Stolen Years

In 1984, Simranjit Singh Mann resigned from the Indian Police Service in protest of Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army operation ordered by Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, that cleared the Golden Temple complex of Sikh militants. Mann was subsequently charged, among other things, with conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. A passionate Sikh whose radical beliefs were honed by his family, Mann went underground and was apprehended while trying to flee the country. He spent five years in prison, after which all charges were dropped. Three decades after Blue Star, his daughter Pavit Kaur looks back on the years her father spent in prison. In this disarmingly honest and emotionally charged account, Pavit Kaur documents her father’s hellish journey through the Indian prison system. This is also a personal story and the story of a family during one of the most fraught times in India’s history.

Sara was only 11 when the Nazis invaded Poland. For the next six years, she fought to survive in the ghetto, at Auschwitz, and as a prisoner in a slave labor camp. Her true story of courage and hope in the face of horror is ultimately one of personal triumph.

An NPR education reporter shows how the pandemic disrupted children’s lives—and how our country has nearly always failed to put our children first The onset of COVID broke a 150-year social contract between America and its children. Tens of millions of students lost what little support they had from the government—not just school but food, heat, and physical and emotional safety. The cost was enormous. But this crisis began much earlier than 2020. In The Stolen Year, Anya Kamenetz exposes a long-running indifference to the plight of children and families in American life and calls for a reckoning. She follows families across the country as they live through the pandemic, facing loss and resilience: a boy with autism in San Francisco who gains a foster brother and a Hispanic family in Texas that loses a member to COVID, and finds solace when they need it most. Kamenetz also recounts the history that brought us to this point: how we thrust children and caregivers into poverty, how we over-police families of color, how we rely on mothers instead of infrastructure. And how our government, in failing to support our children through this tumultuous time, has stolen years of their lives.

This book is a true story and the contents are as related by John Wight himself. Much of the material was taken from the actual letters and tapes that he managed to get out of Madagascar during his seven years imprisonment.

The Stolen Years, first published in 1959, is the gripping story of Chicago gangster Roger Touhy, who, while an admitted beer-manufacturer during Prohibition, was wrongly convicted of a 1933 kidnapping and would serve more than 25 years in prison for this crime he did not commit. The Stolen Years paints a vivid portrait of life in the “roaring 20s” in the Chicago area, where Al Capone ruled the criminal organizations rampant during Prohibition. Included are 34 pages of photographs. Three weeks after Touhy’s release from prison in 1959, and which coincided with the publication of this book, Touhy was gunned down by five shotgun blasts. His mob-linked killers were never found. Included are 34 pages of photographs.

Spanning three generations and a century of love, loss and longing, The Stolen Years is a stunning tale of secrets and betrayals, of an empire forged from the seeds of revenge…and the legacy that withstood it all. On the battlefields of World War I, twin brothers Gavin and Angus MacLeod are torn apart in one horrific instant that changes their lives forever. Believing his brother dead, a shattered, tormented Angus returns home to Scotland and takes his place as heir to the family title and husband to his brother's fiancée. But Gavin has survived. Believing he was betrayed by his twin, he creates a new identity for himself in America. And as he helms an elite china empire through decades of war and turbulence, peace and prosperity, he nurses a bitter obsession for revenge. Fate and one remarkable woman will unite the brothers' lives in astonishing unforeseen ways. Yet the children of these men will bear the sins of their fathers. And as the twenty-first century dawns, the secrets that have shaped their destinies will finally be revealed.