Historic fiction based on the true story of a love that influenced three generations of women in three countries and two world wars. Finally, in the third generation, Maria-Karolina's grand-daughter went in search of the key to unlock the door to what had been and to what could be. Even then, she had to find her courage to start over again and reclaim a promise of love which had haunted her own life.
A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
In 2013, Germany celebrated the bicentennial of the so-called Wars of Liberation (1813-15). These wars were the culmination of the Prussian struggle against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815, which occupied a key position in German national historiography and memory. Although these conflicts have been analyzed in thousands of books and articles, much of the focus has been on the military campaigns and alliances. Karen Hagemann argues that we cannot achieve a comprehensive understanding of these wars and their importance in collective memory without recognizing how the interaction of politics, culture, and gender influenced these historical events and continue to shape later recollections of them. She thus explores the highly contested discourses and symbolic practices by which individuals and groups interpreted these wars and made political claims, beginning with the period itself and ending with the centenary in 1913.
A history of the British Army’s experience at the Battle of the Somme in France during World War I. After an immense but useless bombardment, at 7:30 AM on July 1, 1916, the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, July 1, 1916, was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, as Lloyd George recognized, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener’s call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. Martin Middlebrook’s research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality that it was for front-line soldiers. Praise for The First Day on the Somme “The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words.” —The Guardian (UK)
This is a critical review of the German social and political situation several decades before WWI. The author attempts to analyze how the thoughts, views, and influence of great personalities such as Goethe, Nietsche, Princeton Buelov, and Frederich the Great.
[16 Illustrations, portraits of the author, author’s unit and plane.] In the small city of Wiesbaden in southwest Germany, a small headstone proclaims that the incumbent of its grave is Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen. Small fanfare and panoply for the far-famed and feared Red Baron; a hunter even during his childhood, he took to the skies above France and Flanders in 1915 following service as a cavalry officer. In the air he hunted his prey, almost exclusively British pilots, and by the time of his death in 1918 was credited with some 80 air combat victories. He was only 25 at the time of his death. American author Floyd Gibbon’s biography seeks to give a fuller and more realistic portrait of Manfred von Richthofen than is widely known; to his German countryman he seemed to be a superhuman hero of the skies; to the Allies who opposed him, he seemed a ruthless bogeyman. The truth is far more complex than this as the author explains in great detail, using von Richthofen’s own autobiography and other contemporary sources in order to produce a portrait of the greatest World War One Ace.
