Download or read book Our Man in Warszawa written by Jo Harper and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a Brit who has lived in Poland for more than twenty years, this book challenges some accepted thinking in the West about Poland and about the rise of Law and Justice (PiS) as the ruling party in 2015. It is a remarkable account of the Polish post-1989 transition and contemporary politics, combining personal views and experience with careful fact and material collections. The result is a vivid description of the events and scrupulous explanations of the political processes, and all this with an interesting twist – a perspective of a foreigner and insider at the same time. Settled in the position of participant observer, Jo Harper combines the methods of macro and micro analysis with CDA, critical discourse analysis. He presents and interprets the constituent elements and issues of contemporary Poland: the main political forces, the Church, the media, issues of gender, the Russian connection, the much-disputed judicial reform and many others. A special feature of the book is the detailed examination of the coverage of the Poland’s latest two elections, one in 2019 (parliamentary) and the other in 2020 (presidential) in the British media, an insightful and witty specimen of comparative cultural and political analysis.
Download or read book Our Man in Budapest written by Rebecca L. Erbelding and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Our Man in Vienna written by Richard Timothy Conroy and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-08-11 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wit and charm that marked Our Man in Belize enlivens Richard Timothy Conroy's new "diplomatic memoir," in a posting that couldn't have a more different location. But the wheels of lower-level diplomacy, it turns out, turn at the same rate whatever the setting. Plucked from the cost of Central America and put down in post-World-War II Vienna, land of Der Rosencavalier and whipped cream cakes, Conroy still was "not mentioned in dispatches" (or at least, not complimentary ones) but even a lowly vice-consul could do some good in people's lives. Take, for example, his effort to help a woman flee Vienna after she reported that someone was sneaking into her room and slicing off a bit of her foot each night. Or the unfortunate Austrian whose visa application had been rejected three previous times, with no explanation. Conroy discovered that there was a picture of the man in a Red Army sergeant's uniform. Turned out the man had conned a gullible Red Army soldier to lend him the uniform for a snapshot, and an equally gullible group of Russian border guards that he was an undercover Red agent posing as (what he really was) an export-import businessman. Nobody before Conroy had bothered to ask for an explanation. In between similar tales of deep diplomatic deed and misdeed, the author gives his readers an imitable take on the Vienna of those days. Want to buy a second-hand piano? Some inexpensive paintings? How about -- above all -- that famous Viennese food and beer? You could have found it there with Conroy as your guide; failing that, his account of those days is just as rewarding and not nearly as fattening.
Download or read book Strangers in Budapest written by Jessica Keener and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Jessica Keener has written a gorgeous, lyrical, and sweeping novel about the tangled web of past and present. Suspenseful, perceptive, fast-paced, and ultimately restorative.” —Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue Budapest: gorgeous city of secrets, with ties to a shadowy, bloody past. It is to this enigmatic European capital that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move from Boston with their infant son shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. For Annie, it is an effort to escape the ghosts that haunt her past, and Will wants simply to seize the chance to build a new future for his family. Eight months after their move, their efforts to assimilate are thrown into turmoil when they receive a message from friends in the US asking that they check up on an elderly man, a fiercely independent Jewish American WWII veteran who helped free Hungarian Jews from a Nazi prison camp. They soon learn that the man, Edward Weiss, has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced seduced, married, and then murdered his daughter. Annie, unable to resist anyone’s call for help, recklessly joins in the old man’s plan to track down his former son-in-law and confront him, while Will, pragmatic and cautious by nature, insists they have nothing to do with Weiss and his vendetta. What Annie does not anticipate is that in helping Edward she will become enmeshed in a dark and deadly conflict that will end in tragedy and a stunning loss of innocence. Atmospheric and surprising, Strangers in Budapest is, as bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt says, a “dazzlingly original tale about home, loss, and the persistence of love.”
Download or read book Our Man written by George Packer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
Download or read book Rick Steves Budapest written by Rick Steves and published by Rick Steves. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can count on Rick Steves to tell you what you really need to know when traveling in Budapest. Following this book's self-guided walks, you'll explore Europe's most underrated city. Soak with Hungarians in a thermal bath, sample paprika at the Great Market Hall, and take a romantic twilight cruise on the Danube. Wander through the opulence of Budapest's late-19th-century Golden Age. View relics of the bygone communist era at Memento Park. For a break, head into the countryside for Habsburg palaces and Hungarian folk villages. Rick's candid, humorous advice will guide you to good-value hotels and restaurants. He'll help you plan where to go and what to see, depending on the length of your trip. You'll learn which sights are worth your time and money and how to get around like a local. More than just reviews and directions, a Rick Steves guidebook is a tour guide in your pocket.
Download or read book Kidnapped in Budapest written by Andy Dietz and published by Deep River Books LLC. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a warm summer night in 1998, American missionary Andy Dietz strolled along the Danube River toward the open market to purchase a gift for his daughter. Tricked into entering what he thought was a restaurant, Andy unwittingly became part of an elaborate plot of extortion and blackmail orchestrated by the Hungarian mafia. In Kidnapped in Budapest, Andy recounts the harrowing events that would change his life and his view of God forever. Nabbed by men in trench coats, thrown into a taxi, and whisked around to the darkest corners of Budapest, Andy sensed his chances for survival slipping away. "Now you die " screamed one of his frustrated captors. In his most helpless and desperate hour of need, Andy faced the question we all must answer sooner or later: What am I most desperate for? This true, life-or-death account will have readers turning pages and provoked to ask themselves, Am I as desperate to know God as I am to live? Christians will consider whether they are living a life that's defined by daily circumstances, or daring to live in light of the power and purposes of God.
Download or read book Enemies of the People written by Kati Marton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned author Kati Marton tells how her journalist parents survived the Nazis in Budapest and were imprisoned by the Soviets.
Download or read book Budapest Exit written by Csaba Teglas and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Csaba Teglas was confronted with the Nazi invasion of Hungary during World War II, the Soviet occupation following the Allied victory, and finally with the opportunity to escape the oppressive regime during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he responded not with fear, indecision, or submission, but with courage, ingenuity, and hope. In Budapest Exit: A Memoir of Fascism, Communism, and Freedom, Teglas begins with the story of his childhood in Hungary. During the war, the dramatic changes that took place in his country intensified with the invasion of the Nazis. The Nazis' defeat after the terrifying siege of Budapest should have led to freedom, but for Hungary it meant occupation by the Soviets, who were often little better than the fascists. A twelve-year-old friend of Teglas was forced to watch the brutal gang rape of a Jewish family member by the same Soviet soldiers who liberated her from the Nazis. Despite the difficulties of life in Budapest, Teglas met the challenge when sustenance of the family fell on his young shoulders. One of the innovative ways he earned money was to employ his playments to extract ball bearings from wrecked tanks and other military vehicles that he then sold to factories. He also sold rubber rings cut from bicycle tubes to use as canning seals. Before the communists solidified their rule, Teglas obtained admission to the Technical University of Budapest, where he earned a degree despite constant interference in the University by the communists. The following years under the Stalinist dictatorship were the harshest, and Teglas and his family and friends lived in constant fear; some were even subjected to the communist jails and torture chambers. But rather than standing idly by, Teglas protested, sometimes quietly, sometimes more vocally, against the Soviet and communist presence in Hungary. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Teglas became more involved in the opposition to the communists. When it became clear that the revolutionaries were not going to succeed, he knew he had to leave Hungary to avoid retaliation for his involvement. Teglas recounts his dramatic escape through the heavily guarded Iron Curtain and his subsequent emigration to North America, where life an an immigrant presented new challenges. Teglas compares the genocide and tragedies of Nazi order in World War II and of communist rule to recent international events and ethnic cleansing in Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Yugoslavia. He also highlights the failure of the West to stop the war in Bosnia expediently and the possible far-reaching consequences of a "peace" treaty that aims to satisfy the demands of the aggressors while ignoring the rights of others in the Balkans. Even more, though, this memoir is Csaba Teglas's personal story of his youth, told from the point of view of a man with sons of his own. He found in America the freedom for which he had been searching, but he has raised his American sons to remain proud of their Hungarian heritage.
Download or read book The Great Escape written by Kati Marton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “intensely gripping story” of John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Arthur Koestler, and six other world-renowned Hungarian Jews who fled the Nazis (The Washington Post Book World). In this book, New York Times–bestselling author Kati Marton tells the stunning tale of nine men who grew up in Budapest’s brief Golden Age, then, driven from Hungary by anti-Semitism, fled to the West, especially to the United States, and changed the world. These nine men, each celebrated for individual achievements, were part of a unique group who grew up in a time and place that will never come again. Four helped usher in the nuclear age and the computer, two were major movie myth-makers, two were immortal photographers, and one was a seminal writer. From a Peabody Award–winning journalist and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, The Great Escape is a groundbreaking, poignant American story and an important untold chapter of the tumultuous last century. “Describes the crossroads where art and politics meet, the perils of dictatorship and the horrors of war, all of it punctuated by the frantic struggle to create the atomic bomb. . . . Deserves a special place on bookshelves alongside Budapest 1900.” —The New York Times Book Review “By looking at these nine lives—salvaged, and crucial—Marton provides a moving measure of how much was lost.” —The New Yorker “[Marton has] a keen understanding of what it means to leave one’s country behind.” —The Seattle Times “A haunting tale of the wartime Hungarian diaspora. . . . Marton writes beautifully.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Filled with a number of wonderful anecdotes.” —Chicago Sun-Times “An engrossing book.” —Library Journal
Download or read book The Invisible Bridge written by Julie Orringer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical novel set in 1937 Europe tells the story of three Hungarian Jewish brothers bound by history and love, of a marriage tested by disaster, of a Jewish family's struggle against annihilation by the Nazis and of the dangerous power of art in the time of war.
Download or read book Our Man in Yugoslavia written by Sebastian Ritchie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the wartime exploits of Owen Reed, a British army officer who was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service in 1943 and who subsequently served with Tito's partisans in German-occupied Yugoslavia.
Download or read book Budapest Noir written by Vilmos Kondor and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kondor’s impressive first novel, which unfolds against an atmosphere tinged by alienation, fear, and the threat of violence, stands out for its deft writing, plausible scenarios, vivid sense of place, and noir sensibility.”— Library Journal A dark, riveting, and lightning fast novel of murder, intrigue, and political corruption, set in 1936 Hungary during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. Budapest Noir marks the emergence of an extraordinary new voice in literary crime fiction, Vilmos Kondor. Kondor’s remarkable debut brings this European city to breathtaking life—from the wealthy residential neighborhoods of Buda to the slums of Pest—as it follows crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon’s investigation into the strange death of a beautiful woman. As Gordon’s search for the truth leads him to shocking revelations about a seedy underground crime syndicate and its corrupt political patrons, Budapest Noir will transport you to a dark time and place, and hold you there spellbound until the final page is turned.
Download or read book The Restless Hungarian written by Tom Weidlinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet. In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.
Download or read book The Kid from Budapest written by John A. Somori and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turbulent life of a kid growing up between the two world wars in Hungary, and his subsequent survival under Fascism and Communism
Download or read book I Kiss Your Hands Many Times written by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent wartime love story about the forces that brought the author’s parents together and those that nearly drove them apart Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s parents, Hanna and Aladár, met and fell in love in Budapest in 1940. He was a rising star in the foreign ministry—a vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories, were patrons of intellectuals and artists, and entertained dignitaries at their baronial estates. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding. In a secret and controversial deal brokered with Heinrich Himmler, the family turned over their vast holdings in exchange for their safe passage to Portugal. Aladár survived Dachau, a fragile and anxious version of himself. After nearly two years without contact, he located Hanna and wrote her a letter that warned that he was not the man she’d last seen, but he was still in love with her. After months of waiting for visas and transit, she finally arrived in a devastated Budapest in December 1945, where at last they were wed. Framed by a cache of letters written between 1940 and 1947, Szegedy-Maszák’s family memoir tells the story, at once intimate and epic, of the complicated relationship Hungary had with its Jewish population—the moments of glorious humanism that stood apart from its history of anti-Semitism—and with the rest of the world. She resurrects in riveting detail a lost world of splendor and carefully limns the moral struggles that history exacted—from a country and its individuals. Praise for I Kiss Your Hands Many Times “I Kiss Your Hand Many Times is the sweeping story of Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family in pre– and post–World War II Europe, capturing the many ways the struggles of that period shaped her family for years to come. But most of all it is a beautiful love story, charting her parents’ devotion in one of history’s darkest hours.”—Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief, the Huffington Post Media Group “In this panoramic and gripping narrative of a vanished world of great wealth and power, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák restores an important missing chapter of European, Hungarian, and Holocaust history.”—Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America “How many times can a heart be broken? Hungarians know, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family more than most. History has broken theirs again and again. This is the story of that violence, told by the daughter of an extraordinary man and extraordinary woman who refused to surrender to it. Every perfectly chosen word is as it happened. So brace yourself. Truth can break hearts, too.”—Robert Sam Anson, author of War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina “This family memoir is everything you could wish for in the genre: the story of a fascinating family that illuminates the historical time it lived through. . . . Informative and fascinating in every way, [I Kiss Your Hands Many Times] is a great introduction to World War II Hungary and a moving tale of personal relationships in a time of great duress.”—Booklist (starred review)
