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We love this book, you guys, and we could not be happier to see it getting love on these brilliant 2015 year-end lists!

David McCullough’s Favorite Reads of 2015 “She writes with such spirit and agility that to read her books is something like watching a great dancer. To say that her latest book is fascinating and insightful is hardly sufficient. It’s brilliant from start to finish.”

Hilary Mantel’s “Book of the Year,” Times Literary Supplement “Schiff interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing—sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian.”

Time Magazine’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2015 “With her impressive attention to detail and atmosphere, she conjures an eerie vision of the 17th century.”

NPR’s Great Reads for 2015 “Eerie and engrossing. As a popular historical writer, Schiff is a proven spellbinder. Schiff may not lead us out of the dark, but she makes it an inviting place to linger a while.” —Recommended by Maureen Corrigan, book critic of NPR’S Fresh Air

Boston Globe’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2015 “In this beautiful retelling of one of our ugliest tales, Schiff describes the sheer strangeness of the trials and the society from which they sprang.”

Washington Post’s Notable Nonfiction of 2015 “Schiff’s contribution to the familiar story of the Salem witch trials is her penetrating evocation of the environment that engendered them.”

San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2015 “Schiff’s splendidly written account brings it thrillingly to life.”

Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Picks for Gift Giving “I fell in love with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Stacy Schiff within the first few pages of Cleopatra—not just for her gifts as a researcher, which are prodigious, but for her prose style, which is almost fantastically elegant. Now Schiff is back with The Witches, a gripping, meticulously researched, sumptuously written history of the Salem witch trials and their historical context, and I’m falling in love with her all over again. —Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune

“It’s showtime, folks!”

Happy birthday to Roy Scheider and Ann Reinking, stars of Bob Fosse’s electrifying 1979 musical drama All That Jazz.

David works in Strand’s Underground ⬇️ and has today’s #BannedPick. He picked Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which ironically is set in a world in which books are banned 🚫. Today, Brave New World finds itself consistently being challenged from Seattle to Cape Town for: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and being sexually explicit.

Around 175 mill young people in poor countries cannot read all or part of a sentence 

The poorest young women are the furthest behind:  On current trends, it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to become literate.

Let’s make this #LiteracyDay make a difference!

Read www.efareport.wordpress.com for more info

Share this and let’s make a change for the better.

Happy birthday to artist Jacob Lawrence! 

In 1946, just a year after completing his World War II service with the Coast Guard, Lawrence began work on the fourteen paintings that comprise the War Series. The images are based on the artist’s own experiences and present a narrative, like chapters in a book. Lawrence said that he wanted these works “to capture the essence of war” by “portraying the feeling and emotions that are felt by the individual, both fighter and civilian.”