Do What Thou Wilt: An exploration into the life and works of a modern mystic, occultist, poet, mountaineer, and bisexual adventurer known to his contemporaries as "The Great Beast"Aleister Crowley was a groundbreaking poet and an iconoclastic visionary whose literary and cultural legacy extends far beyond the limits of his notoriety as a practitioner of the occult arts.Born in 1875 to devout Christian parents, young Aleister's devotion scarcely outlived his father, who died when the boy was twelve. He reached maturity in the boarding schools and brothels of Victorian England, trained to become a world-class mountain climber, and seldom persisted with any endeavor in which he could be bested. Like many self-styled illuminati of his class and generation, the hedonistic Crowley gravitated toward the occult. An aspiring poet and a pampered wastrel - obsessed with reconciling his quest for spiritual perfection and his inclination do exactly as...

When the Holocaust descended on Poland, two young Jews fought back—and fell in love Jack and Rochelle first met at a youth dance in Poland before the war. They shared one dance, and Jack stepped on Rochelle's shoes. She was unimpressed. When the Nazis invaded eastern Poland in 1941, both Jack (in the town of Mir) and Rochelle (in the town of Stolpce) witnessed the horrors of ghettoization, forced labor, and mass killings that decimated their families. Jack and Rochelle managed, in their separate ways, to escape into the forest. They reunited, against all odds, in the winter of 1942–43 and became Jewish partisans who fought back against the Nazis. The couple's careful courtship soon blossomed into an enduring love that sustained them through the raging hatred of the Holocaust and the destruction of the lives they had known. Jack and Rochelle's story, told in their own voices through extensive interviews with their son, Lawrence, has...