Download or read book Danubia A Personal History of Habsburg Europe written by Simon Winder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charmingly personal history of Hapsburg Europe, as lively as it is informative, by the author of Germania For centuries much of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire was in the royal hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off—through luck, guile and sheer mulishness—any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere—indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without the House of Hapsburg. Danubia, Simon Winder's hilarious new book, plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, royalty, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Full of music, piracy, religion and fighting, it is the history of a strange dynasty, and the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder's storytelling genius and infectious curiosity in Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating tale of the Habsburgs and their world.
Download or read book Personal History written by Katharine Graham and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen in the new movie The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep, here is the captivating, inside story of the woman who piloted the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media. In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story - one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candour and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband - a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted - and mastered - the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.
Download or read book Germania written by Simon Winder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A UNIQUE EXPLORATION OF GERMAN CULTURE, FROM SAUSAGE ADVERTISEMENTS TO WAGNER Sitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?" This book is an attempt to answer that question. Why spend time wandering around a country that remains a sort of dead zone for many foreigners, surrounded as it is by a force field of historical, linguistic, climatic, and gastronomic barriers? Winder's book is propelled by a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that, since 1945, so many Germans have worked to rebuild. Germania is a very funny book on serious topics—how we are misled by history, how we twist history, and how sometimes it is best to know no history at all. It is a book full of curiosities: odd food, castles, mad princes, fairy tales, and horse-mating videos. It is about the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.
Download or read book Lotharingia written by Simon Winder and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2019 Shortlisted for The Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'No Briton has written better than Winder about Europe' - Sunday Times In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate. In this beguiling, hilarious and compelling book we retrace how both from west and from east any number of ambitious characters have tried and failed to grapple with these Lotharingians, who ultimately became Dutch, German, Belgian, French, Luxembourgers and Swiss. Over many centuries, not only has Lotharingia brought forth many of Europe's greatest artists, inventors and thinkers, but it has also reduced many a would-be conqueror to helpless tears of rage and frustration. Joining Germania and Danubia in Simon Winder's endlessly fascinating retelling of European history, Lotharingia is a personal, wonderful and gripping story.
Download or read book The Danube written by Nick Thorpe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnificent Danube both cuts across and connects central Europe, flowing through and alongside ten countries: Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany. Travelling its full length from east to west, against the river’s flow, Nick Thorpe embarks on an inspiring year-long journey that leads to a new perspective on Europe today. Thorpe’s account is personal, conversational, funny, immediate, and uniquely observant—everything a reader expects in the best travel writing. Immersing himself in the Danube’s waters during daily morning swims, Thorpe likewise becomes immersed in the histories of the lands linked by the river. He observes the river’s ecological conditions, some discouraging and others hopeful, and encounters archaeological remains that whisper of human communities sustained by the river over eight millennia. Most fascinating of all are the ordinary and extraordinary people along the way—the ferrymen and fishermen, workers in the fields, shopkeepers, beekeepers, waitresses, smugglers and border policemen, legal and illegal immigrants, and many more. For readers who anticipate their own journeys on the Danube, as well as those who only dream of seeing the great river, this book will be a unique and treasured guide.
Download or read book Budapest 1900 written by John Lukacs and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished historian and Budapest native offers a rich and eloquent portrait of one of the great European cities at the height of its powers. Budapest, like Paris and Vienna, experienced a remarkable exfoliation at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of population growth, material expansion, and cultural exuberance, it was among the foremost metropolitan centers of the world, the cradle of such talents as Bartók, Kodály, Krúdy, Ady, Molnár, Koestler, Szilárd, and von Neumann, among others. John Lukacs provides a cultural and historical portrait of the city—its sights, sounds, and inhabitants; the artistic and material culture; its class dynamics; the essential role played by its Jewish population—and a historical perspective that describes the ascendance of the city and its decline into the maelstrom of the twentieth century. Intimate and engaging, Budapest 1900 captures the glory of a city at the turn of the century, poised at the moment of its greatest achievements, yet already facing the demands of a new age. “Lukacs’s Budapest, like Hemingway’s Paris, is a moveable feast.” —Chilton Williamson “Lukacs’s book is a lyrical, sometimes dazzling, never merely nostalgic evocation of a glorious period in the city’s history.” —The New York Review of Books “A reliable account of a beautiful city at the zenith of its prosperity.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Germania written by Simon Winder and published by Picador. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germania is a very personal guide to the Germany that Simon Winder loves. Equally passionate about the region's history, folklore, cuisine, architecture and landscape, Winder describes Germany's past afresh – and in doing so sees a country much like our own: Protestant, aggressive and committed to eating some very strange food. This accessible, enthusiastic and startlingly vivid account is a brilliant introduction to the hidden wonders of Germany.
Download or read book Sunflower written by Gyula Krudy and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gyula Krúdy is a marvelous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where urbane sophistication can erupt without warning into passion and madness. In Sunflower young Eveline leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of her desperate love for the unscrupulous charmer Kálmán. There she encounters the melancholy Álmos-Dreamer, who is languishing for love of her, and is visited by the bizarre and beautiful Miss Maszkerádi, a woman who is a force of nature. The plot twists and turns; elemental myth mingles with sheer farce: Krúdy brilliantly illuminates the shifting contours and acid colors of the landscape of desire. John Bátki’s outstanding translation of Sunflower is the perfect introduction to the world of Gyula Krúdy, a genius as singular as Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz, or Joseph Roth.
Download or read book The Man Who Saved Britain written by Simon Winder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--was, more than anything, the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. By inventing the parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. In The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs of his own fandom while illuminating what Bond says about sex, the monarchy, food, class, attitudes toward America, and everything in between. The result is an insightful and, above all, entertaining exploration of postwar Britain under the influence of the legendary Agent 007.
Download or read book The Habsburg Empire written by Pieter M. Judson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A EuropeNow Editor’s Pick A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year “Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.” —Tim Blanning, Wall Street Journal “This is an engaging reappraisal of the empire whose legacy, a century after its collapse in 1918, still resonates across the nation-states that replaced it in central Europe. Judson rejects conventional depictions of the Habsburg empire as a hopelessly dysfunctional assemblage of squabbling nationalities and stresses its achievements in law, administration, science and the arts.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times “Spectacularly revisionist... Judson argues that...the empire was a force for progress and modernity... This is a bold and refreshing book... Judson does much to destroy the picture of an ossified regime and state.” —A. W. Purdue, Times Higher Education “Judson’s reflections on nations, states and institutions are of broader interest, not least in the current debate on the future of the European Union after Brexit.” —Annabelle Chapman, Prospect
Download or read book The Birth of Classical Europe written by Simon Price and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative and intriguing look at the foundations of Western civilization from two leading historians; the first volume in the Penguin History of Europe The influence of ancient Greece and Rome can be seen in every aspect of our lives. From calendars to democracy to the very languages we speak, Western civilization owes a debt to these classical societies. Yet the Greeks and Romans did not emerge fully formed; their culture grew from an active engagement with a deeper past, drawing on ancient myths and figures to shape vibrant civilizations. In The Birth of Classical Europe, the latest entry in the much-acclaimed Penguin History of Europe, historians Simon Price and Peter Thonemann present a fresh perspective on classical culture in a book full of revelations about civilizations we thought we knew. In this impeccably researched and immensely readable history we see the ancient world unfold before us, with its grand cast of characters stretching from the great Greeks of myth to the world-shaping Caesars. A landmark achievement, The Birth of Classical Europe provides insight into an epoch that is both incredibly foreign and surprisingly familiar.
Download or read book Clean written by Virginia Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we still have nits? What exactly are 'purity rules'? And why have baths scarcely changed in 200 years? The long history of personal hygiene and purity is a fascinating subject that reveals how closely we are linked to our deeper past. In this pioneering book, Virginia Smith covers the global history of human body-care from the Neolithic to the present, using first-hand accounts and sources. From pre-historic grooming rituals to New Age medicine, from ascetics to cosmetics, Smith looks at how different cultures have interpreted and striven for personal cleanliness and shows how, throughout history, this striving for purity has brought great social benefits as well as great tragedies. It is probably safe to say that no-one who reads this book will look at his or her body (or bathroom) in quite the same way again.
Download or read book The Habsburgs written by Martyn Rady and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A feat of both scholarship and storytelling" (Wall Street Journal)--the definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries. In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built--and then lost--over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs gained control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs dominated Central Europe through the First World War. Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But Rady reveals their enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. This is the remarkable history of a dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world.
Download or read book After Europe written by Ivan Krastev and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). In a new afterword written in the wake of the 2019 EU parliamentary elections, Krastev concludes that although the union is as fragile as ever, its chances of enduring are much better than they were just a few years ago.
Download or read book Roma in an Expanding Europe written by Dena Ringold and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, Roma (or gypsies) are now the largest minority group in Europe. They are also one of the poorest and most vulnerable groups, living mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, suffering poverty levels as high as ten times that found within majority populations. The lack of information about the living conditions and needs of Roma people compound these stark gaps in human development outcomes. This publication, prepared for a conference held in Budapest, Hungary in June 2003, brings together original sociological research, evaluations of programme initiatives, and the first comparative cross-country household survey on ethnicity and poverty. It finds that Roma poverty is multi-faceted and can only be addressed by a inclusive policy approach which respects their diversity.
Download or read book Run Brother Run written by David Berg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing family memoir, hailed as “remarkable” (The New York Times), “compelling” (People), and “engrossing” (Kirkus Reviews), of a trial lawyer’s tempestuous boyhood in Texas that led to the vicious murder of his brother by the father of actor Woody Harrelson. In 1968, David Berg’s brother, Alan, was murdered by Charles Harrelson, a notorious hit man and father of Woody Harrelson. Alan was only thirty-one when he disappeared (David was twenty-six) and for more than six months his family did not know what had happened to him—until his remains were found in a ditch in Texas. There was an eyewitness to the murder: Charles Harrelson’s girlfriend, who agreed to testify. For his defense, Harrelson hired Percy Foreman, then the most famous criminal lawyer in America. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Harrelson was acquitted. After burying his brother all those years ago, David Berg rarely talked about him. Yet in 2008 he began to remember and research Alan’s life and death. The result is Run, Brother, Run: part memoir—about growing up Jewish in 1950s Texas and Arkansas—and part legal story, informed by Berg’s experience as a seasoned lawyer. Writing with cold-eyed grief and a wild, lacerating humor, Berg tells us first about the striving Jewish family that created Alan Berg and set him on a course for self-destruction, and then about the miscarriage of justice when Berg’s murderer was acquitted. David Berg brings us a painful family history, a portrait of an iconic American place, and a true-crime courtroom murder drama that “elegantly brings to life the rough-and-tumble boomtown that was 1960s-era Houston, and conveys with unflinching force the emotional damage his brother’s death did to his family” (The New York Times).
Download or read book Queen Anne written by Anne Somerset and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment. At the core of Anne Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper. Against a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s father, James II, and brought her to power . . . religious differences (she was born Protestant—her parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of foreign invasion and civil war—the much-admired historian, author of Elizabeth I (“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample, stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World), tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of royal archives, parliamentary records, personal correspondence and previously unpublished material. Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.
