Margalit Fox

"Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison 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 camp, and one day, a Turkish officer approaches Jones with a...

"In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum emigrated to New York from Germany and worked as a rag peddler on the streets of the Lower East Side. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a popular society hostess, and a philanthropist. What enabled a woman on the margins of nineteenth-century American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth? In the intervening years, Mrs. Mandelbaum had become the country's most notorious "fence"-a receiver...