David Unger

Winner of seven awards, including the 2024-2025 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List. The true story of José Andrés, an award-winning chef, food activist, and founder of World Central Kitchen, a disaster-relief organization that uses the power of food to nourish communities after catastrophe strikes. When a terrible earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, chef José Andrés knew he needed to help. Within a few hours of the disaster, he had gathered friends, they flew to the island, and they began cooking rice and beans for the hungry locals. This trip changed the life of the successful chef and led him to found World Central Kitchen, a disaster-relief organization that has fed more than 200 million people affected by natural disasters, the COVID pandemic, and war. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a passionate chef who uses the power of food to nurture people in need, one plate at a time.2024-2025 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List2024 EUREKA! Nonfiction Children's Book Awards Silver Honor2024 Skipping Stones Honor Awards Winner, Multicultural and International Category2025-2026 Land of Enchantment Book Award nominee, Coyote list2026 Towner Award Nominee 2025 Missouri Dogwood Recommended Reading List2025-2026 Chickadee Award Nominee

In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful is a coming-of-age novel, that narrates the life of an Indigenous young woman. It depicts the transformation of Olivia Padilla Xuc, an illiterate six-year-old picking coffee in the Guatemalan countryside as she becomes a liberated, powerful woman working in Mexico City. Through Olivia’s deeply moving narrative, we explore the possibility of change and growth of an indigenous woman as she delve into issues of racism, economic opportunity and self-worth – the vital themes that first nation people confront globally while they try to better themselves in societies convinced of their worthlessness. Against an historical period of armed conflict, turmoil and conflict, Olivia Padilla is funny, intense, imaginative, alternately serious and playful. Her courage allows her to explore her sexuality in Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and Italy as she builds a satisfying, independent life few people could have considered possible.

The ninth instalment of the popular 'Lesson' series - featuring therapist, professor, and reluctant sleuth David Unger, PhD. David's chakras are stimulated when he takes a skeptical step into the unknown. He's been hired for support at the Santa Monica Whole Life Expo - bad juju is expected, and positive therapeutic auras are required. Murder soon spoils the cosmic karma, and with the posse on hand to spice up the mystic mix, David's sleuthing leads him to places he's never been before, and most likely won't return to. But David is distracted - Nova, the Love Doctor, puts the 'oo' in his personal woo-woo, and when a psychic foretells of romance in his future, he all but enters a different dimension. ​ David's special brand of voodoo-therapy-magic has never been more at home, but can he overcome his super Nova distraction for long enough to unmask the killer before anyone else gets hurt?

Davico lives with his family above La Casita - the Little House - in Guatemala City in the early 1950s. But it's not just a little house. It's also the family restaurant! The restaurant provides plenty of distraction and adventure for Davico and his older brother, Felipe. The mean cook, Augusto, and the always-late waiter, Otto, love to play tricks on Davico. There's a huge oven in the gas cookstove, which Felipe knows how to light -- if he can only reach the box of matches above the stove. And there's the endless fascination of the glass tank of live lobsters -- including the king of them all, Genghis Khan, who stares at Davico with round unblinking black eyes, waving his antennas like submarine periscopes. Could Genghis Khan climb on the back of the other lobsters and get out of the tank, Davico wonders. Could he move faster on land than in the water? Then one day, Davico hears shooting in the streets. There are blackouts every evening, and the family must sleep under the big wooden table in the dining room. People stop coming to the restaurant, and tanks and soldiers swarm the front of the National Palace, where a shoeshine boy warns the brothers that the gringos are coming. But what does that mean, and who are the gringos? Davico wants to be brave, but the shooting and tanks and airplanes flying overhead terrify him. He finds comfort in the special lamp that his father buys him to comfort him during the blackouts. But it is not enough to console him when his parents announce that it's time to leave for the United States of America, where no one speaks Spanish, and everything is different.

David Unger teje magistralmente esta historia, evitando cualquier deseo de emitir juicios morales. De la misma forma en la que lo hacen los personajes de la novela, nos sumergimos en las p ginas de este libro y nos identificamos con su confusi n y su desconcierto ante la completa realidad y todas sus complejidades. Esta no es una historia de buenos y malos. Todos son antih roes. Pero en la imperfecci n y la vulnerabilidad de los personajes, en la manera en la que son apremiados por las contradicciones, en la ruina que se procuran a s mismos, hay un juego de espejos, una mirada realista a la sociedad en la que habitan. Dan a luz a un monstruo. Saturno devorando a sus propios hijos. (Gioconda Belli) gil y divertida, reveladora de una cruda realidad latinoamericana, Vivir en el maldito tr pico de David Unger se lee de un tir n. Y al cabo de la lectura uno termina reconoci ndose, porque esa historia no es m s que nuestra propia historia. (Silvia Molina) sta es una sofisticada y, en muchas ocasiones, amargamente divertida novela acerca de un romance pol tico que me hace pensar en Graham Greene. A trav s de la voz y de los ojos de un narrador jud o, m s o menos identificado con Unger, la ciudad de Guatemala en los a os ochenta del siglo XX -un lugar de terror, pero tambi n de obligaciones familiares, de viejas amistades, de amores y desamores de personas de la mediana edad- es evocada bellamente. (Francisco Goldman)Formado en tres tradiciones y dos lenguas, David Unger ha sabido rescatar con iron a y pasi n las peripecias de una familia jud a en la Guatemala de los ochenta. Historia de tres hermanos, de los "choques de civilizaciones" tan en boga en esta poca y de la pluralidad de costumbres que conviven en Am rica Latina, Vivir en el maldito tr pico es una novela que se lee con perplejidad e inmenso placer. (Jorge Volpi)

"Unger bases his latest novel on the true story of a Guatemalan lawyer who planned his own murder in 2009, fleshing out the story with healthy shots of sex and corruption.... The political elements in Unger's story become more gripping through the eyes of his flawed protagonist. He's especially good at subtly shifting the tone of the narrative so that danger signs build up around Guillermo before either he or the reader realizes."--"Kirkus Reviews" "In "The Mastermind," David Unger s compelling antihero reminds us of the effects of privilege and corruption, and how that deadly combo can spill from the public to the private sphere. Unger s Guillermo Rosensweig is on a hallucinatory journey in which everything seems to go right until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. I couldn t put this down."--Achy Obejas, author of "Ruins" "Swaggering, visceral, and sharply astute, "The Mastermind"is a riveting account of one man s high-stakes journey to self-reckoning."--Cristina Garcia, author of"King of Cuba" "David Unger has taken one of the strangest, most sinister affairs in Guatemalan history and, through the power of his imagination and mastery of his art, made it even stranger, richer, disturbingly more human and universal."--Francisco Goldman, author of"The Interior Circuit" ""The Mastermind"is a merciless analysis of the dark web of a country, perhaps of a whole continent, and, finally, of all forms of organized power. The novel raises fascinating questions regarding the literary tensions between real-life events and their fictionalization, between Guatemala s incredible Rosenberg case and Rosensweig, Unger s imagined alter egothe way these two characters blur, argue, and battle in the reader s mind make this an engrossing read. --Andres Neuman, author of "The Things We Don t Do" By all appearances, Guillermo Rosensweig is the epitome of success. He is a member of the Guatemalan elite, runs a successful law practice, has a wife and kids and a string of gorgeous lovers. Then one day he crosses paths with Maryam, a Lebanese beauty with whom he falls desperately in love...to the point that when he loses her, he sees no other option than to orchestrate his own death. "The Mastermind" is based on the bizarre real-life story of Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan attorney who, in 2009, planned his own assassination after leaving behind a video accusing Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom of his murder. (In April 2011, the "New Yorker" published an article by David Grann about Rosenberg which has been optioned by Matt Damon for his directorial debut.) This is a fascinating depiction of modern-day Guatemala and the corrupt, criminal, and threatening reality that permeates its society."

Set in strife-torn Guatemala City in the early 1980s, this sophisticated, quasi-comedic tale depicts the decline and near-fall of a prominent Guatemalan Jewish family.