In this new collection essays, Matthew Stevenson weaves together a historical tapestry of the last hundred years. From the battlefields of Gallipoli and those around Armenia, to Cold War Washington and modern Beirut, he has written a compelling, yet often humorous and always accessible account of persons and places encountered in his travels.
Overcoming disabling injuries, Vietnam vet Paul Bernard becomes an award-winning journalist and television newsman. Known for holding a mirror to American society and long critical of the radical right, after 9-11 Bernard attacks the Bush administration for Osama bin Laden's escape and leading the nation into a disastrous war. On assignment in Iraq, Bernard is killed under suspicious circumstances. Interwoven with the account of his life is an interview of his mentor, Professor Augustus F.X. Flynn, by a magazine writer profiling him. Frustrated by Washington's inaction, the two set out to find the truth about the killing. Book One tells of Paul Bernard's coming of age, his Canadian immigrant roots, the patriotic and religious intensity of the early years. Then through the devastation of Vietnam to recovery and return, immersion in the New York newspaper scene, his family life. Twentieth Century Limited Book Two - Age of Reckoning, continues and completes the story.
This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the “memory boom” is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says. The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers “theaters of memory”—film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.
John King Fairbank (1907-1991) was best known to the public as the dean of Chinese studies in the United States. John Hersey, Hanu Reischauer, Harrison Salisbury, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are among the more than 125 friends, students, and colleagues to contribute to this volume. Each author attempts to capture the essence of the Fairbank he or she knew. The resulting pieces are alternately incisive, affectionate, intimate, deeply affecting, and hilariously funny. Fairbank Remembered is an endearing and moving portrait of America's doyen on China.
In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Several strands of the Rabbit saga come together here as, during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, Harry’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike’s fictional world go round—married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.
Based on declassified materials from eight Ukrainian and Russian archives, Stalin's Empire of Memory, offers a complex and vivid analysis of the politics of memory under Stalinism. Using the Ukrainian republic as a case study, Serhy Yekelchyk elucidates the intricate interaction between the Kremlin, non-Russian intellectuals, and their audiences. Yekelchyk posits that contemporary representations of the past reflected the USSR's evolution into an empire with a complex hierarchy among its nations. In reality, he argues, the authorities never quite managed to control popular historical imagination or fully reconcile Russia's 'glorious past' with national mythologies of the non-Russian nationalities. Combining archival research with an innovative methodology that links scholarly and political texts with the literary works and artistic images, Stalin's Empire of Memory presents a lucid, readable text that will become a must-have for students, academics, and anyone interested in Russian history.