Biography, French Studies, Literary Studies

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.

David Ricardo [1772-1823] has been called ".the principle founder of what has been called the classical school of political economy" (Dictionary of National Biography) and "first 'scientific' economist" (Printing and the Mind of Man 277). Here McCulloch's authoritative Life and Writings of Mr. Ricardo prefaces this collection of Ricardo's pamphlets and other works, including his influential treatise on the distribution of wealth, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon "Dubin's Lives" (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in "The New York Times" as Malamud's "best novel since "The Assistant," Possibly, it is the best he has written of all." Its protagonist is one of Malamud's finest characters; prize-winning biographer William Dubin, who learns from lives, or thinks he does: those he writes, those he shares, the life he lives. Now in his later middle age, he seeks his own secret self, and the obsession of biography is supplanted by the obsession of love--love for a woman half is age, who has sought an understanding of her life through his books. "Dubin's Lives" is a rich, subtle book, as well as a moving tale of love and marriage.

Four-time Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block's definitive essay collection on the art of writing fiction For ten years, crime novelist Lawrence Block funneled his wealth of writing expertise into a monthly column for Writer's Digest. Collected here for the first time are those pieces illuminating the tricks of the authorial trade, from creating vibrant characters and generating seamless plots, to conquering writer's block and experimenting with self-publishing. Filled with wit and insight, The Liar's Bible is a must-read for experts, amateurs, and anyone interested in learning to craft great fiction from one of the field's modern masters. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lawrence Block, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.

Maurois ends the enormous, sprawling life of Balzac with the question, ""But who would wish to be Balzac?"" A man's query perhaps. A woman might write to him admiringly, at first anonymously, as so many did then. What Maurois evokes here so strongly is the writer and the lover and the always hungry dreamer of fame, greatness and happiness. Balzac's feats were prodigious. Hounded by creditors throughout his life, he bought antiques and jewelled walking sticks, and indulged in one ruinous financial deal after another. He worked for months at a frenzied pace. With a passion for unity, he tried to make a comprehensive world from his many works-- ""La Comedie Humaine."" He was lover to many women but he loved only two-Madame de Berny, his mistress in youth and twenty years his senior, and Madame Hanska, whom he married just before his death. Most of the time the narrative is just shy of the many quotations. Maurois is a little like the wise ""friend of the family"" who tells the story with all the intimate speculations, small reproaches and loving (sometimes sentimental) praise one might expect. Names, places and figures abound, and while many of these particulars are only scantily examined, one doesn't mind. Such a French abundance of ""givens"" is in keeping with the rush and energy of Balzac's life. There are good but simple summaries of Balzac's thought but for the most part this close biography draws one headlong into a fantastic life. KIRKUS REVIEW

"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais tells fascinating stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac, Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about nonscientists like Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals. His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book that is partly a memoir, partly a travel commentary, and partly a history of science. Pais's charming recollections of his years as a university student become somber with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He was presented with an unusual deadline for his graduate work: a German decree that July 14, 1941, would be the final date on which Dutch Jews could be granted a doctoral degree. Pais received the degree, only to be forced into hiding from the Nazis in 1943, practically next door to Anne Frank. After the war, he went to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr. 1946 began his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked first as a Fellow and then as a Professor until his move to Rockefeller University in 1963. Combining his understanding of disparate social and political worlds, Pais comments just as insightfully on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the McCarthy era as he does on his own and his European colleagues' struggles during World War II. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers - Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath - have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind. These fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, On Not Being Able to Sleep provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.

An autobiography in the form of a philosophical diary, Little Did I Know 's underlying motive is to describe the events of a life that produced the kind of writing associated with Stanley Cavell's name. Cavell recounts his journey from early childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, through musical studies at UC Berkeley and Julliard, his subsequent veering off into philosophy at UCLA, his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, and his half century of teaching. Influential people from various fields figure prominently or in passing over the course of this memoir. J.L. Austin, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Lowell, Rogers Albritton, Seymour Shifrin, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, W. V. O. Quine, and Jacques Derrida are no longer with us; but Cavell also pays homage to the living: Michael Fried, John Harbison, Rose Mary Harbison, Kurt Fischer, Milton Babbitt, Thompson Clarke, John Hollander, Hilary Putnam, Sandra Laugier, Belle Randall, and Terrence Malick. The drift of his narrative also registers the decisiveness of the relatively unknown and the purely accidental. Cavell's life has produced a trail of some eighteen published books that range from treatments of individual writers like Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, Shakespeare, and Beckett to studies in aesthetics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, cinema, opera, and religion.

"Finally, the writing of one of the century's most notorious lesbians is available in English. Though best known for hosting the avant garde of Paris for thirty years--Colette, Renee Vivien, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, to mention a few--she was also a writer who challenged the male-dominated literary establishment both in the content and the form of her work. Now we can discover her views on the people, places and events of that exciting and stimulating era for ourselves. Here is a spirited translation of Barney's thought-provoking work by one of Britain's most interesting writers"--Back cover.

Continues the life story, as told in Incredible! of young Joe (Yossi) Wallis, member of a tough Bronx gang with ties to the Mafia, who became a wealthy businessman in California, and eventually a religious Jew and rabbi in Israel. Incredible 2 is filled with more stories, adventures, and personalities from Rabbi Wallis's dynamic life.

In the tradition of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love , an unforgettable account of fame, fandom, and the problem of making art in the twenty-first century In his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the musician who calls himself Juiceboxxx couldn't be more modern--you might call him a punk rock-rapper-DJ-record executive-energy drink-magnate. Journalist Leon Neyfakh has been something more than a fan of Juiceboxxx's since he was a teenager, when he booked a show for the artist in a church basement in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Juiceboxxx went on to the tireless, lonely, possibly hopeless pursuit of success on his own terms--no club was too dank, no futon too grubby, if it helped him get to the next, next level. And, for years, Neyfakh remained haunted from afar: was art really worth all the sacrifices? If it was, how did you know you'd made it? And what was the difference, anyway, between a person like Juiceboxxx--who devoted his life to being an artist--and a person like Neyfakh, who elected instead to pursue a stable career and a comfortable, middle-class existence? Much more than a brilliant portrait of a charismatic musician always on the verge of something big, The Next Next Level is a wholly contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition, and friendship--as well as viral videos, rap-rock, and the particulars of life on the margins of culture.

"Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author's quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel's recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. "We'd just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother's foul-tempered Dodge Dart," writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever--beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his "private apocalypse." Both erudite and full-hearted, Appel recounts storylines ranging from a bout of unrequited love gone awry to the poignant romance of his grandparents. We learn of the crank phone calls he made to his own family, the conspicuous absence of Jell-O at his grandaunt's house, and family secrets long believed buried. The stories capture the author's distinctive voice--a blend of a physician's compassion and an ethicist's constant questioning. "--

Marlon Brando was the brightest, boldest, and most iconoclastic acting talent of our time. But while his courage and imagination as an artist brought applause and attention from around the world, Brando shunned nearly everything that goes with celebrity status. He was one of the most reclusive personalities in modern times and a legend beyond compare. He was also an equal opportunity provocateur -- a dazzling baffler -- be it on stage, on screen, or in his private life. Always true to his nature, he never failed to surprise. He did things his way -- The Way It's Never Been Done Before. No one shared as much of Brando's private fields as his lifelong friend and business confidant, George Englund. For more than five decades, Brando and Englund were each other's most trusted ally and closest compadre. Even at their first meeting, at a Hollywood party in 1956 -- the kind of occasion where Brando was most on guard against any who would attempt to get close to him -- he and Englund forged close ties. From that initial meeting right up to the eve of the superstar's death in the summer of 2004, Brando and Englund were in nearly constant contact. They traveled together, worked together, and played together. They consoled and cajoled each other through their marriages and divorces, the births and tragic deaths of their children, good and bad business deals, and the onset of aging, concluding with Brando's death at the age of eighty. "I remembered what Mark Twain wrote," Englund says, "'that everybody is a moon with a dark side he doesn't show anyone else.' I felt this was an appropriate hour for a book that looked at the other side of Marlon, that told of the man and friend and father he was. There has not been such a book in Marlon's lifetime, even including his autobiography, and I felt that after our long years of friendship, perhaps I should attempt to write it. I knew the difficulty I would encounter; to write about Marlon is to work with delicate glass, for he was, without question, the most complicated personality I ever met or knew about. "I once thought what a grand time he and I would have writing the book about our friendship together. That possibility has passed away, for Marlon is gone now -- I must make the attempt to write of us alone. I summon to the task the sacredness, which, when we were at our best, Marlon and I laid upon our friendship."

Sex goddess, Hollywood star, transgressive playwright, author, blues singer, and vaudeville brat---Mae West remains the twentieth century's greatest comedienne. She made an everlasting mark in trailblazing Broadway plays such as Sex and The Constant Sinner and in films such as She Done Him Wrong, Klondike Annie, and I'm No Angel. Simon Louvish, biographer of W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Keystone's Mack Sennett, brings Mae to vibrant life in this unparalleled new biography. He charts her amazing seven decades in show business, from early years in teenage summer stock to her last reincarnation as 1960s gay icon and grande dame of Hollywood survivors. Mae West: It Ain't No Sin is the first biography to make use of Mae's recently uncovered personal papers, offering an unprecedented view into the endless creative drive and daring wit of this legendary star.

This enlightening work by renowned psychic Sylvia Browne contains the Gnostic tenets of her church, the Society of Novus Spiritus, and is a map of our charts—regardless of what spiritual path we follow.[Bokinfo]

New York is a walker's city. You can walk for hours. The streets slip by. There is so much to look at, so much to take in. I walk a lot. Especially when I am not writing . . . Lily Brett's love affair with New York began as an outsider in her late teens when she was posted on assignment there as a young Australian rock journalist. In her early forties she returned, together with her soul mate and three children, to start a new life, and for the best part of three decades she has called New York home. This witty, candid and moving collection of short pieces celebrates the city that's now part of her heartbeat. A compulsive walker, Brett takes us to her favourite places and introduces us to the characters of the city that has nurtured, perplexed and inspired her. She brings to life the delights of Chinatown, the majesty of Grand Central Station, the lure of spandex and sequins in the Garment District, and the peculiarity of canine couture. And she muses on the miracle of love in the Lodz ghetto, the possibility of loneliness amidst skyscrapers, and the joy and redemption in a child's curiosity. Full of wisdom, humour and grace, Only in New York is a human portrait of a city much loved - and of a woman in step with herself. 'Pithy, entertaining and personal . . . the natural, light quality of Brett's writing is a pleasure akin to a conversation with a friend . . . Brett leavens her observations with dry humour.' Weekend Australian 'New York is a city of character and characters and anyone thinking of visiting should use this as a guide to its flavour - and also as an insight into where to eat.' Herald Sun 'Charm ing . . . Her snippets are short and sharp as they portray the essence of New York.' West Australian 'A charming and unique narrative on the city. Brett achieves a perfect combination of wit and naivety, creating a memoir that acknowledges the existence of good and bad experiences, awkward quirks and love affairs with buildings . . . Brett's words have the ability to transport you to the city from the comfort of your own back yard- you may even find it unnecessary to fly to New York after reading it . Readings

These interviews with Henry Rollins conducted by RE/Search (and Search & Destroy) founder V. Vale focus on Henry's travels -- often to countries considered dangerous and off-limits. There are references to Punk Rock history, the Occupy movement, and numerous personal adventures and experiences over the past 30-plus years of combing the planet giving musical and Spoken Word performances, and generally being as creative and humorous as possible no matter what the situation may be . Whatever Henry wants to do, he does it while giving his full attention, like a kind of Zen master. RE/Search tries to reveal the full scope of his creativity, achievements and darkly sardonic perceptiveness and contempt for cliche. This book is full of both humor and inspiration.

Hailed as "the most provocative and disturbing analytical indictment . . . of America's role in Vietnam" by the "New York Times," this is Mary McCarthy's riveting account of her journeys to Saigon and Hanoi In 1967, the editor of the" New York Review of Books "sent Mary McCarthy to Vietnam. In this daring and incisive account," "McCarthy brings her critical thinking and novelist's eye to one of the most unpopular wars in our nation's history.Outraged over America's role in the Vietnam War, McCarthy arrived in Saigon with her own preconceived notions. Her time there did little to alter those beliefs. Focusing on the moral consequences--"the worst thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war"--McCarthy provides firsthand reports from the front line. She describes visits to villages built for Vietnamese refugees torn between the terror that Americans would stay and the fear that they would go.From its coverage of the daily horrors of war to notes on the logistical challenge of bringing 494,000 soldiers home, this is a timely and timeless work from one of America's most outspoken and respected critics.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate.