A “meticulously researched and deftly written biography” of the woman behind the famed wax museums, and their origins in the era of the French Revolution (Midwest Book Review). Madame Marie Tussaud is known worldwide for the chain of wax museums she started over two hundred years ago. Less known is that her original wax models were often of the famous and infamous people she personally knew during and after the French Revolution. These were people like Voltaire, Robespierre, and Napoleon—people who changed the world. Even more, the wax figures were depicted in scenes drawn from the horrors she experienced during the reign of terror in Paris during her early adult years. This book shows how the traumatic and cataclysmic experiences of Madame Tussaud’s early life became part of her legacy. She created a succession of scenes in wax, telling events as she personally experienced them. Her wax sculptures were visceral. She made them herself, at times from the living person’s head and at other times from the recently guillotined head of a former houseguest. As a result, people were drawn to her wax displays because they were the most intense way of experiencing those events themselves. This is the story not only of a unique artist, but of how one of history’s bloodiest events influenced her life and work.

An excellent, single-volume Catholic dictionary of the Bible written by respected Catholic Biblical scholar John L. McKenzie S. J. and originally published in 1965. Fr. John L. McKenzie, S.J., (1910-1991) was an acclaimed Catholic Scripture scholar who wrote numerous books and was the first Catholic scholar on the Divinity School faculty. He was at one time president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America and president of the Society of Biblical Literature. His Dictionary of the Bible is the best one-volume orthodox Catholic Bible dictionary available in the English language—it’s an essential reference tool that should be on the shelf of every good Catholic library. A standard reference work, providing concise descriptions of biblical characters, terms, and places, as well as pertinent illustrations and charts, this is “one of the most up-to-date and reliable dictionaries of the Bible in any language.…Magnificent in scholarship, ample in learning, frank and unhesitating in facing all the difficulties and problems, sympathetic with the varieties and diversities of other views” (Religious Education).