Thane Rosenbaum – författare

Many years have passed since Oliver Levin -- a bestselling mystery writer and a lifetime sufferer from blocked emotions -- has given any thought to his parents, Holocaust survivors who committed suicide. But now, after years of uninterrupted literary output, Oliver Levin finds himself blocked as a writer, too. Oliver''s fourteen-year-old daughter, Ariel, sets out to free her father from his demons by summoning the ghosts of his parents, but, along the way, the ghosts of Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, and Paul Celan, among others, also materialize in this novel of moral philosophy and unforgettable enchantment.

We are obsessed with watching television shows and feature films about lawyers, reading legal thrillers, and following real-life trials. Yet, at the same time, most of us don''t trust lawyers and hold them and the legal system in very low esteem.In The Myth of Moral Justice, law professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum suggests that this paradox stems from the fact that citizens and the courts are at odds when it comes to their definitions of justice. With a lawyer''s expertise and a novelist''s sensability, Rosenbaum tackles complicated philosophical questions about our longing for moral justice. He also takes a critical look at what our legal system does to the spirits of those who must come before the law, along with those who practice within it.

We call it justice - the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of the government from a victim's individual desire for retribution? Are vengeance and justice really so very different? No, answers legal scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum in Payback-revenge is, in fact, indistinguishable from justice. Revenge, Rosenbaum argues, is not the problem. It is, in fact, a perfectly healthy emotion. Instead, the problem is the inadequacy of lawful outlets through which to express it. He mounts a case for legal systems to punish the guilty commensurate with their crimes as part of a societal moral duty to satisfy the needs of victims to feel avenged.Indeed, the legal system would better serve the public if it gave victims the sense that vengeance was being done on their behalf. Drawing on a wide range of support, from recent studies in behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics, to stories of vengeance and justice denied, to revenge practices from around the world, to the way in which revenge tales have permeated popular culture - including "Hamlet", "The Godfather", and "Braveheart" - Rosenbaum demonstrates that vengeance needs to be more openly and honestly discussed and lawfully practiced. Fiercely argued and highly engaging, "Payback" is a provocative and eye-opening cultural tour of revenge and its rewards - from Shakespeare to "The Sopranos". Rosenbaum liberates revenge from its social stigma and proves that vengeance is indeed ours, a perfectly human and acceptable response to moral injury.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Stein loves life in New York. Who wouldn’t, growing up in a cool TriBeCa loft with an artist dad and a chocolate-maker mom, rollerblading in Central Park, hanging out with friends? That is, until the day her parents tell her they’re divorcing. Forced to shuttle each day by bicycle between their separate residences on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Sarah soon discovers that the parents she thought she knew are as opposite as their new homes. She takes on a bizarrely split identity—one day she’s the daughter of the prim, social-climbing chocolatier, the next the streetwise, smart-aleck child of the downtown abstract painter. Sarah Stein becomes a stranger to herself. But that’s not the only thing that’s strange. Colliding with the cart of a homeless man one day while pedaling across the bridge, Sarah tumbles through a magical portal and into an upside-down world of double identities and second chances. Through her friendship with the homeless Clarence Wind, a disgraced fireman missing since 9/11, and the love of her grandmother, a wise Holocaust survivor with her own hidden past, Sarah unlocks the mysteries behind the strangeness that she and Clarence share. In this witty, wonder-filled novel about broken homes and disconnected lives, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge as backdrop and the legacies of the Holocaust and the Twin Towers as backstory, Sarah Stein’s adventures prove both heartbreaking and heartwarming, an enchantment for readers of all ages.

"e;A necessary book that addresses a moral and military question: What can a nation do to defend itself against terrorists who pay no mind to the laws of war? Must it value the lives of its enemies more than its own citizens?"e; – Jeb Bush, Two-term Governor of Florida and Presidential candidateImagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside…human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for terrorists to take hostages and travel freely.Beyond Proportionality examines Israel's battles against Hamas and Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its wartime conduct was based on military necessity and fought justly. The targets are terrorists, weapons, and tunnels—not civilians. Israel relies upon verifiable intelligence, deploys precise weapons, and endangers its own soldiers in order to minimize civilian death.The bombings over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, and the urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, produced large numbers of civilian dead that were not considered acts of genocide; the war in Gaza was no different.

This hilarious novel follows the Posner family--two Holocaust survivors and their young son--doing everything they can to avoid one another in Miami in 1972, the site of the Republican and Democratic political conventions, the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, the desegregation of the old South. This is also the Miami of Gleason, Sinatra, Lansky, and I.B.Singer.