Download or read book The Men from Praga written by Anne Berkeley and published by Salt Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE PRIZE This sharp and unpredictable collection opens in the Cold War. Berkeley’s father was a V-bomber navigator, a conflicted inheritance of pride and guilt which informs the opening poems. While parents struggle to keep life normal, the secrecies and occluded horrors of the period play out in vividly imagined children’s games. One locus of memory is a ruined mansion, sliced into many apartments, through which the adult narrator looks back on the past unsure of what really happened, only that the child did not understand. The second part of the book develops the theme of shared humanity from the Warsaw fishermen of the title poem to a hi-tech dystopia of the near future, by way of a dissolute Norwegian, a traduced Baudelaire, a contemporary woodwose, and a petrolhead on the A1M. The array of voices – boastful, baffled, sardonic – employs Berkeley’s experience as a poetry performer with The Joy of Six. In poems that frequently wrongfoot the reader, the Empire shrinks to an opera audience, the Royal Family is reduced to waxworks, and Cambridge finally gets its ecological mass transportation system. Obliquely political, this debut collection takes a sideways look at modern England.
Download or read book Reflections of Prague written by Ivan Margolius and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflections of Prague is the story of how a Czech Jewish family become embroiled in the most tragic and tumultuous episodes of the twentieth century. Through their eyes we see the history of their beloved Prague, a unique European city, and the wider, political forces that tear their lives apart. Their moving story traces the major events, turmoil, oppression and triumphs of Europe through the last hundred years – from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the First World War; from the vibrant artistic and intellectual life of Prague in the times of Kafka, the Capek Brothers and Masaryk to years of hunger in a Polish ghetto and the concentration camps of Hitler; from the tyrannous rule of Stalin to the rekindled hopes of Dubcek and the subsequent Soviet occupation to liberation under Havel. Told from Ivan’s perspective, it is a poignant but uplifting tale that tells of life lived with purpose and conviction, in the face of personal suffering and sacrifice. ‘A remarkable book. This archetypical story of the twentieth century is intertwined with an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative of the history of the Czechs, of Prague, interspersed with samples of exquisite poetry by great contemporary poets. So the narrative flows like Eliot’s sweet Thames full of the debris of tragic lives, of horrors, of moments of beauty and testimonies of love – all against the backdrop of man’s inhumanity.’ Josef Škvorecký ‘A poignant and vivid mémoire of a child searching for traces of his father, lost in the murky ideologies of post war Central Europe. An engrossing book.’ Sir John Tusa
Download or read book Prague Pictures written by John Banville and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, 'devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art', who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, or even the depredations of the tourist boom after the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it, the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels, and paints a portrait of the Prague of today, revelling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, when he engaged in a spot of art smuggling, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.
Download or read book Prague in Black and Gold written by Peter Demetz and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 1998-03-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.
Download or read book The Prague Cemetery written by Umberto Eco and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prague Cemetery is the #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? “Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale... Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” —The New York Times
Download or read book Prague Spring written by Simon Mawer and published by Little, Brown Book Group. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Prague Spring is a wonderfully atmospheric portrait of the city as well as a political and historical thriller with dashes of espionage. It is as brilliant as anything he has written, which is saying a lot' The Times It's the summer of 1968, the year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter. Two English students, Ellie and James, set off to hitch-hike across Europe with no particular aim in mind but a continent, and themselves, to discover. Somewhere in southern Germany they decide, on a whim, to visit Czechoslovakia where Alexander Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' is smiling on the world. Meanwhile Sam Wareham, a first secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with a mixture of diplomatic cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. It seems that, for the first time, nothing is off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?
Download or read book The Prague Golem written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Contemporary Drama of Italy written by Lander MacClintock and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Monthly Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1800 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Prague Sonata written by Bradford Morrow and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Twining music history with the political tumults of the 20th century, The Prague Sonata is a sophisticated, engrossing intellectual mystery.”—The Wall Street Journal Music and war, war and music—these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus, a novel more than a dozen years in the making. In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta’s eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript’s true owner—a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since they were forced apart by the Second World War—and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one after the music’s secrets. Magisterially evoking decades of Prague’s tragic and triumphant history, from the First World War through the soaring days of the Velvet Revolution, and moving from postwar London to the heartland of immigrant America, The Prague Sonata is both epic and intimate, evoking the ways in which individual notes of love and sacrifice become part of the celebratory symphony of life. “An astonishing writer.”—Joyce Carol Oates “A treasure of a novel, a deliciously enveloping musical mystery.”—Diane Ackerman “An enthralling epic quest of a novel...Regular doses of surprise and suspense keep us immersed and involved...Compulsively enjoyable.”?Minneapolis StarTribune
Download or read book The Man Verdi written by Frank Walker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic biography of composer Giuseppe Verdi, Frank Walker reveals Verdi the man through his connections with the individuals who knew him best. “Walker focuses on some of the more significant people in Verdi’s life and carefully scrutinizes his relationships with them. His wife, Giuseppina Strepponi; his student and amanuensis, Emanuele Muzio; the conductor who first fully understood Verdi’s mature art, Angelo Mariani; the great prima donna, Teresa Stolz; the incomparable librettist and friend of his old age, Arrigo Boito—each passes before our eyes in Walker’s meticulous reconstruction. As we learn more about them, we learn more about Verdi. We see him through the eyes of his closest friends, we watch his daily activities, his daily thoughts, his habits, his warmth, his domestic tyranny. The myth dissolves and a human being stands before us.”—Philip Gossett, from the introduction
Download or read book The Vultures written by Henry Seton Merriman and published by Copp, Clark Company. This book was released on 1902 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mendl Mann s The Fall of Berlin written by Mendl Mann and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mendl Mann’s autobiographical novel The Fall of Berlin tells the painful yet compelling story of life as a Jewish soldier in the Red Army. Menakhem Isaacovich is a Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, finds refuge in the USSR. Translated into English from the original Yiddish by Maurice Wolfthal, the narrative follows Menakhem as he fights on the front line in Stalin’s Red Army against Hitler and the Nazis who are destroying his homeland of Poland and exterminating the Jews. Menakhem encounters anti-Semitism on various occasions throughout the novel, and struggles to comprehend how seemingly normal people could hold such appalling views. As Mann writes, it is odd that "vicious, insidious anti-Semitism could reside in a person with elevated feelings, an average person, a decent person”. The Fall of Berlin is both a striking and timelylook at the struggle that many Jewish soldiers faced. An affecting and unique book, which eloquently explores a variety of themes – such as anti-Semitism, patriotism, Stalinism and life as a Jewish soldier in the Second World War – this is essential reading for anyone interested in the Yiddish language, Jewish history, and the history of World War II.
Download or read book Franz Kafka and Prague written by Harald Salfellner and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Men of Silk written by Glenn Dynner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hasidism, a kabbalah-inspired movement founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (c1700-1760), transformed Jewish communities across Eastern and East Central Europe. In Men of Silk, Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. Dynner presents Hasidism as a socioreligious phenomenon that was shaped in crucial ways by its Polish context. His social historical analysis dispels prevailing romantic notions about Hasidism. Despite their folksy image, the movement's charismatic leaders are revealed as astute populists who proved remarkably adept at securing elite patronage, neutralizing powerful opponents, and methodically co-opting Jewish institutions. The book also reveals the full spectrum of Hasidic devotees, from humble shtetl dwellers to influential Warsaw entrepreneurs.
Download or read book Men in Space written by Tom McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy—acclaimed author of Remainder and C—Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism. It follows an oddball cast—dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut—as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. Planting the themes that McCarthy’s later works develop, here McCarthy questions the meaning of all kinds of space—physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical—as reflected in the characters’ various disconnections. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration. With an afterword by Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers
Download or read book The man from Stalingrad written by Robert Blake and published by Babelcube Inc.. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant suspense and mystery thriller that will capture you from the first page. During a vacation in Italy, Sam Carter, a photographer from New York, will see himself involved in a series of inexplicable events that will lead him to a fast-paced thriller full of adventure, espionage, intrigue, romance, suspense and mystery. Let yourself be seduced by this trip to the deepest heart of Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall where passion and revenge coexist with a dark secret from the past.
