Download or read book Music Talks the lives of classical musicians written by Helen Epstein and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of profiles of some of the world's most fascinating musicians, including the late Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Dorothy DeLay and the very lively James Galway and Yo-Yo Ma. Passed from hand to hand and read by music students as well as music lovers everywhere, Music Talks makes a wonderful gift book. “An illuminating introduction to the trials and triumphs of the classical musician.” — Michael E. Ross, New York Times Sunday Book Review “Informative, perceptive, lively and accurate.” — Gary Graffman, Curtis Institute “For twenty years, I've assigned these profiles to my students as a means of understanding themselves and their art. Epstein has a gift for making the sometimes remote world of classical music seem familiar without sacrificing its majesty and mystery.” — Jonathan Baldo, Eastman School of Music “I use her book as a model for my students in teaching them both the profile form and how to provoke subjects into revealing themselves on the page.” — Megan Marshall, Emerson College, Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing

Download or read book The Sound of Beauty written by Michael Kurek and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music remains something of a mystery to many people—ephemeral sounds floating invisibly through the air—here, and then gone. This book begins with the basic question of what music actually is, scientifically, employing simple, clear explanations of wave theory and the acoustics of sound as part of God's natural creation. It presents accessible and fascinating explanations of some theories of the psychology of perception of music, how music speaks to the mind, emotions, and spirit. Some of these concepts have rarely been addressed outside the ivory tower and even more rarely been seen through the lens of Catholic theology. Moving from music and the individual to music in the culture and the Church, the author addresses numerous issues in the context of Catholic thought, including: immanence and transcendence in music the Real Presence and music Moral Theology, Natural Law and music ordered and disordered understandings of music as it relates to the emotions understanding the authentic meanings of "beauty" and "creativity" the real function of music in Catholic liturgy the role of music in evangelization This is a kind of "layman's handbook," a comprehensive theology of all things music, which anyone can understand, written by an internationally respected classical composer and music professor at a top secular university who is also a faithful Catholic. It sheds light on the mysteries of music and furthers the spiritual formation regarding music for Catholics of many ages and walks of life. It is groundbreaking in its comprehensive and holistic treatment of music from a Catholic perspective, and particularly timely in advocating for the renewal of the norms for music in liturgy found in the documents of Vatican II. It also presents one of the most penetrating critical examinations to be found of contemporary classical music, from an insider.

Download or read book Secret Lives of Great Composers written by Elizabeth Lunday and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover little-known stories from music history—including murder, riots, and heartbreak—in this entertaining tour through the fascinating (and surprising) lives of classical music masters With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Gioachino Rossini (draft-dodging womanizer) to Johann Sebastian Bach (jailbird) to Richard Wagner (alleged cross-dresser), Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international music. Here, you’ll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives; that John Cage was obsessed with fungus; that Berlioz plotted murder; and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church’s organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes. This is one music history lesson you’ll never forget!

Download or read book Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers written by Patrick Kavanaugh and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.

Download or read book Listen to This written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

Download or read book Shostakovich written by Laurel E. Fay and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For this biography the author has used many primary documents; Shostakovich's many letters, concert programmes, newspaper articles and diaries of his contemporaries. Showing his life as an example of the paradoxes of living as an artist in Russia.

Download or read book The Art of Possibility written by Rosamund Stone Zander and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their playing you hear not only precision, color and balance, but thunder, lightning and the language of the heart. This is what the Boston Globe said about a performance by conductor Benjamin Zander with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, but it could apply equally to the Zanders' inspirational book, the product of a synthesis of the diverse worlds of the symphony orchestra and cutting-edge psychology. The Art of Possibility offers a set of breakthrough practices for creativity in all human enterprises. Infused with the energy of their dynamic partnership, the book joins together Ben's extraordinary talent as a mover and shaker, teacher, and communicator, with Rosamund Stone Zander's genius for creating innovative paradigms for personal and professional fulfillment. In lively counterpoint, the authors provide us with a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibility can play in every aspect of our lives. The Zanders' deceptively simple practices are based on two premises: that life is composed as a story ("it's all invented") and that, with new definitions, much more is possible than people ordinarily think. The book shifts our perspective with uplifting stories, parables, and anecdotes from the authors' personal experiences as well as from famous and everyday heroes. From "Giving an A," to the mysterious "Rule Number 6," to "Leading from Any Chair"-the account of Ben's stunning realization that the conductor/leader's power is directly linked to how much greatness he is willing to grant to others-each practice offers an opportunity for personal and organizational transformation. The Art of Possibility provides a life-altering approach to fulfilling dreams large and small. The Zanders invite us all to become passionate communicators, leaders, and performers whose lives radiate possibility into the world. Rosamund Stone Zander is a family therapist and a landscape painter. Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. Based on the principles developed through the authors' unique partnership, Mr. Zander gives presentations to managers and executives around the world and Ms. Zander conducts workshops for organizations on practicing the art of possibility.

Download or read book YEAR OF WONDER Classical Music for Every Day written by Clemency Burton-Hill and published by Headline Home. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As featured in the Telegraph and on Radio 4's Today programme. 'A magnificent treasury . . . a fascinating tour de force.' Observer 'Year of Wonder is an absolute treat - the most enlightening way to be guided through the year.' Eddie Redmayne Classical music for everyone - an inspirational piece of music for every day of the year, celebrating composers from the medieval era to the present day, written by award-winning violinist and BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton-Hill. Have you ever heard a piece of music so beautiful it stops you in your tracks? Or wanted to discover more about classical music but had no idea where to begin? Year of Wonder is a unique celebration of classical music by an author who wants to share its diverse wonders with others and to encourage a love for this genre in all readers, whether complete novices or lifetime enthusiasts. Clemency chooses one piece of music for each day of the year, with a short explanation about the composer to put it into context, and brings the music alive in a modern and playful way, while also extolling the positive mindfulness element of giving yourself some time every day to listen to something uplifting or beautiful. Thoughtfully curated and expertly researched, this is a book of classical music to keep you company: whoever you are, wherever you're from. 'The only requirements for enjoying classical music are open ears and an open mind.' Clemency Burton-Hill Playlists are available on most streaming music platforms including Apple Music.

Download or read book Lone Wolf A Biography of Vladimir Ze ev Jabotinsky written by Shmuel Katz and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 943 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shmuel Katz’s detailed and comprehensive biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) is an unabashedly partisan defense of one of the most complex Zionists of the early 20th century. Jabotinsky was a Russian poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist as well as the founder of Revisionist Zionism and of Betar. His oratory in many languages was legendary. Katz first heard him speak in South Africa in the early part of the 20th century and was so impressed that he dropped out of university to work for Revisionist Zionism. Katz recounts Jabotinsky’s efforts to create the Jewish Legion during World War I, traces the history of Jewish relations with the British during the time of the Palestine Mandate, describes Jabotinsky’s role in the defense of the Jewish Yishuv and in organizing the Af-Al-Pi “illegal” Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War II. He paints a vivid mural of competing Jewish personalities, factions and ideologies in the decades before the establishment of Israel. “Shmuel Katz has written an intelligent, journalistic account of Jabotinsky’s life […] and was able to use a substantial amount of previously unavailable material, particularly British archival documents. Although Katz clearly has tremendous respect and affection for Jabotinsky, he does not hesitate to criticize him, for example, for his ineffectiveness as a fundraiser [...] Lone Wolf’s greatest strength is its comprehensive breadth. Every major event and many minor incidents are extensively covered. Furthermore, Katz has taken the rather unorthodox move of including verbatim large sections of Jabotinsky’s original speeches and writings.” — Paul Radensky, H-Net “[S]cholarly and yet totally gripping... we must be everlastingly grateful [...] to Shmuel Katz for so masterfully giving [Jabotinsky’s] memory fresh life... this [book] — quiet, calm, and, while certainly partisan, without a single shrill note — may one day help to direct the course of Israel’s seemingly endless argument with itself.” — Midge Decter, Commentary Magazine “Dr. Katz's monumental and superb biography is a balanced, detailed story of a lion and not a wolf. (Ze'ev in Hebrew means a wolf and this is the reason why the title isLone Wolf)” — Jewish Post

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 44 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 Adepts in Self Portraiture Casanova Stendhal Tolstoy written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the 1920s, Zweig's work of literary criticism and biography might today be titled Masters of Memoir. In it, Stefan Zweig – one of the 20th century’s most widely-published writers – describes the creative process and work of authors for whom no subject is as compelling as the material of their own lives. Adepts in Self-Portraiture examines the lives and work of three men who represent, in Zweig's view, three levels of development in autobiographical writing. The first and most basic level is evinced by Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian womanizer who records his sexual and social conquests, adventures and escapes, without attempting to analyze or even reflect on them. The second level of self-portraiture is exemplified by Stendhal, the French pioneer of psychological fiction, who kept voluminous notebooks on his own experience of life and on whom no nuance of feeling seems to have been lost. Russian master Leo Tolstoy represents the third and highest level of autobiographical writing in which the psychological is imbued with the spiritual and ethical. In Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Stefan Zweig examines the impulses that give rise to life writing and anticipates the current popularity of the memoir form.

Download or read book Mental Healers Franz Anton Mesmer Mary Baker Eddy Sigmund Freud written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. “Health is natural; sickness is unnatural: at least so it seems to man,” is how Stefan Zweig begins his fascinating, often entertaining examinations of Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Sigmund Freud. “Bodily suffering is not assuaged by technical manipulation but through an act of faith.” Mental Healers is dedicated to Albert Einstein, the scientist who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. It first appeared in 1931 as Die Heilung durch den Geist, orHealing Through the Spirit, a title that anticipates our current interest in alternative medicine and the placebo effect. Zweig’s first healer, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), was a German physician who introduced “animal magnetism” to the world. Viewed by many as a charlatan, he died an outcast before he could properly understand and explain his discovery. Zweig’s second healer, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), was a New England matron who found her vocation only in middle age. She established Christian Science, an American Protestant system of religious practice that rejects medical intervention, when she was almost 60. Zweig’s third healer, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), was the Viennese Jewish physician who founded psychoanalysis. Zweig, who knew Freud and delivered a eulogy at his funeral, describes Freud’s then-new ideas with the insight of an artist who lived in the same time and place. Fluently written and psychologically astute, Mental Healers is compelling cultural history and a valuable window onto the genesis of new ideas in healing. “Mesmer, Eddy and Freud were critical figures alerting the modern world to the influences of the mental and emotional on health and illness. Their impact was tremendous and Zweig's classic study provides a wonderful opportunity to engage with these significant innovators.” — Ted Kaptchuk, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Director, Program in Placebo Studies & Therapeutic Encounter

Download or read book Sergei Prokofiev A Biography written by Harlow Robinson and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography traces the career of one of the most significant — and most popular — composers of the twentieth century. Using materials from previously closed archives in the USSR, from archives in Paris and London, and interviews with family members and musicians who knew and worked with Prokofiev, the biography illuminates the life and music of the prolific creator of such classics as Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, the “Classical” Symphony, the Alexander NevskyCantata, and the Lieutenant Kizhe Suite. Prokofiev (1891-1953) lived a life complicated and enriched by the momentous political and social transformation of his homeland in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Born to a middle-class family in rural Ukraine, he demonstrated amazing music talent at a very early age. In 1904, he began serious musical study at St. Petersburg Conservatory. For graduation, he composed (and performed) his audacious Piano Concerto No.1, which helped to make his name as the “Bad Boy of Russian Music.” As one of the most accomplished pianists of his time, Prokofiev composed many works for the instrument which remain today an important fixture of the concert repertory. Prokofiev fled the chaos following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution for the United States, where he lived and worked for several years, producing his comic opera The Love for Three Oranges and his very popular Third Piano Concerto. But he found American taste too underdeveloped, and moved to Paris in 1923 where he collaborated on ballets with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (including Prodigal Son) and wrote several more operas (The Gambler, The Fiery Angel). Prokofiev also toured widely as a concert pianist, reaching nearly all major European capitals and returning several times to the United States, where his music was promoted by Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his Paris years, he began returning regularly on tours to the USSR, greeted with ecstatic enthusiasm. Dissatisfied with his music’s reception in Paris, and homesick for Russia, Prokofiev in 1936 made the controversial decision to move with his wife and two sons to Moscow, just as Josef Stalin’s purges were intensifying. Until 1938 he continued to tour abroad. In Moscow and Leningrad, Prokofiev worked with brilliant artists, including film director Sergei Eisenstein (for whom he wrote the scores toAlexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible), pianist Sviatoslav Richter, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and ballerina Galina Ulanova (who danced the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet). But life was difficult: during World War II, Prokofiev and his second wife were evacuated to Central Asia. Even so, he managed to compose his gigantic opera War and Peace, his epic Fifth Symphony and many other seminal works of Soviet and world music. After suffering a stroke in 1945, Prokofiev’s health worsened. At the same time, his music was attacked as “formalist” by Stalin’s cultural officials in 1948, when his first wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Ironically, Prokofiev died on the very same day as Stalin, March 5, 1953. “One is grateful for Harlow Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography... which is about as good as a musical biography gets: Robinson illuminates the artist’s character, penetrates the human significance of the music, demonstrates an easy command of Russian political and cultural history, and writes with clarity and vigor. Anyone thinking about Prokofiev is deeply in his debt.” — Algis Valiunas, The Weekly Standard “Harlow Robinson’s biography of the composer is the fullest account to date, a thoughtful study of a puzzling personality in and out of music and a comprehensive history of the East-West cultural curtain as it constrained the life and work of the one major artist who had been active on both of its sides... The biographer is fair-minded, generous to Prokofiev but by no means an apologist... the best-written biography of a modern composer.” — Robert Craft, The Washington Post “An indefatigably productive composer who achieved considerable success during his lifetime, Prokofiev seldom seemed satisfied, as he restlessly sought ever-greater recognition. Mr. Robinson explores the darkest corners of this labyrinthine life and brings clarity to some of its more puzzling twists and turns... [he] skillfully relates Prokofiev’s life to greater political and cultural currents.” — Carol J. Oja, The New York Times “[Robinson] tells us more than anyone hitherto about the composer’s life as well as much about the origins and qualities of the music... The first full biography published in English to avoid the pitfalls of cold-war politics... [A] book of many virtues. [Robinson] gives us more facts about Prokofiev’s life than any previous biographer, and he weaves them into a story of politics, art, and romance that marvelously gathers momentum... Robinson writes with the skill of a novelist; but the story, in this instance, is true.” — George Martin, The Opera Quarterly “A splendid life, by a Slavic-studies specialist who is also a musician, of one of our century’s most popular composers... Mr. Robinson’s account of the musical development of his monomaniacal hero is first-rate.” — The New Yorker “[A] well-written, scholarly, and very detailed book...” — April FitzLyon, The Times Literary Supplement “Certainly, there is nothing in English to rival Robinson’s book in scope and detail...” — Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe “[Prokofiev] has long been in need of the full, impressively researched, congenially written study that Robinson gives us.” — Gary Schmidgall, Opera News “[A] fluent, readable and detailed biography of Prokofiev from the perspective of a musically informed cultural historian... Robinson has made a complicated and contradictory life accessible to the western reader... Robinson has performed the important first step of chronicling for the general reader one of the twentieth century’s major musical personalities – and his biography will stitch music into the Russian cultural scene for many professional Slavists as well.” — Caryl Emerson, The Russian Review “The manner in which [Stravinsky and Prokofiev] pursued their careers in tandem for a while is one of the subjects generously described by Harlow Robinson with his flair for interesting and relevant information in his absorbing new biography of Prokofiev.” — Arthur Berger, The New York Review of Books “More detailed and comprehensive, and less politically partisan, than previous biographies, this readable account... deals objectively but compassionately with the life and work of a major Russian composer.” — Publishers Weekly “This is the best biography in English to date on Prokofiev... Robinson candidly exposes Prokofiev’s flaws, from his musical capriciousness and opportunism to his unpardonable social tactlessness... Throughout, the writing is intended for the lay reader — crisp, fast-paced, and unencumbered by technical jargon. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal

Download or read book Three Masters Balzac Dickens Dostoevsky written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”

Download or read book Marie Antoinette The Portrait of an Average Woman written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1932 and for decades since one of Stefan Zweig’s most popular biographies, this “portrait of an average woman,” betrothed at fourteen, crowned queen at nineteen, and beheaded at thirty-seven, aimed “not to deify, but to humanize.” Supplementing library and archival research with psychological insight,Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is a vivid narrative of France’s most famous queen, her relations with her mother Empress Maria Theresa, her husband Louis XVI, and her lover Swedish Count von Fersen, set against the backdrop of the French and Austrian courts of the ancien régime, the French Revolution and the Terror. “... the biography to end all biographies on Marie Antoinette ... [Zweig's book] possesses all the qualities of the excellent biography — directness, frankness, full exposition, picturesqueness, characterization, color and delectable readableness.” —The New York Times “Powerful, magnificent, poignant…” — The New Republic “A stupendous and superb piece of work.” — Chicago Daily Tribune

Download or read book The Right to Heresy Castellio Against Calvin written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Castellio is a book against zealots of every kind: against anything engendering “the destruction of this world’s divine manifoldness” and injuring the humane spirit. [...] Why could Castellio not maintain himself against Calvin? Stefan Zweig’s answers to these questions have permanent and tragic validity: it was because the masses pay tribute not only to the power of love, but also to that of hatred. Followers could always be found for political slogans that established “enmity and divisions, casting sinister flames of hatred against another religion, race or class.” [...] Those who sacrificed themselves for a future reconciliation of men, wrote Stefan Zweig in 1933, could not escape the fact that a torrent of fanaticism, “rising from the shoals of human instinct,” would burst all dams and inundate all. [...] Castellio, “a fly against an elephant,” rose in opposition to Calvin who had condemned Miguel Servet — better known as Servetus — a true fighter for spiritual freedom, to die at the stake. “To burn a man alive does not defend a doctrine, but kills a man,” said Castellio. It was an ever-recurring curse that ideologies degenerated into tyranny and brute force. Fanaticism, indifferent to the material from which it was ignited, wanted only to let the accumulated forces of hatred flame forth. And Zweig utters these words, six years before the outbreak of the Second World War: “At such apocalyptic turning points, when mass delusions determine universal destinies, the demon of war, bursting the chains of reason, hurls itself greedily and joyfully into the world.” [...] In describing a tragic contest — here that of conscience against force — Zweig is in his element. He illuminates the interesting figure of Servetus who had fought in his own fanatical-hysterical manner already as a youth. It is characteristic that Servetus was dubbed by his enemies “Jew,” “Turk,” and wicked “Spaniard.” [...] Zweig stressed the self-sacrificing way in which [Castellio] defended freedom of thought against Calvin, becoming the symbol of “Conscience against Force.” And he describes most touchingly the sorrow this genuine hero had to suffer. He shows, too, how free spirits may be endangered by the carelessness with which they choose their fellow-wanderers; whereas the one-sided totalitarians, protected by their rigidity, always hold a stone ready to fling at their enemies. (from Married to Stefan Zweigby Friderike Zweig) “One cannot but admire the ardent spirit with which Stefan Zweig has set out to annihilate the doctrines of exclusiveness and restriction in religion and in politics... the most spirited [book] and, in certain scholarly respects, the most important that Stefan Zweig has yet produced... From Stefan Zweig’s new book there emerges a new hero for a modern reading public: a true historic character rescued from near oblivion, and the first modern man who fought the good fight for humanity’s right to think its own thoughts and to say them. The battle has not yet been decided.” — Lloyd Eshleman,The New York Times, November 16, 1936

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 105 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.”