The autobiography of Britain's greatest living composer is as idiosyncratic as the man himself, revealing his insatiable curiosity about people and places, ideas and sensations, and music of every kind. Vigorous, brave, funny, candid about his sexual and emotional life, Sir Michael has written a remarkable, memorable book.
Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in freedom through strong defense. But this extraordinary memoir at last reveals the man behind the headlines--passionate and humorous, devoted and loyal. Never before has Teller told his story as fully as he does here. We learn his true position on everything from the bombing of Japan to the pursuit of weapons research in the post-war years. In clear and compelling prose, Teller chronicles the people and events that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics under Werner Heisenberg. He also describes his relationships with some of the century's greatest minds--Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neumann--and offers an honest assessment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the founding of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his complicated relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer.Rich and humanizing, this candid memoir describes the events that led Edward Teller to be honored or abhorred, and provides a fascinating perspective on the ability of a single individual to affect the course of history.
In their literary autobiographies, modernists Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenge the scientific figures of the perverse lesbian, particularly those promulgated by Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. By multiplying their 'I's, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition to code erotic moments, these writers queer the terms of autobiography. That queering requires understanding autobiography as more institutional than introspective, and the autobiographies themselves question the very theories that determine them: theories of lesbianism, female development, and memory.
Eric Hobsbawm is considered by many to be our greatest living historian. Robert Heilbroner, writing about Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes 1914-1991 said, “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” Skeptical, endlessly curious, and almost contemporary with the terrible “short century” which is the subject of Age of Extremes, his most widely read book, Hobsbawm has, for eighty-five years, been committed to understanding the “interesting times” through which he has lived. Hitler came to power as Hobsbawm was on his way home from school in Berlin, and the Soviet Union fell while he was giving a seminar in New York. He was a member of the Apostles at King’s College, Cambridge, took E.M. Forster to hear Lenny Bruce, and demonstrated with Bertrand Russell against nuclear arms in Trafalgar Square. He translated for Che Guevara in Havana, had Christmas dinner with a Soviet master spy in Budapest and an evening at home with Mahalia Jackson in Chicago. He saw the body of Stalin, started the modern history of banditry and is probably the only Marxist asked to collaborate with the inventor of the Mars bar. Hobsbawm takes us from Britain to the countries and cultures of Europe, to America (which he appreciated first through movies and jazz), to Latin America, Chile, India and the Far East. With Interesting Times, we see the history of the twentieth century through the unforgiving eye of one of its most intensely engaged participants, the incisiveness of whose views we cannot afford to ignore in a world in which history has come to be increasingly forgotten.
"The Black Experience in the 20th Century is also the personal journey of Peter Abrahams. It is the odyssey of a young South African who worked for a time as a seaman in order to leave his homeland for wartime Britain and post-war France to become a writer; it is the story of his personal relationships with the Black literati of the day and his involvement in the pan-Africanist movement of the 1950s, which allows for his fascinating personal pen-portraits of men like George Padmore, W. E. B. Dubois, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. It is how the journey takes him to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where he and his wife, Daphne, and their three children find sanctuary from racial divisiveness at "Coyaba." Finally, it is about the author's lifelong companionship with Daphne and how their multiracial union reflects a symbolic "one bloodedness" mirroring Abrahams' own admirable sensibilities."--BOOK JACKET.
China and the world entered a period of social, political, intellectual, and cultural crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, with China, being on the weak side of the China-world linkage, swept into calamitous turmoil. As this crisis intensified in the late 1920's, an innocent boy from rural China went to Beijing, where disruptive forces feeding the tumult converged, to attend pre-college classes at Peking University. In the ensuing thirty years, with wars torching the land around him, through personal suffering and struggles, he observed, learned, reflected, and lived to develop himself into a serious philosopher. This philosopher will later become arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. This autobiography recounts the philosopher's development against the social and political events and intellectual currents of the turbulent time. It weaves social-political commentaries and philosophical contemplations in a narration of personal experiences. While movingly recalling the bright side of life-the worry-free childhood in a tranquil farm village, the unconditional friendship in difficult times, the uplifting inspiration from a teacher with authentic character, the soul-soaking awakening by a remote chant heard in a quiet night-it also honestly reveals the less bright side of living a life-the pull of the world of the senses, the self-righteous rancor harbored against those who wronged him, the anger and irreverence directed at certain well known figures, the dejection that overtook him when the world around him crumbled. But above all it shares with readers a genuine, unending existential quest. The philosopher's vigilance for "being" leads him to exclaim: "Just let the feeling of nothingness ... float without any lingering resistance! ... Have nothing, only this suffering, only this fear, only this sadness!" Vigilance for "being" is vigilance in solitude. The deepening of nothingness turns into absolute commiseration-the commiserative enlightenment that unifies the subjective and the objective sides of reality into one. With his own religiosity engaged by this deep existential enlightenment, the philosopher in the final chapter leaves the account of his factual life behind and turns to philosophizing "commiseration" by way of evaluating Christianity and Buddhism, infusing the autobiography with a distinct philosophical flavor. In this philosophical evaluation, what he finds lacking in Christianity and Buddhism in terms of commiserative enlightenment, he finds in Confucianism. This autobiography thus marks the launch of the philosopher into thirty more years of philosophizing about Confucianism, and underscores the importance of existential experience in motivating his very original Confucian moral metaphysics.
Assisted by her daughter, Daisy Rubiera Castillo, the author recounts her life as a black woman struggling with prejudice and change in Cuba over the span of 90 years. Known as "Reyita", Maria de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno starts her story with the abduction of her grandmother by slave traders and shares her own experiences as a mother, laborer, and revolutionary.
Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is the first biography of this legendary country music artist and NASCAR driver who scored sixteen number-one hits and two Grammy awards. Yet even with fame and fortune, Marty Robbins always yearned for more. Drawing from personal interviews and in-depth research, biographer Diane Diekman explains how Robbins saw himself as a drifter, a man always searching for self-fulfillment and inner peace. Born Martin David Robinson to a hardworking mother and an abusive alcoholic father, he never fully escaped the insecurities burned into him by a poverty-stricken nomadic childhood in the Arizona desert. In 1947 he got his first gig as a singer and guitar player. Too nervous to talk, the shy young man walked onstage singing. Soon he changed his name to Marty Robbins, cultivated his magnetic stage presence, and established himself as an entertainer, songwriter, and successful NASCAR driver. For fans of Robbins, NASCAR, and classic country music, Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is a revealing portrait of this well-loved, restless entertainer, a private man who kept those who loved him at a distance.
The prominent journalist, historian, and author—an eyewitness to some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century—tells the story of his final years. In the last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat, his shocking firing by CBS News, and his final visit to Paris sixty years after he first lived there as a cub reporter in the 1920s. It paints a bittersweet picture of his final decades, friends lost to old age, and a changing world. More personal than the first two volumes, this final installment takes an unflinching look at the author’s own struggles after World War II—and his vindication after the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his most acclaimed work. It also provides intimate details of his often-troubled marriage. This book gives readers a surprising and moving account of the last years of a true historian—and an important witness to history.
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, delivered by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans) at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 7, 2017, in an elegant, clothbound edition. In their announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy recognized the emotional force of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction and his mastery at uncovering our illusory sense of connection with the world. In the eloquent and candid lecture he delivered upon accepting the award, Ishiguro reflects on the way he was shaped by his upbringing, and on the turning points in his career—“small scruffy moments . . . quiet, private sparks of revelation”—that made him the writer he is today. With the same generous humanity that has graced his novels, Ishiguro here looks beyond himself, to the world that new generations of writers are taking on, and what it will mean—what it will demand of us—to make certain that literature remains not just alive, but essential. An enduring work on writing and becoming a writer, by one of the most accomplished novelists of our generation.