"The author has constructed a chronicle of the life of Ilia Zdanevich (known as Iliazd), an important writer and artist in Russian and French modernism, and enriched this chronicle with commentary on the process of writing a biography and a discussion of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The author originally researched Iliazd with the help of his widow many years ago, and she revisited her notes taken at that time with an experienced scholar's critical distance"--

A Memoir of Creativity chronicles one woman's life journey as she derives a theory, revealing meaning in abstract painting, from varied personal and professional experiences, and tells how she locates this theory within a broader social context. In 1966, Piri Halasz became the first woman within living memory to write a cover story for Time (and not just any cover story, either: the notorious one on "Swinging London"). With wit and wisdom, she provides a glimpse into her "red-diaper" childhood, as well as reporting on her climb at Time from research to the writing staff. Vividly, she describes her controversial career as a female journalist during the sixties, offering an inside view of newsweekly rivalries during that tempestuous decade. Halasz then moves on to her initiation into the art world, her lively interaction with some of its most distinguished denizens and her immersion in graduate school. She concludes with what she has learned about art, art history, and history itself since the early eighties, applying that knowledge to better understand the twenty-first century. Through sharing her life story, Halasz encourages others to remain open to new experiences, to try different ways of seeing, and to use creativity to tackle hurdles.

"Jack Austin served as a cabinet minister in both the Trudeau and Martin governments and represented British Columbia for over three decades in the Senate. In the 1970s, he served as federal deputy minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources (during the oil crisis), and then Principal Secretary to Trudeau Sr., who later became a travelling companion. Since 2008, he has been an honorary professor at UBC's Institute of Asian Research. His memoir, Unlikely insider, is more than a personal journey; it ruminates on some of the most pressing political issues animating Canadian public life: the move away from a colonial relationship with First Nations peoples, Canada-China relations, bilateral relations with the US, economic security, and the defense of domestic sovereignty. Inclusion, at both the regional and demographic levels, is an import theme recurring throughout the chapters."--

Edith Anderson left America for Berlin in 1947 to join her German husband - an exile from the Nazis - who had returned to his homeland to build a new country from Hitler's ruins. Max Schroeder had been a surrealist poet/playwright in his bohemian twenties, but when Edith Anderson met him in New York at the height of World War II, he was a seasoned, forty-three-year-old political activist editing an anti-facist periodical in English and German. Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls."

"This work is a compilation of life stories of twenty Turkish Jews, born and raised in Turkey, and who have settled in new homelands. They now live in the United States, Canada, France, Israel, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Through their stories the reader will be able to have glimpses of their lives before and after leaving Turkey and understand the resasons that pushed them to emigrate." -- back cover.

"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Muslim and non-Muslim Turks went to try their luck in the New World. [...] Drawing upon eyewitness testimony, Rifat N. Bali tells the story of a century of Turkish immigrants to the USA."--Back cover.

"Vitali Vitaliev is the Ukranian-born author, poet and journalist whose life has been spent exploring the curious, the unusual and the plain dotty manifestations of human life around the world." "In this honest memoir, Vitaliev describes how on many occasions in his life, words have provided him with the means of survival: the words of great writers from Mikhail Bulgakov to George Orwell; the words of writer friends such as Peter Ustinov and Joseph Heller; the words of his mother, of his children. He references his own writing too, with memories of creative assignments all over the globe, recalling the voices of people he as met and the impressions they made on him." --Book Jacket.