58,196 results in 0.07 seconds

Party animals: my family and other communists

Aaronovitch, David
In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch's seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian spaceman was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism, of the forward march of history. When Gagarin went to Highgate to visit the tomb of Karl Marx, the local communists came out to cheer, David's father, a full-time worker for the Communist Party, and his mother among them. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? In a sense they were like a non-magical version of the wizards of J K Rowling's world, living part secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Where others went to church they went to Socialist Sunday School, where others watched the Black and White Minstrels they went to see the Red Army Choir (always providing that visas had been issued). Society's up was their down, its heroes were their villains and vice versa. Trade unions were never more noble than when militant, the blacks were right and the whites were wrong. Who wanted American TV when you could have Russian movies? A memoir of early life among communists and an exploration of the world that created that life, Party Animals first took David Aaronovitch back through his own memories of belief and action. But there was much more to it. He found himself studying the old secret service files, his mother's diaries and letters, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal. Only then did he begin to understand what had come before - both the obstinate heroism and the monstrous cowardice. And the elements that shape our fondest beliefs
Jonathan Cape 2016 308 pages

Bait

Albahari, David
David Albahari is one of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His serious, understated explorations of the self have influenced many writers of his native land's younger generation. The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by the mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own-one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired.
Northwestern University Press 2001-06-20 117 pages

Götz and Meyer

David Albahari
Gotz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency." Their task is to transport five thousand women, children and elderly, one hundred at a time, from a concentration camp near Belgrade in a hermetically sealed truck, in which they are gassed. As Albahari's anonymous narrator, a teacher, obsessively pursues the truth of this systematic annihilation, he shares his findings with his students. Their school bus becomes that truck, and as the memory of Belgrade's lost Jewish souls is evoked, the students are bewildered. Their teacher, worn down as much by the task of making history come alive as by the toll his research has taken on him, is overwhelmed by the horror of his own imaginings. A harrowing, masterfully written story, full of compassion, irony, and lyricism.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2006 168 pages

Radical coherency: selected essays on art and literature, 1966 to 2005

Antin, David
“We got to talking”—so David Antin begins the introduction to Radical Coherency , embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of performance artist or poet, cultural explorer or literary critic, Antin’s innovative observations have helped us to better understand everything from Pop to Postmodernism. Intimately wedded to the worlds of conceptual art and poetics, Radical Coherency collects Antin’s influential critical essays and spontaneous, performed lectures (or “talk pieces”) for the very first time, capturing one of the most distinctive perspectives in contemporary literature. The essays presented here range from the first serious assessment of Andy Warhol published in a major art journal, as well as Antin’s provocative take on Clement Greenberg’s theory of Modernism, to frontline interventions in present debates on poetics and fugitive pieces from the ’60s and ’70s that still sparkle today—and represent a gold mine for art historians of the period. From John Cage to Allan Kaprow, Mark Rothko to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Antin takes the reader on an idiosyncratic, personal journey through twentieth-century culture with his trademark antiformalist panache—one thatwill be welcomed by any fan of this consummate trailblazer.
University of Chicago Press 2011-03-15 369 pages

Talking

Antin, David
If someone came up and started talking a poem at you how would you know it was a poem? So begins David Antin's Talking, a collection of writings that defy classification. Combining a passion for storytelling and improvisation with a unique sensitivity to the relationship between verbal and written language, Antin creates a work that is hilarious and intelligent, making use of techniques of poetry, fiction, theater, autobiography, and cultural criticism. The four pieces here center on political, social, and artistic concerns that were both timely and ahead of their time. In them we see Antin's real poetic achievement: the creation of new artistic forms.
Dalkey Archive Press 2001 190 pages

John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey

Antin, David
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. The two texts that make up this book originated as talks Antin gave in honor of John Cage's seventy-seventh birthday. Using Cage's poem "Composition as Process" as a point of departure, Antin explores a way of understanding how structure in art and life provides us not with a rigid blueprint for determining behavior but with the ability "to attend to no matter what eventuality" with spontaneity and grace. As Kenneth Goldsmith reminds us, "From Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, passing through O'Hara and Ginsberg, Antin has played a major role in what Cage, writing in Silence, refers to as an awakening of the senses."
Singing Horse Press 2005-09-01 75 pages

Reflections: a memoir

Atlas, David
Dave Atlas, one of the founding fathers of radar meteorology, solved many puzzles and invented numerous techniques that transformed a fledgling application into a vital scientific and operational tool. This is an entertaining book that combines recollections and commentary on the various stages of the author s career in the field of weather radar with his boundless enthusiasm for creativity and the sheer joy of discovery."
American Meteorological Society 2001 142 pages

Ego development and psychopathology

Ausubel, David Paul
Ego Development and Psychopathology presents an original theoretical underpinning for classification and interpretation of the major mental disorders, one based largely on the author's clinical experience. Ausubel's central thesis is that the most significant and crucial factors predisposing persons to mental disorders are critical developmental defects that arise at vital transitional phases of ego development. He sees both normal and pathological personality functioning as most cogently explained in terms of an individual's ego structure at a given point in the life cycle.
Transaction Publishers 1996 301 pages