"A poignant, compelling, and clear-eyed memoir of a life in music, with the dogged pursuit of composing at its center. Perhaps no art form has ever splintered into as many factions, genres, languages, philosophies, and mutually exclusive audiences as the art of music did in the mid-twentieth century. Allen Shawn's memoir fascinatingly evokes this tumultuous time, while weaving together his art and his life, hinting at their unexpected and sometimes paradoxical interconnections. Shawn grew up in an atmosphere of cultural privilege in New York City, the son of New Yorker editor William Shawn. An instinctive composing prodigy at age ten, it took him until the age of thirty to compose music he was proud of. Shawn sketches his childhood and long apprenticeship, his experiences composing for theater, dance, and concert hall, his forty years as a teacher at Bennington College, and his unexpected emergence as a writer. The book balances an account of his musical evolution, ups and downs, and life choices, offering glimpses into family life and of the many people with whom he interacted, including Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Petit, Jacques-Louis Monod, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Benny Goodman, Louis Malle, and Vivian Fine. Along the way, Shawn offers reflections on such issues as social class, aging, loneliness, politics, and music education. In The Realm of Tones: A Composer's Memoir is a unique and touching account of one individual's internal search for self-expression and self-understanding, and of his effort to construct a life around it"--

Alfred Bader's achievements—as the founder of one of the most important companies in its field in the world, as a collector and dealer in Old Master paintings, and as a legendary philanthropist—make for fascinating reading. This book begins where Alfred Bader's first autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector, ended: with the boardroom coup in which he was dismissed from the chemical company he had built up from the ground. Bader now turns his enormous energy to Old Master paintings, in which he had become interested at a young age and in which he by now has the means to invest. The chapters that follow are roughly chronological, with some devoted to particularly meaningful paintings or groups of paintings, memorable auctions, mysteries, or discoveries relating to the artworks in the Bader Collection, while others are dedicated to friends, family, love, religion, charity, and, occasionally, chemistry.

English poet and critic Alvarez begins this autobiography with his recollections of his childhood as the sickly son of deeply unhappy parents. Alvarez courted danger as a way of overcoming his infirmities and found in the deadly ballet of the Battle of Britain - Messerschmitts and Spifires dancing and dueling across the London sky - an image of beauty and risk that would never leave him. And, yet, poetry and the literary life were his first loves as an adult, and he describes the excitement of his early successes at Oxford and as poetry critic at the Observer.

Biographical profiles of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and other twentieth-century physicists feature observations and insights from a fellow scientist who knew the subjects personally.

Memoir of the author's life from Palestine, to Poland, to America, covering a career in government and Sovietology.

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience, yet there was a danger that his name would disappear from history. Originally published in 1954, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography was the first major publication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda machine. In this definitive biography Trotsky emerges in his real stature, as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian Revolution. This third volume of the trilogy, first published in 1963, is a self-contained narrative of Trotsky’s years in exile and of his murder in Mexico in 1940. Deutscher’s masterful account of the period, and of the ideological controversies ranging throughout it, forms a background against which, as he says, ‘the protagonist’s character reveals itself, while he is moving towards catastrophe.’

"Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods. In this comprehensive biography, Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner's life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew. Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews--the freest in history--to be fully American and fully Jewish."--Publisher's description

At the end of the millennium, the leading British industry magazine, The Bookseller, selected the ten people who had most influenced its century. Tom Maschler—described as "the most important publisher in Britain; the most innovative, adventurous, and newsworthy"—was one of them. It went on to say that for nearly 20 years, "he made publishing glamorous." Over the course of his career, Maschler launched the careers of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Bruce Chatwin, among others. From the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife to the porch where Ernest Hemingway shot himself, this frank and fascinating memoir affords a rare glimpse into the golden days of British publishing. An extraordinary literary memoir by one great publishers of the 20th century.

Truth Comes in Blows is distinguished editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's richly textured account of a coming-of-age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. Planted between him and his entry into adulthood, autonomy, and the wider world was Ben Solotaroff - as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, shrewd, seductive, and impossibly overbearing, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man carried to the edge - "almost all ego and almost no conscience." Against this formidable scion of the fierce Solotaroff clan stood Ted's mother, Rose, product of the cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

The story of "an idealistic young American who freely cast his lot with the Chinese revolution only to be struck down by that revolution at the floodtide of its success."--Leonard Woodcock, first American Ambassador to China

Presents the life of the Scottish activist who worked as a secret agent against apartheid in South Africa during the 1960s, suffering imprisonment until her escape from the country.

"First-hand accounts of indigenous people's encounters with colonialism are rare. A daily diary that extends over fifty years is unparalleled. Based on a transcription of Arthur Wellington Clah's diaries, this book offers a riveting account of a Tsimshian elder who moved in both colonial and Aboriginal worlds. From his birth in 1831 to his death in 1916, Clah witnessed profound change: the arrival of traders, missionaries, and miners, and the establishment of industrial fisheries, wage labour, and reserves. His many voyages physical, cultural, and spiritual provide an unprecedented Aboriginal perspective on colonial relationships on the Pacific Northwest Coast."--Pub. desc.

"And so, in her seventies, she sat down to recreate the world of her childhood, a world structured around strong parental authority and deep religious commitment. When it first appeared in 1908, her memoir received rave reviews for its sensitive and faithful depiction of the Jewish world of the nineteenth century. A second volume devoted to her years of married life quickly followed." "Now available for the first time in English translation, Wengeroff's memoir is the earliest record of Eastern European Jewish life written by a woman. Pauline spreads out before us the richness of Judaism and Jewish folk life, the joy and pain of marriage and motherhood, and the personal losses that she, as a Jewish woman, had suffered at the hands of great historical forces."--BOOK JACKET.

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a memoir of coming-of-age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB’s persecution of refuseniks, a poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer’s remembrances are set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire’s collapse. His story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.

Publisher's description: At the heart of this... Mexican novel lies the search for a family history. Using ancestral recollections, flashbacks through history, and personal memory, the author traces her family roots from pre-Revolutionary Russia to contemporary Mexico. Margo Glantz's Mexico is a mysterious world-- a cultural carnival where Flash Gordon crosses paths with Columbus: a Mexico of Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, hijacked by Dracula and King Kong, filled with the aromas of a kosher bakery and the echoes of jokes, some corny, some not.

Trotsky's last battle against the Stalinist murder machine - the only book by him never before published in English. Contains all the articles against the GPU written between the raid on Trotsky's house on May 24, 1940, and his assassination on August 20. The record of a life-and-death struggle against the agents of the bureaucracy, 'Stalin's Gangsters' is essential for training today's generation of revolutionaries in the history of the movement and the fight for its security.

Czech writer Ivan Klima masterfully recounts, first, what it was like for him as a Jewish child confronting with his family the inhumanities of the Theresienstadt concentration camp situated at the edge of their hometown, Prague. Then, more fully, he painstakingly recalls what it was like for him and his countrymen after the Nazi thugs were driven out by the Soviet Army and replaced for four decades by the Communist thugs. Includes an appendix of essays on topics ranging from social history and political thinking to love and liberty.