This retrospective on the career of Academy Award-winning production designer Richard Sylbert takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential films of the past fifty years. The Manchurian Candidate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Dick Tracy . The common factor behind these diverse, visually ground-breaking cinematic masterpieces is the work of legendary production designer Richard Sylbert. Basing the book in part on the late designer's Hollywood memoirs, writer Sylvia Townsend, with the participation of Sylbert's widow, screenwriter Sharmagne Sylbert, has enhanced the production designer's original manuscript with candid interviews from some of his most famous collaborators, including Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and Francis Ford Coppola. The result is a book that takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential and highly acclaimed films of the past fifty years. This is a portrait of a highly driven, sometimes tempestuous visionary who wasn't afraid to fight for the artistic integrity of the worlds he created on screen. Movie lovers will find in-depth discussions of the making of such modern classics as Reds, Carnal Knowledge, Shampoo , and The Cotton Club . More than thirty illustrations capture Sylbert's creative process from early sketches to completed sets and locations.

We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be. --Richard Avedon, 1974 The preeminent stars and artists of the performing arts from the second half of the 20th century offered their greatest gifts--and, sometimes, their inner lives--to Richard Avedon. More than 200 are portrayed in Performance, many in photographs that have been rarely or never seen before. Of course, the great stars light the way: Hepburn and Chaplin, Monroe and Garland, Brando and Sinatra. But here too are the actors and comedians, pop stars and divas, musicians and dancers, artists in all mediums with public lives that were essentially performances, who stand at the pinnacle of our cultural achievement. The celebrated author and critic John Lahr offers an elegant assessment of Avedon's achievement. Four supremely talented artists from the performing arts--Mike Nichols, André Gregory, Mitsuko Uchida, and Twyla Tharp--contribute lively and moving memoirs about their collaborations with Avedon.

Austria experienced remarkable economic and social growth in the years following World War II, especially considering the troubled nature of its politics. A small, land-locked country, Austria has emerged as the European Union's fourth richest state, yet it still wrestles with old decisions and demons. Merging personal observation with rich historical scholarship, a renowned journalist and award-winning memoirist tracks Austria's unique trajectory, beginning the origins of its peoples and following through to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Paul Lendvai investigates whether Austrians have come to terms with Hitler s Anschluss and the Waldheim affair and how they have met the challenge of Jorg Haider s radical right-wing ascendancy. Lendvai identifies a positive moral toughness, internal cohesion, and social discipline within Austria, especially during the years of occupation and subsequent crises, such as the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Yugoslav wars. A probing study of Austria's long quest for nationhood, this volume offers a firsthand look at the factors and players that have influenced an evolving power.Praise for the German edition: Daring, exciting, unmasking...Lendvai presents hitherto hardly known facts and] incredible details.& mdash; NEWS (Vienna Weekly)Lendvai seeks to explain what Austria is like. He has succeeded exactly in this endeavor.& mdash; Die Wel

Weisstein was a brilliant, zesty original — hilarious, irrepressibly bold, a daring, joyful mischief-maker. In both her scientific work and her political essays she questioned all the sacred pieties, accepting no orthodoxy without challenge. This volume of her non-scientific articles restores to prominence her rightful place as one of the Left’s most audacious figures. “For years, I’ve been trying to explain that Naomi Weisstein was great at everything, from science and music to writing and friendship. If she hadn’t existed, no one could have invented her. Now, Martin Duberman has collected her essays, so you, too, can discover her.” — Gloria Steinem “Naomi was a force of nature … May the next generation carry on her spirit!”—Heather Booth, founder of JANE “Naomi Weisstein fearlessly challenged bigotry and ignorance … Fortunately for us, her longtime close friend and comrade, esteemed historian Martin Duberman, has assembled and annotated her scattered essays. Weisstein, a multifaceted woman, upended the status quo and paved the way.” — Marcia Gallo, author, Different Daughters “Naomi Weisstein’s ideas suffused the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s with a revolutionary vision … Eloquent, funny and relentlessly honest … she contributed a brilliant critique of hierarchical power relations and the ideologies that justified them.” — Amy Kesselman, Professor Emerita, Women’s Studies, SUNY, New Paltz “Powerful argument coupled with mischievous wit …Viva Naomi!" — Alix Kates Shulman, author, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of Clure's Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova, who first toured the United States on the eve of World War I, 'Ballet Class: An American History' explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. 0A social history, 'Ballet Class' takes a new approach to the very popular subject of ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of regular, everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios across the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, including children's books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, and dance periodicals, in addition to archival collections and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a deeply-researched national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children's lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children's literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture

On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

Memoirs of Cohn, a Jew born in 1920 in Metz as Marthe Hoffnung. As a child, Cohn was confronted with the antisemitism of the local population. In September 1939 the family moved to Poitiers, where they experienced the German occupation and the Nazi anti-Jewish measures. Several of Cohn's seven siblings joined the resistance. One sister, Stéphanie, was arrested in summer 1942, interned in various camps, and murdered in Auschwitz. Cohn arranged for most of her family to escape to the south of France, with the help of her fiancé, Jacques Delaunay, who was executed in 1943 for his resistance activities. Cohn moved to Paris to live with one of her sisters. After the liberation she joined the French army and, being fluent in German, worked for intelligence, interrogating German POWs. In early 1945 she entered Germany to gather vital information for the advancing French army, for which she was awarded various medals. In 1956 she emigrated to the U.S.

"Do survivors of life's greatest trials possess a secret knowledge? Is there an art to survival-a map for crossing the wilderness-or daily life? Why do some people blossom through adversity while others stop growing? Drawing on twenty years' experience in this field, using stories, parable, and scientific data, acclaimed memoirist Mark Matousek gives the first-ever comprehensive look at this mysterious phenomenon of viriditas, the power of drawing passion, beauty, and wisdom from the unlikeliest places. Matousek interviews hundreds of well-known survivors-including Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel, and Isabel Allende-and experts such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jonathan Kozol, and Sogyal Rimpoche. He includes extraordinary testimonials, such as from a Tibetan nun imprisoned by the Chinese at age eleven and the women of Calama, Chile, digging for their "disappeared," among many others. Drawing insight and advice from these many heroic individuals, Matousek presents a chorus of wisdom for how to survive our own lives-the vicissitudes of being human-and prevail"--

Memoirs of a Jew from Lithuania, born in Rokiškis in 1925, who relates his experiences in the Holocaust against the background of a return trip to the area in 1994. Describes the German occupation in 1941, followed by the massacre of ca. 4,000 Jews from Rokiškis and the surrounding villages by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Relates stories of relatives and acquaintances. Harmatz joined the resistance movement in the Vilna ghetto, the Veraynigte Partisaner Organisatzye, whose leader, Yitzhak Wittenberg, was sacrificed to the Nazis by Judenrat head Jacob Gens. When the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, he escaped with other resistance members to the forests, where they formed a partisan group which operated in the area until the liberation by the Russians in summer 1944. After the war Harmatz emigrated to Palestine.

Continuing her narration of the story of the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, After These Things recounts the relationship between Abraham’s tragic son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob. In following the psychological trail of the children of Abraham, the first properly constituted family, we discover all the complexities of love, power, and desire that make them so quintessentially human. Jenny Diski is the author of eight novels and two memoirs: Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train.

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.

(Applause Books). Jacob Adler, with his performances in the Yiddish King Lear , Uriel Acosta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice , became first a megastar of the exploding Yiddish theatre, and then all of Broadway. His memoirs, originally written and published in Yiddish and now translated (by his granddaughter) into English provides not only a compelling portrait of one of America's greatest actors but a fascinating social history of his time.

Geza Vermes is known world-wide as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls and for his pioneering work, Jesus the Jew . But in addition to that he is the living embodiment of Jewish-Christian relations in the context of an honest quest for the truth. Few scholars have had such a colorful and eventful life, the course of which he describes here. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family which later converted to Christianity, he received a Catholic education and was later ordained priest after the turmoil of the War. The quest for membership in a religious order led him to the Sion Fathers, in Louvain and then in Paris, where among other things he was introduced to biblical studies and became fascinated with the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Subsequent emotional turmoil from conflicting pressures made him ill , but a series of "Providential Accidents" which gave this book its title brought him to England, marriage, and a new fulfilled life, first in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and then in Oxford, and to a public reassertian of his Jewishness. As well as telling a fascinating personal story, this book provides a vivid insider's account of developments in Scrolls research and of the lengthy battle with procrastinating editors over the "academic scandal of the century." These memoirs shed much light on the deep personal friendships and antagonisms and the complex, non-scholarly factors which accompany even committed study of the Bible, Qumran, and the Gospels.

Based on documentation from various archives, discusses religious and halakhic issues which affected the lives of observant Jews during the Holocaust. Includes chapters on the reactions of rabbis in various towns to reports on the extermination of Jews; the persecution and suffering of rabbis and the rescue of some hasidic rabbis; halakhic rulings in ghettos and camps, e.g. concerning the desire of individual Jews to sacrifice themselves for others; rulings on problems involved in posing as a non-Jew; marriage, prayers, and the sanctification of God's name during the Holocaust; responsa of Rabbi Yehoshua Moshe Aronzon, a rabbi in Sanniki, Poland, who survived Nazi camps; sermons delivered by Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapira in the Warsaw ghetto; diaries, memoirs, and letters of survivors.

Memoirs of a Jew born as Erna Korn in 1923 in Kaiserslautern, Germany. She and her mother, Jeanette, were deported to Auschwitz. Erna was transferred to Ravensbrück, where she was liberated. Her mother perished in Auschwitz.

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

Is Israel worth saving, and if so, how do we secure its future? The Jewish State must end, say its enemies, from intellectuals like Tony Judt to hate-filled demagogues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even average Israelis are wondering if they wouldn't be better off somewhere else and whether they ought to persevere. Daniel Gordis is confident his fellow Jews can renew their faith in the cause, and in Saving Israel , he outlines how. 2009 National Jewish Book Award winner Addresses the most pressing issues faced by Israel-and American Jews-today, without recycling the same old arguments Lays to rest some of the most pernicious myths about Israel, including: Jews could thrive without Israel; Israeli Arabs just want equality, and Palestinians just want their own state; peace will come, if Israel will just do the right things "Morally powerful . . . from a writer whose reflections are consistently as intellectually impressive as they are moving. . . . Gordis addresses the exigencies of our time with the urgency they overridingly demand, and with the depth of feeling they inspire."-Cynthia Ozick Gordis has written many popular personal essays and memoirs in the past, but Saving Israel is a full-throated call to arms. Never has the case for defending-no, celebrating-the existence of Israel been so clear, so passionate, or so worthy of wholehearted support.

Memoirs of Cohn, born in 1929 to an Orthodox family in Pressburg (now Bratislava), recounting his Holocaust experiences. Describes anti-Jewish laws from 1939, and violent acts against Jews committed by the Hlinka Guards. In 1942 Cohn was smuggled into Hungary and eventually reached Budapest. His parents and six siblings followed, but his mother and four of the children were caught and sent to Majdanek, where they perished. Two of Cohn's sisters, Hana and Sara, remained in Hungary and survived. His father was arrested, but Cohn bribed officials in order to free him; he then left Budapest to study in a yeshiva in Pupa. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 he returned to Slovakia and studied in a yeshiva in Nitra. After the German invasion of Slovakia in September 1944 he returned to Pressburg and, posing as a non-Jew, helped some Jewish families. He was arrested, but escaped and joined a Slovak partisan group. After the war he became successful in business. His father, who had been in a labor camp, and his two surviving sisters returned to Pressburg after the war; in 1948 the family immigrated to the U.S.

Facing surgery to remove a brain tumor, former Sacramento City Councilman Steve Cohn wrote this memoir chronicling his life's story, from his grandfather's daring escape from the Russian Army in Ukraine during World War I and Cohn's childhood growing up in mid-century Missouri, to his adult life in Northern California, where he raised a family and began a long career as an attorney for the nation's most progressive electric utility and a civic leader for "America's Most Livable City." Cohn was one of the longest serving City Council members in the history of Sacramento, dating back to the California Capital's founding during the Gold Rush in 1849. Cohn's memoir shines a light on how local politics was played, for better or worse, during some of the Capital's most controversial battles over the last 25 years, including the saga of the Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team and the building of a new Downtown arena. Cohn's memoir also tells the inside story of some of the Council's toughest decisions to change the City's development pattern from its post-war suburban, automobile-oriented past to a more sustainable vision of Sacramento as "America's Most Livable City."