The experiences of a young Jewish girl in occupied Poland and Nazi concentration camps. When Gerda's father told her to wear her ski boots to the work camp in June, he could hardly know that they would help in her desperate fight for survival. Three years later, one of the two hundred slave girls remaining from the four thousand who were forced on a thousand-mile winter march, she took them off her frozen feet and extracted the family photographs...

"More than 300 million men, women, and children are being forces to work in conditions of virtual enslavement ... This program goes around the world to document the stories of disposable people ..."--Container.

Luka, a Ukrainian boy working in a slave labor camp, plays dead after an explosion at the factory and escapes, eventually joining a resistance group that opposes both the Nazis and the Soviets, and through the danger of the guerilla fighting he has two overriding goals--find out if his parents are still alive, and reunite with Lida, a girl who was a friend in the labor camp.

In the title novella, the rivalry between two brothers in love with the same Jewish girl moves from 1946 Moscow to a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the House of Meetings will have a haunting influence on three characters.

Drawing on eleven years of research in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, Kara delves into an ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery that ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world and generates profits that exceeded $17.6 billion in 2011. In addition to providing a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, Kara travels to the far reaches of South Asia, from cyclone-wracked southwestern Bangladesh to...

"American lucifers tracks how struggles to produce light transformed American history, beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s and culminating in the emergence, around the Civil War, of the petroleum industry and its primary product, kerosene. Between this shift from oil harvested from whales to oil extracted from rocks, American light was substantially derived from a substance called camphene, a highly explosive liquid...

"BLOOD AND EARTH is a gripping account of the deadly link between slavery and environmental destruction. Kevin Bales is a social scientist, human rights activist, and journalist -- and he's also one of the world's leading experts on modern slavery. In his work he began to notice the connection between environmental decline and slavery: the two almost always went hand-in-hand, whether in the hellish gold mines of Ghana or the miraculously beautiful...

One of Stalin's most heinous acts was the ruthless repression of millions of peasants in the early 1930s, an act that established the very foundations of the gulag. Solzhenitsyn barely touched upon this brutal episode in his magisterial Gulag Archipelago and subsequent writers passed over the subject in silence. Now, with the opening of Soviet archives, an entirely new dimension of Stalin's brutality has been uncovered. The Unknown Gulag is the first...