Resistance brings together the voices of writers whose personal experience and testimonies of human rights abuses and conflict are transmuted into powerful poetry and memoir. The book includes the work of renowned writers and writers who have experienced torture, or prison, or loss of their homelands. Their poems and prose lay bare the realities of persecution and war and the pain of displacement. In so doing, their searing art becomes a form of protest and illumination
An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.
“[A] raucous, offensive, and sometimes amusing CliffsNotes compilation of wars both well-known and ignored.” —Utne Reader Self-described war nerd Gary Brecher knows he’s not alone, that there’s a legion of fat, lonely Americans, stuck in stupid, paper-pushing desk jobs, who get off on reading about war because they hate their lives. But Brecher writes about war, too. War Nerd collects his most opinionated, enraging, enlightening, and entertaining pieces. Part war commentator, part angry humorist à la Bill Hicks, Brecher inveighs against pieties of all stripes—Liberian generals, Dick Cheney, U.N. peacekeepers, the neo-cons—and the massive incompetence of military powers. A provocative free thinker, he finds much to admire in the most unlikely places, and not always for the most pacifistic reasons: the Tamil Tigers, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Danes of 1,000 years ago, and so on, across the globe and through the centuries. Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed, Brecher provides a radically different, completely unvarnished perspective on the nature of warfare. “Military columnist Gary Brecher’s look at contemporary war is both offensive and illuminating. His book, War Nerd . . . aims to explain why the best-equipped armies in the world continue to lose battles to peasants armed with rocks . . . Brecher’s unrefined voice adds something essential to the conversation.” —Mother Jones “It’s international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.” —The Millions
With its vivid descriptions of courtly society, gardens, and architecture in early eleventh-century Japan, The Tale of Genji—recognized as the world’s first novel—has captivated audiences around the globe and inspired artistic traditions for one thousand years. Its female author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a diarist, a renowned poet, and, as a tutor to the young empress, the ultimate palace insider; her monumental work of fiction offers entry into an elaborate, mysterious world of court romance, political intrigue, elite customs, and religious life. This handsomely designed and illustrated book explores the outstanding art associated with Genji through in-depth essays and discussions of more than one hundred works. The Tale of Genji has influenced all forms of Japanese artistic expression, from intimately scaled albums to boldly designed hanging scrolls and screen paintings, lacquer boxes, incense burners, games, palanquins for transporting young brides to their new homes, and even contemporary manga. The authors, both art historians and Genji scholars, discuss the tale’s transmission and reception over the centuries; illuminate its place within the history of Japanese literature and calligraphy; highlight its key episodes and characters; and explore its wide-ranging influence on Japanese culture, design, and aesthetics into the modern era. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
Invisible Ink is the story of Guy Stern’s remarkable life. This is not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the horrors of the Holocaust and his remarkable escape from Nazi Germany created the central driving force for the rest of his life. Stern gives much credit to his father’s profound cautionary words, "You have to be like invisible ink. You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, we can emerge again and show ourselves as the individuals we are." Stern carried these words and their psychological impact for much of his life, shaping himself around them, until his emergence as someone who would be visible to thousands over the years. This book is divided into thirteen chapters, each marking a pivotal moment in Stern’s life. His story begins with Stern’s parents—"the two met, or else this chronicle would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter)." Then, in 1933, the Nazis come to power, ushering in a fiery and destructive timeline that Stern recollects by exact dates and calls "the end of [his] childhood and adolescence." Through a series of fortunate occurrences, Stern immigrated to the United States at the tender age of fifteen. While attending St. Louis University, Stern was drafted into the U.S. Army and soon found himself selected, along with other German-speaking immigrants, for a special military intelligence unit that would come to be known as the Ritchie Boys (named so because their training took place at Ft. Ritchie, MD). Their primary job was to interrogate Nazi prisoners, often on the front lines. Although his family did not survive the war (the details of which the reader is spared), Stern did. He has gone on to have a long and illustrious career as a scholar, author, husband and father, mentor, decorated veteran, and friend. Invisible Ink is a story that will have a lasting impact. If one can name a singular characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his resolute determination to persevere. To that end Stern’s memoir provides hope, strength, and graciousness in times of uncertainty.
As a little boy grows up in Palestine, he has no idea that his mothers unconditional love is already paving the road for his success later in life. When he is thirteen, his hardworking mother suddenly dies, leaving Alghadanfar alone and with no other choice but to attend a military boarding school while his father and his new wife live mostly on charity. Four years later, Alghadanfars life forever changes when his country is occupied by Israel and he is left homeless, seemingly doomed to enter lifes wild arena whether he is ready or not. After the invasion, Alghadanfar escapes on foot with others to the River Jordan in a dangerous journey to reach the only place he knows, his boarding school on the eastern side of the river. As he is led to his first brush with death and onto a new path in life, he must rely on his survival instincts, his mothers shadow, and her prayers to become empowered to overcome the many obstacles that stand in his way.
Poetry. "It's very rare to watch the birth of a new style. It's like watching through a new set of Proust's kaleidescopes. Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of himself and parts of the city--concentrated and bare as any poetry. It's hard to compare it to anything else."--David Shapiro "Sieve-like and shifty language with more directness and clarity than obfuscation and obtuseness. The father poem of EXILE HOME, 'Green Side Up,' is a triumph of courage and poetry and love. From it the manuscript opens like a flower of multiple petals. I am enthralled by a seeming innocence and a creeping wisdom, which, rather than distort the innocence, strengthens it. After all, we have the choice to see the world as unconcerned about our troubles in it. It is the world, not a bark on which we float toward happiness. An assertion of the will to see hope as language-driven, music-clad. Mr. Yeats and his wind-up birds. There are many drowsy emperors out there."--Pablo Medina
Michelle Cooper combines the drama of pre-War Europe with the romance of debutante balls and gives us another compelling historical page turner. Sophia FitzOsborne and the royal family of Montmaray escaped their remote island home when the Germans attacked, and now find themselves in the lap of luxury. Sophie's journal fills us in on the social whirl of London's 1937 season, but even a princess in lovely new gowns finds it hard to fit in. Is there no other debutante who reads?! And while the balls and house parties go on, newspaper headlines scream of war in Spain and threats from Germany. No one wants a second world war. Especially not the Montmaravians—with all Europe under attack, who will care about the fate of their tiny island kingdom? Will the FitzOsbornes ever be able to go home again? Could Montmaray be lost forever?
Hermine Reuss of Greiz is perhaps better known as the second wife of the Kaiser (Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany) whom she married shortly after the death of his first wife Auguste Viktoria and while he was in exile in the Netherlands. She was by then a widow herself with young children. She was known to be ambitious about wanting to return to power, and her husband insisted on her being called 'Empress'. To achieve her goal, she turned to the most powerful man in Germany at the time, Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, her dream was not realised as Hitler refused to restore the monarchy and with the death of Wilhelm in 1941, Hermine was forced to return to her first husband's lands. She was arrested shortly after the end of the Second World War and would die under mysterious circumstances while under house arrest by the Red Army.
