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A National Book Award Finalist A "riveting" (New York Times) look at one year of Viennese life during the twilight of an empire On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still. Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.
On January 30, 1889, during the Viennese Carnival, Emperor Franz Josef’s son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then at himself at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods. In this National Book Award finalist, Frederic Morton tells the story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of ten months, “the Western dream started to go wrong.” In 1888-89 Vienna, other young men like Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and Arthur Schnitzler were as frustrated as the Crown Prince, but for other reasons. Morton interweaves their fates with that of the Prince and the entire city, until Rudolf’s body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf is born to Frau Klara Hitler. “Riveting” — John Leonard, The New York Times “As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor’s waltz” — Publishers Weekly “[A] spirited tale of Viennese life... by his skillful use of rich but forgotten daily details [Morton] construct[s] a fascinating account of ten months in the lives of Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Wolf, and others.” — Kirkus Reviews “On every page, great names and odd moments glitter... a remarkable and unusual slice of history.” — Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times “1888/1889 is my favorite year in the life of ‘the Imperial City,’ and Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor is my favorite book about Vienna.” — John Irving, author of The World According to Garp
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On July 6, 1888, the price of sugar went up from forty to forty-two kreuzers a kilo in Imperial Vienna. On the afternoon of the same day, the gates of Franz Joseph’s palace swung open. A carriage swept out onto the cobbles of the Ringstrasse. #2 The Austrian Empire was a dynastic fiction, but it was still a spectacular oddity among the great states of Europe. Rudolf waited to be the next Austrian emperor. Every fairytale corner of the Monarchy contributed visitors to the Ringstrasse. #3 The Ringstrasse was home to many military uniforms, which made for a beautiful sight. But the boulevard also attracted officers from all over the Empire, who brought with them their nation's tensions and nationalism. #4 Rudolf was the heir apparent, but he had never been given any real power save the almost occult ability to make heels click and hats levitate through his mere presence. He had learned to play the princely eunuch for a while longer.
During a seven-decade career that spanned from 19th century Vienna to 1920s Broadway to the golden age of Hollywood, three-time Academy Award winner Max Steiner did more than any other composer to introduce and establish the language of film music. Indeed, revered contemporary film composers like John Williams and Danny Elfman use the same techniques that Steiner himself perfected in his iconic work for such classics as Casablanca, King Kong, Gone with the Wind, The Searchers, Now, Voyager, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, and over 200 other titles. And Steiner's private life was a drama all its own. Born into a legendary Austrian theatrical dynasty, he became one of Hollywood's top-paid composers. But he was also constantly in debt--the inevitable result of gambling, financial mismanagement, four marriages, and the actions of his emotionally troubled son. Throughout his chaotic life, Steiner was buoyed by an innate optimism, a quick wit, and an instinctive gift for melody, all of which would come to the fore as he met and worked with luminaries like Richard Strauss, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, the Warner Bros., David O. Selznick, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Frank Capra. In Music by Max Steiner, the first full biography of Steiner, author Steven C. Smith interweaves the dramatic incidents of Steiner's personal life with an accessible exploration of his composing methods and experiences, bringing to life the previously untold story of a musical pioneer and master dramatist who helped create a vital new art with some of the greatest film scores in cinema history.
In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power: Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic. Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia. Otto von Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation. The three statesmen forged the empires that would dominate the twentieth century through two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Each of the three was a revolutionary, yet each consolidated a nation that differed profoundly from the others in its conceptions of liberty, power, and human destiny. Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires brilliantly entwines the stories of the three epochal transformations and their fateful legacies. Telling the stories from the point of view of those who participated in the momentous events -- among them Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Chesnut and Leo Tolstoy, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie -- Beran weaves a rich tapestry of high drama and human pathos. Great events often turned on the decisions of a few lone souls, and each of the three statesmen faced moments of painful doubt or denial as well as significant decisions that would redefine their nations. With its vivid narrative and memorable portraiture, Forge of Empires sheds new light on a question of perennial importance: How are free states made, and how are they unmade? In the same decade that saw freedom's victories, one of the trinity of liberators revealed himself as an enemy to the free state, and another lost heart. What Lincoln called the "germ" of freedom, which was "to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind," came close to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state against new philosophies of terror and coercion. Forge of Empires is a masterly story of one of history's most significant decades.
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.