Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood--facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf--his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal...

Over four weeks in Washington, D.C., Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living. A catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East, and at stake is the meaning of home -- and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

American college student Jonathan Safran Foer sets out, along with Ukranian travel agent Alex Perchov, Alex's depressive grandfather, and the family dog, in an attempt to find the village where a Ukranian woman might or might not have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis during World War II.

A young Jewish man travels to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II with only a local who speaks broken English to guide him. Jonathan is a Jewish college student searching Europe for the one person he believes can explain his roots. Alex, a lover of all things American and unsurpassed butcher of the English language, is his Ukrainian guide. The two young men look for Augustine, a woman who might have saved Jonathan's...