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Stefan Zweig's Amerigo: A Comedy of Errors in History is the Austrian writer's account of how America got its name. This short, late work describes how Amerigo Vespucci, “a man of medium caliber [who] had never been entrusted with a fleet” gave his name to the New World because “of a combination of circumstances — through error, accident, and misunderstanding.” Zweig was living in exile in Brazil when he wrote Amerigo, shortly before committing suicide in despair over Hitler's conquest of Europe. “The paradox that Columbus discovered America but failed to recognize it, while Vespucci did not discover it but was the first to recognize it as a new continent,” he wrote, illustrates how “history will not be reasoned with.”
In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era. “A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)
In this succinct, fact-based, insightful analysis of Hitler and his impact on the world, Sebastian Haffner displays his skills as a first-class journalist and a student of German and modern European history. A keen psychologist, he describes the man, the politician, the ideologue, the military leader, the mass-murderer, and ultimately the traitor to his own (adopted) country. “Mr Haffner ... has exposed better, and more briefly, than anyone else the clockwork of that infernal machine” — Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Sunday Telegraph “Lucid, informative and provocative.” — Golo Mann, Der Spiegel “Nothing I have read on the Third Reich has been as valuable as Sebastian Haffner’s Meaning of Hitler” — Manfred Rommel, Stuttgarter Nachrichten “a stimulating book, brilliant and rich in ideas; in short a masterpiece of historical essay writing.” — Joachim Fest, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “This study ... deserves the highest praise. There is nothing of this brevity and depth to inform the younger generation and give those who lived through the era food for thought.” — Peter Diehl-Thiele, Süddeutsche Zeitung “He circumnavigates the Hitler phenomenon in order to illuminate it from seven different viewpoints, and that in under 200 lucid and precise pages without assuming any prior knowledge.” — Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Münchner Merkur “not one more biography but an analysis - a most penetrating analysis - of what Hitler was up to in his astonishing career” — A.L. Rowse “Sebastian Haffner’s book already has received recognition ... as perhaps the best that has dealt with the phenomenon of Hitler and his impact on the 20th century. It is better than Trevor-Roper’s best-seller, The Last Days of Hitler ... a most penetrating analysis of what Hitler was up to in his astonishing career.” — The New Republic “Tough-minded evaluation of Hitler’s career ... That this book was a best-seller in Germany [43 weeks] indicates that Haffner’s countrymen welcomed this compact, lucid, hard-headed reexamination of contemporary history.” — Publishers Weekly “Until [1991], as Sebastian Haffner wrote in his short, matchless book The Meaning of Hitler (1978), we had been living in the Europe which Hitler created for us: the split continent and the mutilated, divided Germany.” — Neal Ascherson, The Observer
Czech-born playwright, novelist and poet Franz Werfel (1890-1945) became internationally famous(and a special target of the Nazis) after he wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the first novel about the Armenian Genocide. He later published the Catholic classic The Song of Bernadette, written after a deeply religious experience in Lourdes, a stop on his escape route to the United States through occupied France. Born into a wealthy family of Prague Jews, Werfel was torn between his Jewish identity and his attraction to Catholicism, between high art and popular success. He was friends with Franz Kafka and Max Brod in his youth and later and part of a larger Central European intellectual circle that included Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. He married Alma Schindler-Mahler-Gropius (widow of composer Gustav Mahler and ex-wife of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius). The couple fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and became part of the German exile community of California. They lived in Beverly Hills where Werfel died, a successful Hollywood screenwriter. “This lovely book is more than a biography — a meditation on art, history and human life.” — John Simon, New York Times Book Review “An exemplary biography.” Edward Timms, The Times Literary Supplement “Jungk’s description of how he researched his subject is highly suspenseful and reads like a detective story.” — Der Spiegel “This exemplary biography recalls Werfel’s career and its vanished settings as part of the cultural history of the West. Mr. Jungk also provides a searing picture of Werfel’s wife, the famous Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel...” — The New Yorker “This biography, ostensibly the story of a life, is really a broad panorama of culture and history... It is Jungk’s genius to seduce us into following him into Werfel’s world, and to keep us there, completely enthralled.” — Die Welt
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Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was America’s first internationally famous female foreign correspondent. Born outside of Buffalo, New York, she graduated from Syracuse University in 1914 and honed her writing and interviewing skills in the women’s suffrage movement before heading for Europe as a freelance journalist. Reporting from Vienna, Budapest and Berlin during the rise of Nazism, she was the first western journalist to be expelled from Germany by Adolf Hitler after denigrating him in a profile. Her later columns in the Ladies’ Home Journal and radio broadcasts for CBS (published as Listen, Hans) made her, next to Eleanor Roosevelt, the most influential woman in the United States. Thompson was married three times: her second marriage was to the American novelist, Nobel Prize-winner, and alcoholic Sinclair Lewis; her third and happiest, to Czech artist Maxim Kopf. She also had several lesbian relationships. Avidly interested in everything from sustainable farming to the fine arts, she divided her later years between New York City and her farm in Barnard, Vermont. “A skillful exploration of the life and personality of the formidable foreign correspondent” — New York Times “[readers] will be pleased to meet a fascinating, driven and indomitable woman who richly deserves this fine biography” — Thomas Griffith, New York Times “Sensationally good ... Kurth’s vividly detailed and dramatic portrayal of Thompson’s life fully compensates for the memoirs she planned but never lived to write. Here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a woman we must not forget.” — USA Today “Kurth guides us through the tumultuous complexities of the time-the rise of Nazism in Germany; isolationism in America; the Second World War; the establishment of Israel and other issues that Thompson took over as her personal battleground. His daunting task is to show us a mind at work, and he pulls it off.” — Washington Post “In a day of dime-a-dozen pundits jabbering on the talk shows, Thompson’s diligence and influence are worth recalling. Mr. Kurth’s compulsively readable account allows us to re-live an age and do just that.” — Wall Street Journal “Kurth has a surprising grasp of Thompson’s emotional makeup, strictly avoiding the kind of supercilious or paternalistic attitude that such a character invites in male authors. His biography is insightful without being sentimental, warm without being sycophantic.” — Toronto Star “An important asset of this big, solid book is author Kurth’s prolific use of Thompson’s own words. She left 150 file cases of published and unpublished writings — chunks of private thoughts and musings on her three husbands and her own sexuality one would have expected her to burn... Kurth has battled through this paper blizzard and emerged with a clear-as-ice-water picture of a turbulent, complex personality.” —Baltimore Sun “Peter Kurth, author of the haunting Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, proves once again that he is the equal of Stefan Zweig as a biographer of women. His fairness, his control of his material and his eye for the revealing quotation are such that he makes us empathize with Miss Thompson even when we feel like strangling her.” — Washington Times
This daughter's profile of Czechoslovak swimmer and water polo player Kurt Epstein (1904-1975) traces the history of Jewish athletes in Central Europe and provides a case study of one such life-long athlete. Epstein grew up a stone's throw from the Elbe River and began swimming before the First World War, when his town of Roudnice nad Labem was still part of Austria-Hungary. In high school, he became a competitive rower and swimmer, challenging prevailing stereotypes about Jews and becoming a leading Czechoslovak water polo player and swimming coach, representing his country at two Olympic Games, in 1928 and 1936. In addition to describing the cultural background of the Epstein family in the Bohemian countryside, the book examines Kurt Epstein's decision to participate in the 1936 Berlin "Nazi" Olympics, and follows him through a series of Nazi concentration camps back to Prague, where he was elected member of the Czechoslovak National Olympic Committee. After the Communist putsch of 1948, Epstein vowed to flee "in a swimsuit if necessary" and, at 44, emigrated to New York City where he became a cutter in the garment district, swam weekly at the St. George pool in Brooklyn, and served as Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World.
When The Pillar of Salt was first published in 1953, it caused a scandal in Tunis. Acclaimed sociologist Albert Memmi, the son of poor Jewish parents who lived at the edge of the equally poor Jewish and Muslim quarters, wrote candidly about the life of Tunisia’s small Jewish community and the failings of the tiny local bourgeoisie, “which thought itself opulent but was only ridiculous.” Memmi was no less critical of his Muslim fellow citizens or of the various European colonialists in his vicinity. “The Pillar of Salt reads like a general indictment,” Memmi writes in a new introduction to this 2013 eBook edition. This is an unusual man’s coming of age story and a document about a community that has now all but disappeared. “The grave torment of the truly homeless is the theme of Albert Memmi's mature, thoughtful book... His father an Italian Jew, his mother a Berber, Benillouche struggles on the tattered fringe of the Tunisian ghetto for the very air he breathes... Beneath this account of privation, there is a more deeply harrowing realization on the part of the protagonist that he belongs nowhere.” — New York Times “In the Celine-Sartre-Camus tradition of the contemporary French novel of despair, this autobiographical narrative has maturity, stylistic grace, and purpose... A thoughtful, perceptive work.” — Library Journal “Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, Memmi’s young hero and narrator, is a Jewish native of French-colonized Tunisia ... Memmi’s ... semiautobiographical novel powerfully distinguishes itself through its unblinking examination of the contradictions that thwart even Alexandre’s most altruistic ambitions. After volunteering to work in a labor camp during World War II, Alexandre discovers that the class and ethnic distinctions haunting him continued within the camp. Ultimately, only exile and fiction writing — ‘mastering ... life by recreating it’ — can avert despair.” — Publishers Weekly “Told with clarity of vision, a passionate sense of justice, and a warm heart.” — New York Herald Tribune
Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth — where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in 1949 as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons for a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years after the war and of the stormy marriage between her father, a brilliant Talmudic scholar, and her mother, a cosmopolitan woman from a more secular Jewish family. In 1993, after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for a six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest. Emerging from this eloquent, often suspenseful diary is the portrait of an intellectual who recaptures her past and comes into contact with the vital, troubling world of contemporary Eastern Europe. Suleiman's vivid descriptions of her encounters with a proud, old city and its people in a time of historical change remind us that every life story is at once unique and part of a larger history. "I recommend this autobiographical narrative because it is grave and beautiful. Better still, it is shatteringly truthful." — Elie Wiesel "Susan Rubin was a little girl when her parents fled through darkened fields to escape the Communist regime in Hungary in 1949... [This] is a poignant piece of self-revelation, sprinkled with some trenchant observations on the way the dead hand of history has weighed down the former Warsaw Pact countries." — Kirkus "[A] fascinating, revealing journal... brutally honest." — Publishers Weekly "This pensive, forthright journal records Suleiman's efforts to reconnect with a long-forgotten homeland." — Booklist "Suleiman lyrically describes her quest and the complex interaction of the Eastern Europe of the past and present." — Boston Globe "A tale of survival, adaptation and pure luck, whose darker side reveals the linguistic and emotional cost of emigration and exile, the feeling of permanent displacement, of being nowhere at home." — Forward "This story must speak to all those who have fled and who have ever dreamed of a return." — Independent Jewish Women's Magazine "[A] thoughtful and sophisticated memoir... You don't have to be Hungarian or Jewish to appreciate writing like this." — Montreal Gazette
A personal account of a mother’s sudden and unexpected hospitalization, and how her adult children negotiated end-of-life decisions. This essay appeared as a New York Magazine cover story on November 27, 1989 as "A Death in the Family 1989."