Michael W. Klein Book order

A young economic professor's adventures in his quest for a tenure-track position and a well-balanced life. David Fox (Ph.D. Economics, Columbia, Visiting Assistant Professor at Kester College, Knittersville, New York) is having a stressful year. He has a temporary position at a small college in a small town miles from everything except Albany. His students have never read Freakonomics. He thinks he is getting the hang of teaching, but a smart and beautiful young woman in his Economics of Social Issues class is distractingly flirtatious. His research is stagnant, to put it kindly. His search for a tenure-track job looms dauntingly. (The previous visiting assistant professor of economics is now working in a bookstore.) So when a right-wing think tank called the Center to Research Opportunities for a Spiritual Society (CROSS)--affiliated with the Salvation Academy for Value Economics (SAVE)--wants to publish (and publicize) a paper he wrote as a graduate student showing the benefits of high school abstinence programs, fetchingly retitled "Something for Nothing," he ignores his misgivings and accepts happily. After all, publication is "the coin of the realm," as a senior colleague puts it. But David faces a personal dilemma when his prized results are cast into doubt. The school year is filled with other challenges as well, including faculty politics, a romance with a Knittersville native, running the annual interview gauntlet, and delivering the culminating "job talk" lecture under trying circumstances. David's adventures offer an instructive fictional guide for the young economist and an entertaining and comic tale for everyone interested in questions of balancing career and life, success and integrity, and loyalty and desire.

This book describes how Michael Klein's faith and determination helped him to survive the concentration camps at age 15 and overcome bitterness, the trauma of the Holocaust, and all physical and spiritual obstacles, to become a happy and useful member of society. Dr. Klein portrays the Jews' spiritual resistance to the Germans and their struggle to retain their faith and humanity in the shadow of death. He then portrays his personal struggle back to a normal life, not only the struggle for health and an education, but also to reconcile the tension between the world of a Chassidic teenage boy and the experience of surviving the Nazi death camps. Dr. Klein writes about the events that led to his life being saved by a decision of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist credited with saving the lives of many Jews, and reveals his Yom Kippur experience that prompted him to "breaking silence" and tell what happened in the camps. Dr. Klein was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Golleschau. After liberation, Dr. Klein spent years recovering from TB. In 1950, he made his way to the United States where he was able to earn a degree in Engineering-Physics at the University of Colorado. He earned his Ph.D in Theoretical Physics at Cornell University in 1962.