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The previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the…
familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration.In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. It was championed by a group of intellectuals who envisioned a place of post-oppression Jewish culture, and by the early 1930s, tens of thousands of Jews had moved there from the shtetls. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite, but after the Second World War, the newly named "Jewish Autonomous Region" received an influx of Jews dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, most of whom had lost families in the Holocaust. In the late 1940s, another wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, traumatizing the Jews into silence, and effectively making them invisible. Now Masha Gessen gives us a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia.(Part of the Jewish Encounters series)Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years
By Nicholas Frankel. 2017
Nicholas Frankel presents a revisionary account of Oscar Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile in Europe following his…
release from an English prison for the crime of gross indecency between men. Despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde—unapologetic and even defiant—attempted to rebuild himself as a man, and a man of letters.Difficult Women
By Scott Spencer, David Plante. 2017
David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time…
in decades.Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante’s portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when the publication of The Wide Sargasso Sea, after years of silence that had made Rhys’s great novels of the 1920s and ’30s as good as unknown, had at last gained genuine recognition for her. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new fame. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants like King Lear on the heath in the hotel room that she has made her home, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is his second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.Robertson Davies: Magician of Words
By Nicholas Maes. 2008
Born in Thamesville, Ontario, a student at Queen’s University in Kingston in the 1930’s, and editor and later publisher of…
the Peterborough Examiner from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, playwright, essayist, critic, professor, and novelist Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary voices for more than a half-century. Davies, with his generous beard and donnish manner, was the very epitome of the "man of letters," a term he abhorred. Best known for his Deptford Trilogy of novels (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders), he also wrote two other trilogies (Salterton and Cornish) and was at work on the third volume of another trilogy (Toronto) when he died. With a life as rich in character and colour as that found in his fiction and essays, Davies had a great fondness for magic and myth, both of which are found in abundance in his work, along with a prodigious streak of wry humour.The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism
By Mitchell Stephens. 2017
The first and definitive biography of an audacious adventurer—the most famous journalist of his time—who more than anyone invented contemporary…
journalism.Tom Brokaw says: "Lowell Thomas so deserves this lively account of his legendary life. He was a man for all seasons."Few Americans today recognize his name, but Lowell Thomas was as well known in his time as any American journalist ever has been. Raised in a Colorado gold-rush town, Thomas covered crimes and scandals for local then Chicago newspapers. He began lecturing on Alaska, after spending eight days in Alaska. Then he assigned himself to report on World War I and returned with an exclusive: the story of “Lawrence of Arabia.” In 1930, Lowell Thomas began delivering America’s initial radio newscast. His was the trusted voice that kept Americans abreast of world events in turbulent decades – his face familiar, too, as the narrator of the most popular newsreels. His contemporaries were also dazzled by his life. In a prime-time special after Thomas died in 1981, Walter Cronkite said that Thomas had “crammed a couple of centuries worth of living” into his eighty-nine years. Thomas delighted in entering “forbidden” countries—Tibet, for example, where he met the teenaged Dalai Lama. The Explorers Club has named its building, its awards, and its annual dinner after him. Journalists in the last decades of the twentieth century—including Cronkite and Tom Brokaw—acknowledged a profound debt to Thomas. Though they may not know it, journalists today too are following a path he blazed. In The Voice of America, Mitchell Stephens offers a hugely entertaining, sometimes critical portrait of this larger than life figure.Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide
By Robin Black. 2016
Robin Black's path through loss and survival delivered her to the writer's life. Agoraphobia, the challenges of parenting a child…
with special needs, and the legacy of a formidable father all shaped that journey. In these deeply personal and instructive essays, the author of the internationally acclaimed If I loved you, I would tell you this and Life Drawing explores the making of art through the experiences of building a life. Engaging, challenging, and moving, Crash Course is full of insight into how to write-and why.From "Autumn, 1972, A Moment at Which I Became a Writer":I sense, even now, the reverberations of a kind of shattering of my foundation and a quick rebuild, a change at a molecular level of who I understood myself to be. No longer someone who could look at another person without wondering what their life was like, but someone with a new curiosity about what people's stories might actually be.Robin Black is the author of the story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this and the novel Life Drawing, both critically acclaimed, and both published in multiple languages. She has developed a loyal, enthusiastic following for her essays on life and writing, online and in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and O Magazine. She lives with her husband in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the house is always open for their three grown children.Chernobyl Strawberries
By Vesna Goldsworthy. 2015
"Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then…
I've missed it."--Times Literary SupplementHow would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir, Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family, and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to England, and a successful media and academic career, then a cancer diagnosis and its unresolved consequences. A profoundly moving, comic, and original account by a stunning literary talent.Zen and the Beat Way
By Alan Watts. 1997
Zen and the Beat Way is based upon selections from Alan Watts's early radio talks, many of which were first…
aired on the Pacifica Radio Network in the late fifties and early sixties, and sessions from two of his most compelling seminarsin the mid-sixties.Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent
By Anthony Rapp. 2006
Anthony Rapp captures the passion and grit unique to the theatre world as he recounts his life-changing experience in the…
original cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent. Anthony had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson's rock musical from his first audition, so he was thrilled when he landed a starring role as the filmmaker Mark Cohen. With his mom's cancer in remission and a reason to quit his newly acquired job at Starbucks, his life was looking up. When Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off Broadway, Rapp and his fellow cast members knew that something truly extraordinary had taken shape. But even as friends and family were celebrating the show's success, they were also mourning Jonathan Larson's sudden death from an aortic aneurysm. By the time Rent made its triumphant jump to Broadway, Larson had posthumously won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. When Anthony's mom began to lose her battle with cancer, he struggled to balance the demands of life in the theatre with his responsibility to his family. Here, Anthony recounts the show's magnificent success and his overwhelming loss. He also shares his first experiences discovering his sexuality, the tension it created with his mother, and his struggle into adulthood to gain her acceptance. Variously marked by fledgling love and devastating loss, piercing frustration and powerful enlightenment, Without You charts the course of Rapp's exhilarating journey with the cast and crew of Rent as well as the intimacies of his personal life behind the curtain.Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller
By Margaret Forster. 1993
The authorized biography of the author of Rebecca, a novel first published in 1938 and still a steady seller. Du…
Maurier was an intensely emotional and unconventional woman, and Forster draws on hitherto unpublished letters, including a cache of previously unknown love letters between Du Maurier and actress Gertrude Lawrence. Includes photos. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc. , Portland, ORThe Cambridge Companion to Lucretius
By Philip Hardie, Stuart Gillespie. 2007
Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist…
philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this 2007 Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its ancient contexts and in its reception both as a literary text and as a vehicle for progressive ideas. The Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Lucretius, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of classical antiquity and its reception. It is completely accessible to the reader who has only read Lucretius in translation.The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
By Stanley Wells, Margreta De Grazia. 2001
Written by a team of leading international scholars, this Companion is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's works through discussion of the…
key topics of Shakespeare studies. Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to recent scholarship and criticism for readers keen to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. The book contains stimulating chapters on traditional topics such as Shakespeare's biography and the transmission of his texts. Individual readings of the plays are given in the context of genre as well as through the cultural and historical perspectives of race, sexuality and gender, and politics and religion. Essays on performance survey the latest digital media as well as stage and film. Throughout the volume, contributors discuss Shakespeare in a global as well as a national context, a dramatist with a long and constantly mutating history of reception and performance.Broadcast Rites and Sites: I Saw it on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox
By Joe Castiglione, Douglas Lyons. 2004
Veteran broadcaster Joe Castiglione has seen his share of heartbreaking games, especially from his vantage point at Fenway Park where…
he has called the Red Sox games for the last 20 years. In his newest book, Castiglione not only recounts the drama from the booth in Boston, but also his travels and baseball adventures throughout the country in his previous stints with the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers over his 30-year career.Sir Philip Gibbs and English Journalism in War and Peace
By Martin C. Kerby. 2016
Sir Philip Gibbs was one of the most widely read English journalists of the first half of the twentieth century.…
Prior to 1914 he reported on industrial unrest, Ireland, the suffragette movement, royal births, deaths and coronations, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Balkan War in 1912. This coverage of his writing offers a broad insight into British social and political developments, government and press relations, propaganda, and war reporting during the First World War. As a war correspondent on the Western Front, his articles, which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, did much to shape civilian attitudes during the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Many critics dismissed Gibbs' work as propaganda and his acceptance of a knighthood in 1920 as a reward. His writing in the post-war years covered the full range of inter-war European politics, the Second World War, and the Cold War.Looking Back
By Lois Lowry. 1998
"I would like to introduce you to this book. It has no plot. It is about moments, memories, fragments, falsehoods,…
and fantasies. It is about things that happened, which caused other things to happen, so that eventually stories emerged." Children as well as adults often ask Lois Lowry where the ideas for her stories came from. In this fascinating, moving autobiography, the Newbery Medalist answers this and many other questions. Her writing often transports readers into her own world. She explores her rich history through family pictures, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. She details pivotal moments that affected her life, inspired her writing, and that magically evolved into rich and wonderful stories that one is reluctant to put down. Lowry fans, and anyone interested in the writing process, will tremendously enjoy this poignant trip through a remarkable writer's past.Citizen Newhouse
By Carol Felsenthal. 1998
An acclaimed biographer takes on one of the world's most elusive media moguls in Citizen Newhouse. The harvest of four…
years and over 400 interviews, Carol Felsenthal's book is an unauthorized investigative biography that paints a tough yet even-handed portrait. Here is the father, Sam Newhouse, who developed a formula for creating newspaper monopolies in small metropolitan markets and turned it into a huge family fortune. And the sons: Si in the magazine business, with his crown jewels, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, and Donald, who runs the family's newspaper and cable television companies. Focusing on Si's life and career, Citizen Newhouse takes the measure of one of America's most powerful yet unexamined figures. Felsenthal shows how Si's quirky behavior as a shy and awkward outsider has had a far-reaching impact on the properties he owns, affecting--and in the opinion of some, compromising--the quality of the Newhouse "product" across the country and the world. Felsenthal shines a light on the breathtaking changes that have taken place among Si's top editors, and the fabulous perks available to members of this elite. She also lays bare the role played by Roy Cohn in the affairs of both father and son. Citizen Newhouse provides a fascinating account of powerful and glamorous lives--and their impact on the newspapers and magazines we read every day.Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
By William F. Buckley. 1993
In "Happy Days Were Here Again", William F. Buckley Jr. offers a collection of his finest essays from the latter…
part of his long career. Sometimes celebrating, sometimes assailing, Buckley takes on opponents ranging from Mikhail Gorbachev to Carl Sagan to Leonard Bernstein; reflects on the academic scene, the Gulf War, and the idea of sin; and offers appreciations of friends, both right and left. For everyone who appreciates the wit and style of America's preeminent conservative, this is a must-have collection.Pound's Cantos Declassified
By Philip Furia. 1984
By using his Cantos for storing, "making new," and transmitting historical documents, Pound was returning the epic to its ancient…
function as a tribal archive for the "luminous details" of history that define a culture's past and shape its future. So argues this book, which does not overlook the poem's brilliant lyrical passages but for the first time focuses on those vast stretches of Pound's epic composed not of literary touchstones but of that most unpoetic of literary forms, historical documents.Pound's task as epic poet was complicated by the fact that the documents he wished to renew and transmit to his culture were largely unknown, often because in his mind they had been suppressed by a widespread conspiracy throughout the ages which he termed the "historical black-out." His Cantos therefore, he believed, must be a counter-conspiracy to rescue vital documents from that black-out, renew them, and then recirculate them to combat the economic and political forces behind the black-out.Drawing on recent research by numerous scholars, Furia traces the arcane documents Pound unearthed from libraries around the world and shows how he transmuted this documentary mass into poetry, first by framing passages of prose to highlight their poetic texture and then by weaving these shards and fragments into a collage of intricate structure. Among the documents Furia "declassifies" are Chinese edicts, Italian bank charters, British factory commission reports, Byzantine guild regulations, American Presidential papers, municipal records, judicial writs, parliamentary statutes, legislative codes, contracts, deeds, mandates, treaties, diary entries, and correspondence by such diverse figures as Lorenzo de' Medici, Martin Van Buren, Napoleon, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mustapha Kemal, and Kubla Khan.Pound's Cantos Declassified traces the poet's struggle to shape the content of the epic poem that absorbed most of his creative life.Radio and the Gendered Soundscape
By Christine Ehrick. 2015
This book is a history of women, radio, and the gendered constructions of voice and sound in Buenos Aires, Argentina,…
and Montevideo, Uruguay. Through the stories of five women and one radio station, this study makes a substantial theoretical contribution to the study of gender, mass media, and political culture and expands our knowledge of these issues beyond the US and Western Europe. Included here is a study of the first all-women's radio station in the Western Hemisphere, an Argentine comedian known as 'Chaplin in Skirts', an author of titillating dramatic serials and, of course, Argentine First Lady 'Evita' Perón. Through the concept of the gendered soundscape, this study integrates sound studies and gender history in new ways, asking readers to consider both the female voice in history and the sonic dimensions of gender.Blue Collar Intellectuals
By Daniel Flynn. 2011
Stupid is the new smart--but it wasn't always soPopular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who…
has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play?At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation.It wasn't always so.Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone--intellectual and everyman alike--has suffered from mass culture's crowding out of higher things and the elite's failure to engage the masses.