Miriam Gross, as a journalist and editor, has worked with some of the most influential figures of the 20th century poets, philosophers, playwrights and politicians. This book offers recollections from 40 years at the heart of English cultural life. Brought up in wartime Jerusalem, she was deposited by her parents, speaking no English, at the bohemian Dartington Hall School; and then continued her education at Oxford where eschewing her quiet, tea-drinking contemporaries at St Anne s she found her way into more glamorous academic circles. From there it was a short hop to pre-spell-check Fleet Street. Her descriptions whether she is having to mend her boss's bra on her first day at work, or rewriting Angus Wilson's slapdash book reviews, or being asked to make the women s pages of the Observer more raunchy show a merciless eye for the bogus and the absurd. Alongside reflections on everything from feminism and motherhood to education and anti-semitism, she recounts her numerous infatuations, both requited and unrequited, with the sort of self-deprecating candour that makes this memoir a classic of its kind.

"Journal entries help chronicle the experiences Mihail Sebastian had while living in Romania during the fascist years."

"This is not just the story of another Holocaust survivor. After all, very few survivors would, just a few years after liberation, become Olympic athletes. It is a story Michael Freedland tells after dozens of interviews with Ben himself, as well as with members of his family, fellow survivors, and residents of his old home town in Poland. Ben grew up in a small Polish town, Pietrkow. His sister, the only other member of his family to survive, said that if she or anyone else needed a protector, Ben was the one to call. When the Nazis came to Pietrkow, his mother and one sister were shot. He and his father managed to survive, initially, in the town ghetto by working in a glass factory and a woodwork plant. Before long, they were transported to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp where his father subsequently died. Taken to Thereisenstadt, Ben was eventually liberated by the Red Army. Before long, he was one of "The Boys" who came to England. His sporting excellence was recognised when he was selected for two Olympic Games in which he represented Britain as a weightlifter. He became a successful businessman and retired early so that he could make a personal crusade of bringing together other survivors. He founded the famous 45 Aid Society, worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Holocaust Educational Trust. In his mid 80s, Ben is a prominent figure in the Claims Conference, which has awarded billions of dollars to needy survivors. He is a great believer in reconciliation with both Germany and his native Poland, and both nations have given him awards in recognition of his work"--

"From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work. Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets" --

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet writes about her life, the creative process, and the work of other poets.

A fresh exploration of Paul's activities during the hidden years of his life, from his conversion in Damascus to his familiar ministry in the book of Acts. With an unparalled wealth of historical material and a reconsideration of Paul's own writings, a new picture of Paul's life emerges.

Overview: The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself--the historical as opposed to the figural individual--was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."--

Greenman was born in 1910 in London to a Jewish family; in 1913 he and his widowed father settled in Rotterdam. Greenman failed to escape to England when the war began, and in 1940 was caught by the German occupation. He lost his British identity papers and, because of bureaucratic procrastination on the part of Dutch officials and of the Swiss consulate that represented British interests, could not prove his British nationality. He was deported to Westerbork in October 1942, with his wife and son. In January 1943 the family was sent to Birkenau, where Greenman's wife and child were killed immediately, and he was used for slave labor. He was also a victim of "medical experiments" in the camp. In September 1943 he was transferred to the Monowitz camp, and in January 1945, after a death march to Gleiwitz, he was transported to Buchenwald, where he was liberated. After the war he settled in Britain. His father survived, since he was married to a non-Jew.

Landscape architect, urban planner, teacher, and social visionary: over the course of a sixty-year career, Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) reshaped the spaces we inhabit and our ways of moving through them. The New York Times called him "the tribal elder of American landscape architecture" and the critic Ada Louise Huxtable credited him with creating what "may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance." His bold use of abstract imagery could evoke the landscape of the American West in a sequence of city squares and fountains, while his plan for repurposing an abandoned factory near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf showed how adaptive use of a historic structure could turn commercial development into urban theater. A man who deeply loved cities, he left as one of his most important legacies the five thousand acres of coastline, hedgerows, and meadows that became Sonoma County's environmentally sensitive and enormously influential Sea Ranch. Featuring more than ninety black-and-white and one hundred color reproductions of photographs, plans, and sketchbooks, A Life Spent Changing Places is Halprin's own account of how a young boy who listened to the fireside chats of FDR on the radio became the man who designed the memorial to that president in the nation's capital. It is a book about the invention and reinvention of an extraordinary man over the span of decades and how he helped to reframe the world around him.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable. Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

"Eugenio Zolli is a prophet for our time, charged with asking a single question: Why? This question was a grace from God that set him off on his course as a scholar and a mystic. In trying to explore the missing link between the Old and New Testament, he discovered the love of God for all humanity. In this way, his life experience led him to an accomplishment in Jesus Christ, in itself a prophecy of the New World mentioned in the Holy Scripture"--

Beginning with the first Jewish settler, Moses David, the important role that Windsor Jews played in the development of Ontario's south is mirrored in this 200-year chronicle. the founding pioneer families transformed their Eastern European shtetl into a North American settlement; many individuals were involved in establishing synagogues, schools, and an organized communal structure in spite of divergent religious, political, and economic interests. Modernity and the growing influences of Zionism and Conservative/Reform Judaism challenged the traditional and leftist leanings of the community's founders. From the outset, Jews were represented in city council, actively involved in communal organizations, and appointed to judicial posts. While its Jewish population was small, Windsor boasted Canada's first Jewish Cabinet members, provincially and federally, in David Croll and Herb Gray. As the new millennium approached, jews faced shrinking numbers, forcing major consolidations in order to ensure their survival.

A master historian offers an eloquent and personal auto-history of his life and his ideas Twenty years ago, John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs in Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful--an auto-history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man. Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before. He includes also a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs's later studies. Last Rites is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations--an original book only John Lukacs could have written. Praise for Confessions of an Original Sinner: "[Lukacs] is an often witty and always fascinating--even entertaining--writer."--Washington Post

In an autobiographical memoir directed to his young son Dylan, the film and theater critic uses stories and anecdotes to present the story of his life and the life lessons he has learned.

Hardcover. Jacket shows a few superficial scores, with very minor wear on upper and lower edges. Spine ends of hardcover and jacket are bumped; minimal wear on leading corners of jacket and hardcover. Page block head foxed with a smudge on face; penned number on rear pastedown. Pages are sound and clean throughout; all text clear. TS

Over the course of his career, Jeff Corey (1914-2002) educated movie, television, and theater stars from James Dean to Jane Fonda in the art of acting. Though he worked with some of the most famous talents of his day, one of Corey's greatest pleasures was teaching regular people - accountants, schoolteachers, and lawyers - who had a secret desire to act. In his eyes, anyone could nurture his or her innate "mimetic impulse." Jack Nicholason, one of Corey's most famous students, said, "Acting is life study, and Corey's classes got me into looking at life as an artist." In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Jeff Corey narrates his life story first as a successful young actor in Hollywood and later as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors. Corey made a name for himself as a strong character actor in films like The Killers (1946), Home of the Brave (1951). However, everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Corey refused to name names before the committee and was promptly blacklisted, forcing him to walk away from his vibrant career as an actor. Later that year, Corey began work as an acting teacher in a small studio, and almost overnight, he became one of the most sought-after instructors in Hollywood, with students such as Kirk Douglas, Rob Reiner, and Tony Perkins. In 1962, when the blacklist ended, Corey was one of the industry's first trailblazers to seamlessly reboot his acting career and he secured roles in some of the classic films of the era, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), True Grit (1969), and Little Big Man (1970), in which he starred as the legendary Wild Bill Hickok. The major action of Corey's life was to capture the human heart: in conflict, in terror, in love, and in all of its small triumphs. His memoir, which he wrote with his daughter Emily Corey, provides a unique and personal perspective of the man whose teaching inspired some of Hollywood's biggest names to excel in the roles that made them famous--Dust jacket

International fashion icon Jeanne Beker dishes on her life on and off the runway More than 30 years ago, Jeanne Beker set out to live a life that was not just great, but extraordinary . In Finding Myself in Fashion , she recalls some of the high and low points of the turbulent past decade. Personally, she dealt with heartbreak (the end of her marriage) and rediscovered romance. Professionally, she suffered setbacks that became learning experiences leading to new career paths. She travelled the world with FQ Magazine ; witnessed epic events and conducted intimate interviews as a fashion reporter; launched her own clothes labels; wrote newspaper columns; and hosted or appeared on innumerable television shows. Through it all, both at home and at work, she stuck to her youthful resolution. This is Jeanne's candid account of a life lived to the max.