The Emperor Of Shoes

“Evocative…The Emperor of Shoes underscores the extent to which the promise of economic opportunity still moves people across great distances on our planet…Wise [has] written a novel of our times…”—New York Times Book Review *A Library Journal Best Debut of Summer 2018* From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a transfixing story about an expatriate in southern China and his burgeoning relationship with a seamstress intent on inspiring dramatic political change Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line. When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite? Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution, set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.

There was once a poor little girl called Karen. In summer, she walked barefoot and in winter, she wore clogs that hurt her feet. She had no choice, it was all she had. Dame Shoemaker wanted to help her and sewed, as best she could, a pair of red shoes. When she wore them for the first time, Karen’s life took an unexpected turn. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish author, poet and artist. Celebrated for children’s literature, his most cherished fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Match Girl". His books have been translated into every living language, and today there is no child or adult that has not met Andersen's whimsical characters. His fairy tales have been adapted to stage and screen countless times, most notably by Disney with the animated films "The Little Mermaid" in 1989 and "Frozen", which is loosely based on "The Snow Queen", in 2013. Thanks to Andersen's contribution to children's literature, his birth date, April 2, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: ?In this classic fairy tale, retold with a twist, the elves run a shoe store in Fairytale Land. But no one wants their old-fashioned shoes. Then one day they wake up to find their shop full of trendy shoes! Where did they come from?

The most comprehensive and detailed history of shoes ever published, with more than 2000 specially drawn illustrations. John Peacock charts the development of every kind and style of footwear from earliest times to the present day, for both men and women. His drawings reproduce in meticulous detail a host of representative examples from every era: the simple sandals of Ancient Egypt, made from natural fibers; exquisite Greek footwear of the "Golden Age," including boots made from rawhide with leather linings and leg bindings; richly embroidered and bejeweled shoes of the Byzantine empire; the fantastic pike-toed boots newly fashionable in the fourteenth century; the hugely exaggerated platform heels of the sixteenth century; eighteenth-century women's slippers of the finest silk; and a huge range of contemporary shoes, from sneakers and stilettos to the latest footwear in radical materials and experimental styles. The pictures are arranged in six chronological sections and accompanied by full descriptions, including details of materials, heel and toe styles, decorations, and fastenings. An invaluable reference section includes a time chart summarizing the development of shoes throughout the centuries, a concise bibliography, and biographies and histories of the world's leading shoe designers and manufacturers, including Manolo Blahnik, Salvatore Ferragamo, Charles Jourdan, Roger Vivier, and Vivienne Westwood. This encyclopedic survey, with its colorful and detailed illustrations, will become the unrivaled reference work in its field, indispensable to any shoe enthusiast, designer, or collector.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.

After the funeral of his powerful father, Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League university, is left to unravel the meaning of a cryptic note and carry out the arrangements his father left behind.

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director, and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto's very existence. From one of Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter of a million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it - and himself - indispensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience, and questions the nature of evil. He asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

What shoes were the height of fashion in Paris at the turn of the century? What did Tutankhamen's burial sandals look like? The answers lie in this illustrated compendium covering centuries of footwear, from Egyptian sandals, to Chinese silk wedges used for binding feet, to American saddle oxfords. The definitive work on the subject. "A shoe lover's feast." — Cleveland Plain Dealer.