Download or read book Amerigo A Comedy of Errors in History written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stefan Zweig's Amerigo: A Comedy of Errors in History is the Austrian writer's account of how America got its name. This short, late work describes how Amerigo Vespucci, “a man of medium caliber [who] had never been entrusted with a fleet” gave his name to the New World because “of a combination of circumstances — through error, accident, and misunderstanding.” Zweig was living in exile in Brazil when he wrote Amerigo, shortly before committing suicide in despair over Hitler's conquest of Europe. “The paradox that Columbus discovered America but failed to recognize it, while Vespucci did not discover it but was the first to recognize it as a new continent,” he wrote, illustrates how “history will not be reasoned with.”

Download or read book Amerigo written by Stefan Zweig and published by . This book was released on 1944 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Amerigo written by Stefan Zweig and published by New York, Viking. This book was released on 1942 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Amerigo written by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era. “A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)

Download or read book The Pill Pygmy Chimps and Degas Horse written by Carl Djerassi and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusually wide-ranging memoir, moving from Europe to America, academia to industry, science to art, triumph to tragedy, is the idiosyncratic life story of Carl Djerassi, teenage refugee from Nazism and prodigiously gifted chemist who experimented with a local yam in Mexico, synthesized steroids and, along with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, fathered the birth control pill. In this personal, incisive account, Djerassi tells the story of an extraordinarily driven and successful scientist-businessman, who taught for decades at Stanford University while maintaining a foothold in industry, married three times, had two children, and became an art collector as well as author and playwright. He describes how he lost his only daughter to suicide and his beloved third wife, biographer Diane Middlebrook, to cancer and how he has continued to live his extraordinary life. “Mr. Djerassi has a great deal to be immodest about… He is the very model of the scientist-businessman who knows how to turn his discoveries into commercially useful and profitable enterprises without jeopardizing his academic standing…” — The New York Times “Djerassi became enormously wealthy thanks to the soaring value of the Syntex stock acquired when he worked at the company... where he led the research team that synthesized the first orally active steroid contraceptive compound... and he took up art (and house) collecting. Emotionally, his life was turbulent: he married three times, and had to face the tragedy of his daughter’s suicide in 1978. His marvellous first autobiography, The Pill, Pygmy Chimps and Degas’ Horse, covers this era in his life.” — Nature “The pill here is the first oral contraceptive, synthesized by the author at age 28 in 1951; pygmy chimps were the subjects of a mid-career biomedical experiment and Degas's horse represents the delights of art collecting, to which the award-winning scientist turned in later life… Shattering the cliche of scientists as one-dimensional technocrats, the book reveals a singular life with more than its share of pain, self-discovery, danger, wit, joy and irony.” — Publishers Weekly “Carl Djerassi, who is a scientist, artist, philosopher and mensch all in one, has produced the very best of scientific autobiography… Read this book.” — Stephen Jay Gould “I found the first few pages so interesting that for two days I neglected my work in order to read the book from beginning to end.” — Linus Pauling, Nobel Laureate “Delightfully unconventional… hilarious and wide-ranging.” — Arthur C. Clarke

Download or read book John von Neumann The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer Game Theory Nuclear Deterrence and Much More written by Norman Macrae and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John von Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Hungary — considered a “genius” like fellow Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller — who played key roles developing the A-bomb at Los Alamos during World War II. As a mathematician at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (where Einstein was also a professor), von Neumann was a leader in the development of early computers. Later, he developed the new field of game theory in economics and became a top nuclear arms policy adviser to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. “I always thought [von Neumann’s] brain indicated that he belonged to a new species, an evolution beyond man. Macrae shows us in a lively way how this brain was nurtured and then left its great imprint on the world.” — Hans A. Bethe, Cornell University “The book makes for utterly captivating reading. Von Neumann was, of course, one of this century’s geniuses, and it is surprising that we have had to wait so long... for a fully fleshed and sympathetic biography of the man. But now, happily, we have one. Macrae nicely delineates the cultural, familial, and educational environment from which von Neumann sprang and sketches the mathematical and scientific environment in which he flourished. It’s no small task to render a genius like von Neumann in ordinary language, yet Macrae manages the trick, providing more than a glimpse of what von Neumann accomplished intellectually without expecting the reader to have a Ph.D. in mathematics. Beyond that, he captures von Neumann’s qualities of temperament, mind, and personality, including his effortless wit and humor. And [Macrae] frames and accounts for von Neumann’s politics in ways that even critics of them, among whom I include myself, will find provocative and illuminating.” — Daniel J. Kevles, California Institute of Technology “A lively portrait of the hugely consequential nonmathematician-physicist-et al., whose genius has left an enduring impress on our thought, technology, society, and culture. A double salute to Steve White, who started this grand book designed for us avid, nonmathematical readers, and to Norman Macrae, who brought it to a triumphant conclusion.” — Robert K. Merton, Columbia University “The first full-scale biography of this polymath, who was born Jewish in Hungary in 1903 and died Roman Catholic in the United States at the age of 53. And Mr. Macrae has some great stories to tell... Mr. Macrae’s biography has rescued a lot of good science gossip from probable extinction, and has introduced many of us to the life story of a man we ought to know better.” — Ed Regis, The New York Times “A nice and fascinating picture of a genius who was active in so many domains.” —Zentralblatt MATH “Biographer Macrae takes a ‘viewspaperman’ approach which stresses the context and personalities associated with von Neumann’s remarkable life, rather than attempting to give a detailed scholarly analysis of von Neumann’s papers. The resulting book is a highly entertaining account that is difficult to put down.” — Journal of Mathematical Psychology “A full and intimate biography of ‘the man who consciously and deliberately set mankind moving along the road that led us into the Age of Computers.’” — Freeman Dyson, Princeton, NJ “It is good to have a biography of one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century, even if it is a biography that focuses much more on the man than on the mathematics.” — Fernando Q. Gouvêa, Mathematical Association of America “Based on much research, his own and that of others (especially of Stephen White), Macrae has written a valuable biography of this remarkable genius of our century, without the opacity of technical (mathematical) dimensions that are part of the hero’s intellectual contributions to humanity. Interesting, informative, illuminating, and insightful.” — Choice Review “Macrae paints a highly readable, humanizing portrait of a man whose legacy still influences and shapes modern science and knowledge.” — Resonance, Journal of Science Education “In this affectionate, humanizing biography, former Economist editor Macrae limns a prescient pragmatist who actively fought against fascism and who advocated a policy of nuclear deterrence because he foresaw that Stalin’s Soviet Union would rapidly acquire the bomb and develop rocketry... Macrae makes [von Neumann’s] contributions accessible to the lay reader, and also discusses von Neumann’s relationships with two long-suffering wives, his political differences with Einstein and the cancer that killed him.” — Publishers Weekly “Macrae’s life of the great mathematician shows dramatically what proper care and feeding can do for an unusually capacious mind.” — John Wilkes, Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Churchill written by Sebastian Haffner and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the tradition of Stefan Zweig’s biographical studies, Haffner’s Churchill is a concise, effective, warts-and-all analysis of one of the giants of the twentieth century. Beginning with a brief history of the Churchill family, Haffner examines the future Prime Minister’s childhood; his early failures in school and in politics; his indomitable energy and drive; how he managed to become an inspirational figure to anti-Nazis all over the world; and how he managed to seize success from the jaws of defeat over and over again. Compact, elegant and incisive, this is the one book about Churchill that is a must-read. “One of the most brilliant things of any length written about Churchill.” — The Times Literary Supplement “Fast-moving and perceptive.” — The (London) Times “A wonderful portrait of Churchill.” — Die Zeit “A ravishing biography.” — Der Spiegel “[A] fascinating psychological study of Britain’s greatest war leader... a pleasure to put on your bookshelf” — Tribune “His Meaning of Hitler published in 1978 remains a masterpiece of historiography. His Churchill biography gives the first indication of his great talent for brief, wonderfully graphic insights.” — Süddeutsche Zeitung “Of all [Haffner’s] books, this is the one that stays in my memory.” — Marcel Reich-Ranicki “[Haffner] was an ‘admirer of great men’ and among all the biographies of Winston Churchill his brief sketch of the man who ‘risked Britain in order to defeat Hitler’ is a model of historically empathetic veneration.” — Joachim Fest “Astute, short, analytical, like all Haffner’s work. Cuts away anything that is not bare essential, what remains stays with you for a lifetime.” — J. AB Sennef, Quora “What distinguishes this brilliant biography is its partisanship. It does not list facts in order and evaluate them. Every sentence is witness to the fact that the biographer loves this man with all his failings.” — Wolfgang Franssen, Belletristik Couch “A jewel. Haffner lived through the decisive years in Britain and gives a convincing description the fragile atmosphere in which Churchill fought his battles.” — Tarzan von Aquin “[Haffner was] one of the great historians and journalists of the last century.” —Andrew Roberts

Download or read book Founder A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time written by Amos Elon and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this short biography of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), historian and journalist Amos Elon describes how the founder of the Rothschild dynasty started out by dealing in rare coins and traveling across Germany while still confined, as a Frankfurt Jew, to its Judengasse. Assisted by his five skilled sons, Rothschild subsequently built up a fortune by helping manage the investments of the Landgrave of Hesse, circumventing Napoleon’s blockade of England and funding Napoleon’s eventual defeat. “This slim, charming volume is actually a biographical essay, yet it succeeds in snatching its elusive subject from oblivion.” — Ron Chernow, The New York Times “This is a fascinating story.” — The New York Review of Books “A memorable first biography of a near-mythical founding father.” — Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly researched, fascinating, and altogether exemplary biography.” —Kirkus Reviews “Amos Elon’s portrait of the man who fathered a dynasty makes fascinating reading for anyone even mildly interested in money and power and their effects on history. Founder is a rich and colorful examination of [Meyer Amschel Rothschild]” — Morley Safer “Elon’s book... is a thoroughly researched and absorbing biography.” — St. Louis Jewish Light “A biography that’s a must read for today’s entrepreneurs.” — Houston Chronicle

Download or read book The Meaning of Hitler written by Sebastian Haffner and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this succinct, fact-based, insightful analysis of Hitler and his impact on the world, Sebastian Haffner displays his skills as a first-class journalist and a student of German and modern European history. A keen psychologist, he describes the man, the politician, the ideologue, the military leader, the mass-murderer, and ultimately the traitor to his own (adopted) country. “Mr Haffner ... has exposed better, and more briefly, than anyone else the clockwork of that infernal machine” — Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Sunday Telegraph “Lucid, informative and provocative.” — Golo Mann, Der Spiegel “Nothing I have read on the Third Reich has been as valuable as Sebastian Haffner’s Meaning of Hitler” — Manfred Rommel, Stuttgarter Nachrichten “a stimulating book, brilliant and rich in ideas; in short a masterpiece of historical essay writing.” — Joachim Fest, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “This study ... deserves the highest praise. There is nothing of this brevity and depth to inform the younger generation and give those who lived through the era food for thought.” — Peter Diehl-Thiele, Süddeutsche Zeitung “He circumnavigates the Hitler phenomenon in order to illuminate it from seven different viewpoints, and that in under 200 lucid and precise pages without assuming any prior knowledge.” — Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Münchner Merkur “not one more biography but an analysis - a most penetrating analysis - of what Hitler was up to in his astonishing career” — A.L. Rowse “Sebastian Haffner’s book already has received recognition ... as perhaps the best that has dealt with the phenomenon of Hitler and his impact on the 20th century. It is better than Trevor-Roper’s best-seller, The Last Days of Hitler ... a most penetrating analysis of what Hitler was up to in his astonishing career.” — The New Republic “Tough-minded evaluation of Hitler’s career ... That this book was a best-seller in Germany [43 weeks] indicates that Haffner’s countrymen welcomed this compact, lucid, hard-headed reexamination of contemporary history.” — Publishers Weekly “Until [1991], as Sebastian Haffner wrote in his short, matchless book The Meaning of Hitler (1978), we had been living in the Europe which Hitler created for us: the split continent and the mutilated, divided Germany.” — Neal Ascherson, The Observer

Download or read book Franz Werfel A Life in Prague Vienna and Hollywood written by Peter Stephan Jungk and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Czech-born playwright, novelist and poet Franz Werfel (1890-1945) became internationally famous(and a special target of the Nazis) after he wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the first novel about the Armenian Genocide. He later published the Catholic classic The Song of Bernadette, written after a deeply religious experience in Lourdes, a stop on his escape route to the United States through occupied France. Born into a wealthy family of Prague Jews, Werfel was torn between his Jewish identity and his attraction to Catholicism, between high art and popular success. He was friends with Franz Kafka and Max Brod in his youth and later and part of a larger Central European intellectual circle that included Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. He married Alma Schindler-Mahler-Gropius (widow of composer Gustav Mahler and ex-wife of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius). The couple fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and became part of the German exile community of California. They lived in Beverly Hills where Werfel died, a successful Hollywood screenwriter. “This lovely book is more than a biography — a meditation on art, history and human life.” — John Simon, New York Times Book Review “An exemplary biography.” Edward Timms, The Times Literary Supplement “Jungk’s description of how he researched his subject is highly suspenseful and reads like a detective story.” — Der Spiegel “This exemplary biography recalls Werfel’s career and its vanished settings as part of the cultural history of the West. Mr. Jungk also provides a searing picture of Werfel’s wife, the famous Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel...” — The New Yorker “This biography, ostensibly the story of a life, is really a broad panorama of culture and history... It is Jungk’s genius to seduce us into following him into Werfel’s world, and to keep us there, completely enthralled.” — Die Welt

Download or read book Stefan and Lotte Zweig s South American Letters written by Stefan Zweig and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Download or read book American Cassandra The Life of Dorothy Thompson written by Peter Kurth and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was America’s first internationally famous female foreign correspondent. Born outside of Buffalo, New York, she graduated from Syracuse University in 1914 and honed her writing and interviewing skills in the women’s suffrage movement before heading for Europe as a freelance journalist. Reporting from Vienna, Budapest and Berlin during the rise of Nazism, she was the first western journalist to be expelled from Germany by Adolf Hitler after denigrating him in a profile. Her later columns in the Ladies’ Home Journal and radio broadcasts for CBS (published as Listen, Hans) made her, next to Eleanor Roosevelt, the most influential woman in the United States. Thompson was married three times: her second marriage was to the American novelist, Nobel Prize-winner, and alcoholic Sinclair Lewis; her third and happiest, to Czech artist Maxim Kopf. She also had several lesbian relationships. Avidly interested in everything from sustainable farming to the fine arts, she divided her later years between New York City and her farm in Barnard, Vermont. “A skillful exploration of the life and personality of the formidable foreign correspondent” — New York Times “[readers] will be pleased to meet a fascinating, driven and indomitable woman who richly deserves this fine biography” — Thomas Griffith, New York Times “Sensationally good ... Kurth’s vividly detailed and dramatic portrayal of Thompson’s life fully compensates for the memoirs she planned but never lived to write. Here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a woman we must not forget.” — USA Today “Kurth guides us through the tumultuous complexities of the time-the rise of Nazism in Germany; isolationism in America; the Second World War; the establishment of Israel and other issues that Thompson took over as her personal battleground. His daunting task is to show us a mind at work, and he pulls it off.” — Washington Post “In a day of dime-a-dozen pundits jabbering on the talk shows, Thompson’s diligence and influence are worth recalling. Mr. Kurth’s compulsively readable account allows us to re-live an age and do just that.” — Wall Street Journal “Kurth has a surprising grasp of Thompson’s emotional makeup, strictly avoiding the kind of supercilious or paternalistic attitude that such a character invites in male authors. His biography is insightful without being sentimental, warm without being sycophantic.” — Toronto Star “An important asset of this big, solid book is author Kurth’s prolific use of Thompson’s own words. She left 150 file cases of published and unpublished writings — chunks of private thoughts and musings on her three husbands and her own sexuality one would have expected her to burn... Kurth has battled through this paper blizzard and emerged with a clear-as-ice-water picture of a turbulent, complex personality.” —Baltimore Sun “Peter Kurth, author of the haunting Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, proves once again that he is the equal of Stefan Zweig as a biographer of women. His fairness, his control of his material and his eye for the revealing quotation are such that he makes us empathize with Miss Thompson even when we feel like strangling her.” — Washington Times

Download or read book A Jewish Athlete Swimming Against Stereotype in 20th Century Europe written by Helen Epstein and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-18 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This daughter's profile of Czechoslovak swimmer and water polo player Kurt Epstein (1904-1975) traces the history of Jewish athletes in Central Europe and provides a case study of one such life-long athlete. Epstein grew up a stone's throw from the Elbe River and began swimming before the First World War, when his town of Roudnice nad Labem was still part of Austria-Hungary. In high school, he became a competitive rower and swimmer, challenging prevailing stereotypes about Jews and becoming a leading Czechoslovak water polo player and swimming coach, representing his country at two Olympic Games, in 1928 and 1936. In addition to describing the cultural background of the Epstein family in the Bohemian countryside, the book examines Kurt Epstein's decision to participate in the 1936 Berlin "Nazi" Olympics, and follows him through a series of Nazi concentration camps back to Prague, where he was elected member of the Czechoslovak National Olympic Committee. After the Communist putsch of 1948, Epstein vowed to flee "in a swimsuit if necessary" and, at 44, emigrated to New York City where he became a cutter in the garment district, swam weekly at the St. George pool in Brooklyn, and served as Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World.

Download or read book The Pillar of Salt written by Albert Memmi and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When The Pillar of Salt was first published in 1953, it caused a scandal in Tunis. Acclaimed sociologist Albert Memmi, the son of poor Jewish parents who lived at the edge of the equally poor Jewish and Muslim quarters, wrote candidly about the life of Tunisia’s small Jewish community and the failings of the tiny local bourgeoisie, “which thought itself opulent but was only ridiculous.” Memmi was no less critical of his Muslim fellow citizens or of the various European colonialists in his vicinity. “The Pillar of Salt reads like a general indictment,” Memmi writes in a new introduction to this 2013 eBook edition. This is an unusual man’s coming of age story and a document about a community that has now all but disappeared. “The grave torment of the truly homeless is the theme of Albert Memmi's mature, thoughtful book... His father an Italian Jew, his mother a Berber, Benillouche struggles on the tattered fringe of the Tunisian ghetto for the very air he breathes... Beneath this account of privation, there is a more deeply harrowing realization on the part of the protagonist that he belongs nowhere.” — New York Times “In the Celine-Sartre-Camus tradition of the contemporary French novel of despair, this autobiographical narrative has maturity, stylistic grace, and purpose... A thoughtful, perceptive work.” — Library Journal “Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, Memmi’s young hero and narrator, is a Jewish native of French-colonized Tunisia ... Memmi’s ... semiautobiographical novel powerfully distinguishes itself through its unblinking examination of the contradictions that thwart even Alexandre’s most altruistic ambitions. After volunteering to work in a labor camp during World War II, Alexandre discovers that the class and ethnic distinctions haunting him continued within the camp. Ultimately, only exile and fiction writing — ‘mastering ... life by recreating it’ — can avert despair.” — Publishers Weekly “Told with clarity of vision, a passionate sense of justice, and a warm heart.” — New York Herald Tribune

Download or read book Budapest Diary In Search of the Motherbook written by Susan Rubin Suleiman and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth — where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in 1949 as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons for a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years after the war and of the stormy marriage between her father, a brilliant Talmudic scholar, and her mother, a cosmopolitan woman from a more secular Jewish family. In 1993, after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for a six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest. Emerging from this eloquent, often suspenseful diary is the portrait of an intellectual who recaptures her past and comes into contact with the vital, troubling world of contemporary Eastern Europe. Suleiman's vivid descriptions of her encounters with a proud, old city and its people in a time of historical change remind us that every life story is at once unique and part of a larger history. "I recommend this autobiographical narrative because it is grave and beautiful. Better still, it is shatteringly truthful." — Elie Wiesel "Susan Rubin was a little girl when her parents fled through darkened fields to escape the Communist regime in Hungary in 1949... [This] is a poignant piece of self-revelation, sprinkled with some trenchant observations on the way the dead hand of history has weighed down the former Warsaw Pact countries." — Kirkus "[A] fascinating, revealing journal... brutally honest." — Publishers Weekly "This pensive, forthright journal records Suleiman's efforts to reconnect with a long-forgotten homeland." — Booklist "Suleiman lyrically describes her quest and the complex interaction of the Eastern Europe of the past and present." — Boston Globe "A tale of survival, adaptation and pure luck, whose darker side reveals the linguistic and emotional cost of emigration and exile, the feeling of permanent displacement, of being nowhere at home." — Forward "This story must speak to all those who have fled and who have ever dreamed of a return." — Independent Jewish Women's Magazine "[A] thoughtful and sophisticated memoir... You don't have to be Hungarian or Jewish to appreciate writing like this." — Montreal Gazette

Download or read book A Living Will written by Helen Epstein and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal account of a mother’s sudden and unexpected hospitalization, and how her adult children negotiated end-of-life decisions. This essay appeared as a New York Magazine cover story on November 27, 1989 as "A Death in the Family 1989."

Download or read book Trujillo The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator written by Robert D. Crassweller and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2023-01-28 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the most satisfactory study of Rafael Trujillo [1891-1961] yet published. Mr. Crassweller has used printed materials and interviews to reconstruct the life of the Caribbean strongman and his book is not the typical sycophantic panegyric published during Trujillo’s rule or a recapitulation of the worst excesses of his dictatorship. It is a surprisingly well-balanced attempt to understand the man, his motives, and his regime. Trujillo was the product of the United States occupation between 1916 and 1924. Born in humble circumstances in 1891, his career had been inauspicious until he discovered that he might be able to obtain a commission in a new constabulary being formed by the occupation forces... within ten years he was in charge of the nation’s armed forces, and by 1930 he was President. From that time until his death he ruled his country with an iron hand, and the author lucidly shows how he converted it into his own personal estate through political and economic manipulation. A vain man, Trujillo used the vanity of others to achieve his goals. He thought everyone had his price, and all too often he was right. Not only would Dominicans debase themselves in order to receive the dictator’s largesse, but there is evidence, as the author shows, that United States Congressmen and even the Vatican accepted favours from Trujillo. But in his quest for power he made more enemies than friends, and the account of his decline is both informative and dramatic.” — International Journal “Crassweller has produced a superb volume about ‘the man’ in Caribbean politics from the early 1930’s until the rise of Fidel Castro. This portrait of Dominican politics and the ascendancy of Trujillo is chilling in its implications and far surpasses what the average critic of Trujillo imagined. The former dictator is portrayed as a tyrant in the absolute sense operating through a series of clever tactics to intimidate those around him... this volume must stand as an achievement.” — The Review of Politics “[H]ere we have a small miracle... [Crassweller] has produced the best work on Trujillo, the man, and the Dominican Republic, the country, that we have or are likely to get in the years immediately ahead... In scope, the book is both expansive and intimate, paying careful attention to the changing historical circumstances as it concentrates on the personal characteristics and activities.” — The New York Times Book Review “This book deserves to be read: no comparable picture of the Caribbean saga exists in English... a devastating history... This biography of Trujillo may be read as a super-detective story, or as colorful history, or as a commentary on our times. No one starting the book is likely to put it down, and he will be left at the end with a pressing question of how sane, clean, and healthy forces can be made to triumph in this area so vital to the safety of the United States.” — The New York Herald Tribune’s Book Week “This is a remarkable account of a remarkable period in Caribbean history... well-planned and well-written.” — Chicago Tribune “Mr. Crassweller’s account of this power-crazy dictator and his times is a monumental job of historical and biographical research and writing.” — Christian Science Monitor “This biography of Trujillo is by far the best available. In a vivid, very readable style, it presents a mass of information, much of it hardly known, most of it of historical interest... highly recommended as a lively portrait of a fascinating character.” — Caribbean Studies “I suppose everyone has told you what a subtle, elegant and penetrating account you have written of Trujillo. But let me also add my word. This combination of artistry and craftsmanship happens only about once every five years.” — John Kenneth Galbraith