincingly that name changing had a lasting impact on American Jewish culture. Ordinary Jews were forced to consider changing their names as they saw their friends, family, classmates, co-workers, and neighbors do so. Jewish communal leaders and civil rights activists needed to consider name changers as part of the Jewish community, making name changing a pivotal part of early civil rights legislation. And Jewish artists created critical portraits of name changers that lasted for decades in American Jewish culture. This book ends with the disturbing realization that the prosperity Jews found by changing their names is not as accessible for the Chinese, Latino, and Muslim immigrants who wish to exercise that right today.

I picked up the book and thumbed through the pages. Names in alphabetical order, names with meanings, names I knew, names I’d never heard of. How to pick? Nothing that would stand out, nothing that would link me to the past – those were the instructions. The past. As if everything that had gone before this moment was buried already. Being the new girl at school is hard. But when you’ve been forced to abandon your old life, your old friends and even your old identity, hard doesn’t begin to cover it. That’s the point of witness protection, though. And it’s the only thing that can keep Holly and her family safe. But how is she supposed to start a new life when one wrong move could put all their lives in danger?

This spellbinding and intimate novel explores the burden of legacy as a young woman wrestles with discoveries that contradict her great-uncle’s supposed heroism during World War II. D says that a name always fits in the end, that a name is like a leather shoe that forms itself to the foot. But in my mind, it’s the other way around: a person grows into his name. Marjolijn van Heemstra has heard about her great-uncle’s heroism for as long as she can remember. As a resistance fighter, he was the mastermind of a bombing operation that killed a Dutch man who collaborated with the Nazis, and later became a hero to everyone in the family. So, when Marjolijn’s grandmother bestows her with her great-uncle’s signet ring requesting that she name her future son after him, Marjolijn can’t say no. Now pregnant with her firstborn, she embarks on a quest to uncover the true story behind the myth of her late relative. Chasing leads from friends and family, and doing her own local research, Marolijn realizes that the audacious story she always heard is not as clear-cut as it was made out to be. As her belly grows, her doubts grow, too—was her uncle a hero or a criminal? Vivid, hypnotic, and profoundly moving, In Search of a Name explores war and its aftermath and how the stories we tell and the stories we are told always seem to exist somewhere between truth and fiction.