New Releases by Joan Dash

Before the world understood that lightning was electricity, Ben Franklin set out during an electrical storm with a kite and a length of wire. At the time of this experiment, Franklin was unaware that his theories about electricity had made him a celebrity all over Europe, esp. in France. Admired by the French court and beloved by French citizens, Franklin effectively became America¿s first foreign diplomat. A father of the Revolution and a signer of the Constitution, Franklin was a lightning rod in political circles -- ¿a dangerous Engine,¿ according to a critic. And though he devoted the last 25 years of his life to affairs of state, his first love was always science. ¿This is the story of adventure, of one man¿s curiosity and the extraordinary rewards of his discoveries.¿ Illus.

At the time of his famous kite experiment, Benjamin Franklin was unaware that his theories about electricity had already made him a celebrity all over Europe, especially in France, where fashionable circles loved to discuss scientific discovery. Admired by the French court and beloved by French citizens, Franklin effectively became America''s first foreign diplomat, later helping to enlist France''s military and financial support for the American Revolution. A father of the revolution and a signer of the Constitution, Franklin was a lightning rod in political circles - "a dangerous Engine," according to a critic. And although he devoted the last twenty-five years of his life to affairs of state, his first love was always science. Handsome pen-and-ink drawings highlight moments in this revolutionary thinker''s life.

''February 1943: a crowded railway station in Haifa, Palestine. Crowds of people wait for a train to pull in. Through a winter of anguish the Jews of Palestine have longed for this train. It arrives and from the open windows hundreds of little hands wave blue-and-white flags. The train is packed with Jewish children who have been traveling war-ravaged Europe since the fall of Poland in 1939. Palestine is their journey''s end. In front of the crowd is an official delegation, headed by an old woman not quite five feet tall. She is Henrietta Szold, and these children, the final contingent of ten thousand children, were saved from the Nazis and brought to Palestine because of her.'' One could not have predicted from the beginnings of her comfortable, dependent life as the oldest daughter of a Baltimore rabbi the extraordinary accomplishments of Henreitta Szold. Even as she reached middle age, she was the dutiful studious partner of her father''s scholarly researches, although she had behind her impressive accomplishments, such as the establishment of a pioneering night school for Russian Jewish immigrants. But each time she ventured, she retreated. It took two grave emotional crises to bring her into her own -- the death of her father, and the more astonishing public emotional collapse that ensued after her intense love for a scholar thirteen years her junior ended when he took a young German bride. Out of the ashes of this second bereavement emerged the Henrietta Szold who was to imprint her formidable accomplishments on American Jewry and the land of Palestine. That barren land, the needs of its population, and the courage of its pioneers shaped the course of her future, while back home in New York the small study group she had established, and which was called Hadassah, grew into the women''s arm of the American Zionist movement. Zionism was full of factionalism, and the history of Palestine was bloody and divisive. It was Henrietta Szold''s initiative and drive that established its health care system, shaped education, and began the social services that prevail today. In the 1930s a new mission emerged: the rescue from the Nazis of thousands of Jewish children who would otherwise have been lost. This Youth Aliyah was her last triumph. She was eighty-three when her indomitable body wearied at last, and she lies buried on the Mount of Olives, in the land she played so large a part in shaping.

A sparkling biography tells the incredible story of a woman who overcame her dark, silent world.

The story of John Harrison, inventor of watches and clocks, who spent forty years working on a time-machine which could be used to accurately determine longitude at sea.

The story of the notable female activists in their courageous fight for humane working conditions in 1909 describes the hazardous circumstances of the pre-strike New York shirtwaist industry. Reprint.

Examines the lives of Barbara McClintock, Maria Mayer, Rosalyn Yalow, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, women scientists who won the Nobel Prize against extraordinary odds, in different fields and under different circumstances.