This is the first biography of Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, a key figure in the early development of airpower, whose significant and varied achievements have been overlooked because of his subsequent involvement in the fall of Singapore. It highlights Brooke-Popham’s role in developing the first modern military logistic system, the creation of the Royal Air Force Staff College and the organizational arrangements that underpinned Fighter Command’s success in the Battle of Britain. Peter Dye challenges longstanding views about performance as Commander-in-Chief Far East and, based on new evidence, offers a more nuanced narrative that sheds light on British and Allied preparations for the Pacific War, inter-service relations and the reasons for the disastrous loss of air and naval superiority that followed the Japanese attack. “The Man Who Took the Rap” highlights the misguided attempts at deterrence, in the absence of a coordinated information campaign, and the unprecedented security lapse that betrayed the parlous state of the Allied defenses.
Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
'A gripping, unsettling, and highly original book that turns the making of a Soviet socialist-realist classic—Azhaev's Far from Moscow—into a detective story, and sheds as strange and ambiguous a light on the Stalin era, from gulag to Writers'Union, as one could hope for. Lahusen is a disarmingly low-key scholarly virtuoso who performs simultaneously as an archive-based historian, an interpreter of texts (including Azhaev's own self-organized archive), and a gently relentless biographer whose stalking of his prey is reminiscent of Nabokov. The final chilling paragraph typically economical and understated, is a reminder that the author/investigator, too, is a collaborator in the multiple reworkings of Azhaev's text, and of his life, that How Life Writes the Book has so finely analyzed.'—Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago 'This is a wonderfully original work: a history of a book, a literary analysis of an age, a montage of a life. Lahusen writes with a postmodern sensibility but without the postmodernist jargon.'—Yuri Slezkine, University of California, Berkeley 'Thomas Lahusen has written an imaginative and archivally grounded book that presents the most fascinating picture to date of the literary process that produced canonical works of Socialist Realism and the people who wrote them. How Life Writes the Book is alternatingly chilling and funny as it demonstrates the interpenetration of literary institutions, massive construction projects and the Soviet system of prison camps and slave labor. With this study, as with his earlier Intimacy and Terror, Lahusen continues his own project of revolutionizing our understanding of the Soviet subject and Soviet subjectivity.'—Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley 'Lahusen's case study marks a new genre of inquiry into the very nature of socialist realism, a genre which became possible after archives and memory in Russia regained their voice. It shows how life is transformed into Soviet myth.'—Hans G'nther, editor of The Culture of the Stalin Period
A compilation of personal letters creates an autobiography of the author of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" through his correspondence with other literary luminaries, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as well as letters to complete strangers.
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
To British television viewers, the name ‘Patrick Moore’ has been synonymous with Astronomy and Space Travel since he first appeared on The Sky at Night in 1957. To amateur astronomers he has been a source of inspiration, joy, humour and even an eccentric role model since that time. Most people know that his 55 years of presenting The Sky at Night is a world record, but what was he really like in person? What did he do away from the TV cameras, in his observatory, and within the British Astronomical Association, the organisation that inspired him as a youngster? Also, precisely what did he do during the War Years, a subject that has always been shrouded in mystery? Martin Mobberley, a friend of Patrick Moore’s for 30 years, and a former President of the British Astronomical Association, has spent ten years exhaustively researching Patrick’s real life away from the TV cameras. His childhood, RAF service, tireless voluntary work for astronomy and charity and his endless book writing are all examined in detail. His astronomical observations are also examined in unprecedented detail, along with the battles he fought along the way and his hatred of bureaucracy and political correctness. No fan of Sir Patrick Moore can possibly live without this work on their bookshelf!
A mama cow’s devotion to her calf provides lessons in motherhood to a poor Southern woman in this novel of family, survival, and human-animal bonds. South Carolina, 1950s. Homemaker Sarah Creamer has been left to care for young Emerson Bridge, the product of an affair between Sarah’s husband and her best friend. But beyond the deep wound of their betrayal, Sarah is daunted by the prophecy of her mother’s words, seared in her memory since childhood: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.” When Sarah finds Emerson a steer to compete at an upcoming cattle show, the young calf cries in distress on her farm. Miles away, his mother breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to find him. When Sarah finds the young steer contently nursing a large cow, her education in motherhood begins. But Luther Dobbins is desperate to regain his championship cattle dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her budding mama bone, Sarah is committed to victory even after she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she too stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher? One Good Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love and the ethical dilemmas of raising animals for food.
Nicolaas van Wijk (1880-1941) was the founder of Slavic studies in the Netherlands and one of the greatest Slavists in general. This book describes for the first time how a scholar of the Dutch language, whose etymological dictionary of the Dutch language is still considered the best of its kind, was appointed in 1913 to the newly created Chair in Slavic languages at Leiden University and built up a tremendous reputation for himself in Eastern Europe. Van Wijk's relations with his famous teacher, the linguist C.C. Uhlenbeck, are followed attentively, as is his postgraduate apprenticeship in Leipzig (1902-1903), where he followed August Leskien's lectures in Slavic studies. Attention is also paid to the various aspects of Van Wijk's enormous oeuvre covering the whole field of Slavic studies and of phonology, of which he was one of the pioneers. Van Wijk did not, however, follow the lines approved for the social conduct of a Leiden professor and was at one time suspected by the police of communist activities. His commitment to materially helping all he could from an Eastern Europe torn apart by the First World War and its aftermath was exceptional. His fascination with all things Russian is a background theme that played throughout his life and even at his death: son of a Dutch Reformed minister, the bachelor Van Wijk was buried in a grave surmounted by a Russian Orthodox cross beside his Russian foster son, who died young. This book is of interest to Slavists, linguists and cultural historians.
This book is the culmination of a long companionship, a final link between a historian familiar with theology and a theologian keen on history. It was in February 1966 that Etienne Fouilloux met the Dominican theologian Yves Congar for the first time. He then began a thesis on the origins of ecumenism. Congar liberally opened his personal archives to him. For fifteen years, Congar did not leave the horizon of Fouilloux. Congar attended the defense of his thesis in 1980. Then, according to the work of the historian, the theologian was never far away, voluntary or involuntary protagonist of many of his studies on the theological crises of the 1930s and 1950s, the Second World War or the Second Vatican Council. In scattered but recurring touches, Fouilloux had already shed light on many aspects of Congar's work, including by publishing Journal d'un theologien. 1946-1956 (Editions du Cerf, 2000). Today, an overall plan and the cement necessary for writing a life story conceal the many stones previously brought to the building and finally constitute a biography of Father Congar. The sum is undeniably greater than the addition of the parts. Sabine Rousseau, Archives de Sciences sociales des religions October-December 2021.
This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on a close examination of twenty-five works published between 1972 and 2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifist, troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic spirit, inspirational figure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofiction, whether to enhance or debunk stereotypes about the historical figure, the authors studied here contribute to her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fictional portraits constitute a way to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-first century
