Author Charles Ota Heller's early childhood in Czechoslovakia was idyllic, but his safe and happy world didn't last long, Three years after his birth, Germany forced an occupation of his country; afterward, most of his young life consisted of running and hiding. His life, just like those of the other youths who lived in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s, was shaped forever by the dangers, horrors, and unsettling events he experienced. In this memoir, Heller, born Ota Karel Heller, narrates his family's story—a family nearly destroyed by the Nazis. Son of a mixed marriage, he was raised a Catholic and was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and fifteen members of his family disappeared. Prague: My Long Journey Home tells of his Christian mother being sent to a slave labor camp and of his hiding on a farm to avoid deportation to a death camp. With the war coming to a close, Heller tells of how he picked up a revolver and shot a Nazi when he was just nine years old. Heller, now an assimilated American, left the horrors of the past—along with his birth name—behind to live the proverbial American Dream. In his memoir, he recalls how two cataclysmic events following Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought him face-to-face with demons of his former life. On his personal journey Heller discovered and embraced his heritage—one which he had abandoned decades earlier.

A four-year-old girl survives a harrowing escape across the heavily armed border of Czechoslovakia with her mother and brother after the Communist takeover in 1948. The family leaves everything behind to flee to freedom in Canada. Years later, as a young woman living in Toronto, she finds herself drawn to the country of her birth and returns to Prague, along the way finding love, danger, heartbreak, and her family's legacy. Helen Notzl's poignant memoir takes readers on a voyage between two starkly different and conflicting worlds - from affluence and fulfillment in Canada to passion and revolution in Prague. Must she choose between the two? With intense drama, vivid narration, and brilliant detail, Long Journey Home tells the story of a woman's quest for those things that truly matter to all of us: love, family, identity and homeland.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

While on a journey to Prague with his wife for the opening night of Don Giovanni, Mozart is caught picking an orange on the grounds of a stately home. But when the resident family finds out who they are dealing with, they are delighted to be in the presence of the celebrated composer and invite him to their daughter's wedding. This vivid and imaginative depiction captures both the humorous and the more pensive side of the genius composer.

How did Clint Eastwood spend his Thursday evenings? What caused one of Americas greatest basketball coaches to scream the n-word at the author? How did Heller become an early witness to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair? Why did jazz singer Helen OConnell proposition the young, innocent Charlie Heller? What led the author to insult the leader of Americas space program? How did Heller and a TV star/sex therapist develop immediate rapport? How did the author and the leader of a famous rock band become friends? These are some of the interesting vignettes told by Charles Ota Heller, a former CEO entrepreneur, educator, venture capitalist, athlete, and engineer who came to America as an immigrant from Czechoslovakia at the age of thirteen and who now looks back at a life of chasing the proverbial American Dream, chronicling the famous and near-famous people he met along the way.

"True story of a man who, at the age of nine, shot a Nazi"--Cover.

The author tells of his life story coming from Serbia as an immigrant arriving in Castle Garden with five cents in his pocket. His objective for writing the book was to describe the rise of idealism in American science, and particularly in physical sciences.--Publisher's description.

This hip, hilarious travelogue, which takes the author on the Sixties hippie trail — from the UK to Australia without flying — will strike a chord with all those travelers who have stood where Moore stood, and entertain and alarm lovers of off-the-beaten-track travel adventures with his characteristically quirky descriptions of places and people.