These memoirs of Baitalsky (1903-1978) serve a record of the lives and work of the young revolutionaries in the Ukraine who came of age during the Russian Revolution in 1917, and who perished for supporting the Left Opposition to Stalin in the 1920s. Baitalsky writes as a Marxist and a Jew.
Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
Arita Baaijens gave up her job as an environmentalist nearly twenty years ago, and has been exploring the deserts of Egypt and Sudan with her small camel caravan ever since. In Desert Songs she recounts her passion for the desert, the place she loves and fears. On one level Desert Songs reads as an ode to camels, vistas and horizons, nomads and exploration. On another it is a story about an inward journey, a rite of passage. It is about leaving the world you know to venture into the unknown where you discover your true strength. How strong are you when there's no backup? Where do your limits lie? Baaijens sets out on a voyage of self-discovery and unrelenting physical trials to find the answers. The experience changes her forever.
The most memorable Hollywood musicals of 1930s showcased the talents of stars like Fred Astaire, Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby and Alice Faye. The less memorable ones didn't. This book takes a look at the unsung songfests of the '30s--secondary or forgotten features with short-lived or unlikely stars from major studios and Poverty Row. Through analysis of films such as Lord Byron of Broadway (1930), Shoot the Works (1934), Bottoms Up (1934), Moonlight and Pretzels (1933) and The Music Goes 'Round (1936), the author profiles such performers as Dorothy Dell, Lee Dixon, Peggy Fears, Lawrence Gray, Joe Morrison and the mother-daughter team of Myrt and Marge. Behind-the-scenes figures are discussed, like the infamously profligate producer Lou Brock, whose flops Down to Their Last Yacht (1934) and Top of the Town (1937) cost him his career. Filmographies and production information are included, with background on key participants.
The highlight of this complete edition of poems is a CD containing vintage recordings of Thomas reading eight of his works in his famous "Welsh-singing" style.
A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter. The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution. Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint—until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist’s work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint’s life—not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic.
The manuscripts transcribed and reproduced in this volume of the Cornell Yeats were written from spring 1933 through December 1934. "Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems" is the third section of W. B. Yeats's book A Full Moon in March (1935), following the two plays A Full Moon in March and The King of the Great Clock Tower. David R. Clark's introduction relates biographical events to what the manuscripts show about the chronological order in which the poems were written. The poems, which illuminate such facets of Yeats's life as the poet's flirtations with fascism and Hinduism and his concern, at age sixty-eight, that his poetic powers were waning, are presented in the order in which they appeared in A Full Moon in March. Of the twenty-one poems here, eighteen are called songs. Only "Parnell's Funeral" itself is un-songlike, a somber and powerful declaration made by a Parnellite. Each poem is accompanied by comments on its content and its manuscripts. Ninety-nine illustrations show Yeats's handwritten drafts, typescripts, and revisions. Because of the poems' exotic references, a long section of the introduction provides relevant material from Yeats's letters and commentary and an independent analysis of each poem. Early in his career Yeats, with his fellow poets in the Rymers' Club, had "taken delight in poetry that was, before all else, speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a good play or a good conversation." Throughout "Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems," Yeats's desire for a direct lyrical urge is evident.
“The beautiful owner of this book is dearer to me than my life – August your protector.” This one sentence was the key to a mystery involving some of the greatest and most infamous figures in European history, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon and Hitler—and solved by the author of this book. Eve Haas is the daughter of a German Jewish family that took refuge in London after Hitler came to power. Following a terrifying air raid in the blitz, her father revealed the family secret, that her great-great grandmother Emilie was married to a Prussian prince. He then showed her the treasured leather-bound notebook inscribed to Emilie by the prince. Her parents were reluctant to learn more, but later in life, when Eve was married and inherited the diary, she became obsessed with proving this birthright. The Secrets of the Notebook tells how she follows the clues, from experts on European royalty in London to archives in West Germany and then, under threat of being arrested as a spy by the Communist regime, to an archive in East Germany that had never before opened its doors to the West. What she unearths is a love story set against the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars and the antiSemitism of the Prussian court, and a ruse that both protected Emilie’s daughter and probably condemned her granddaughter—Eve’s beloved grandmother, Anna—to death in the Nazi camps. When first published in the UK, The Secrets of the Notebook was an Irish Times bestseller. A movie based on the book is in production.
During his adult life until his death in 1834, Coleridge made entries in more than sixty notebooks. Neither commonplace books nor diaries, but something of both, they contain notes on literary, theological, philosophical, scientific, social, and psychological matters, plans for and fragments of works, and many other items of great interest. This fourth double volume of the Notebooks covers the years 1819 to 1826. The range of Coleridge's reading, his endless questioning, and his recondite sources continue to fascinate the reader. Included here are drafts and full versions of the later poems. Many passages reflect the theological interests that led to Coleridge's writing of Aids to Reflection, later to become an important source for the transcendentalists. Another development in this volume is the startling expansion of Coleridge's interest in 'the theory of life' and in chemistry - the laboratory chemistry of the Royal Institute and the theoretical chemistry of German transcendentalists such as Oken, Steffens, and Oersted.