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Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation Experienced biographer Jeffrey Meyers delves into the complex personal history of the man whose visionary work gave us the great anti-utopias of the twentieth-century. Meyers draws on a close study of the new edition of George Orwell's Complete Works, interviews with his family and friends, and research into unpublished material in the Orwell Archive in London to shed new light on this most unusual literary figure. A child of the waning British Empire, Orwell came to reject the stifling class system of his birth, and through his writing forged a new social consciousness that continues to engage modern intellectual thought. Meyers's work also reveals the human failings of this creative visionary, his childhood insecurities, his political dilemmas, and his conflicted relationships with women. The Orwell who emerges from this book is a darker, but distinctly more nuanced, portrait of the legendary figure.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre; the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. Drawing from the huge body of work that Pessoa left behind, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is further testimony from a writer whose worst enemy was his own brilliance. These pieces span playful intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and bitter intellectual scrapping between Pessoa and his many literary alter egos ("heteronyms"). Pessoa experiments with the surrealist technique of automatic writing and toys with the occult. The heteronyms launch movements and write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only known romantic relationship. There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce, critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another, and a love letter by Pessoa's only known female heteronym. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important contribution to literature that brings back to life a forgotten but crucial part of the canon.
Sea Battles on Dry Land Sea Battles on Dry Land gathers the best of Brodkey's essays into a single volume. His "One of the Rules of Foppishness" explains, with deadpan precision, just what men and women are trying to communicate to each other by the way they dress. The previously unpublished "Notes on American Fascism" eerily anticipates the violence of latter-day militia groups. And Brodkey's profile of Frank O'Hara's Harvard years stands as one of the most eloquent portraits of a legendary American writer. Gifted with a capacious and searching intelligence, Brodkey was equally skilled at writing film reviews, lighthearted "Talk of the Town" pieces, and erudite discourses on the nature of fiction.
Mauve Mauve is the story of a man who accidentally invented a color, and in the process transformed the world around him. Before 1856, the color in our lives; the reds, blues, and blacks of clothing, paint, print; came from insects of mollusks, roots or leaves, and dyeing was painstaking and expensive. But in 1856 eighteen-year-old English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce color in a factory. Working on a treatment for malaria in his London home laboratory, Perkin found mauve by chance. His experiments failed to result in artificial quinine as he had hoped, but produced instead a dark oily sludge that happened to turn silk a beautiful light purple. Mauve became the most desirable shade in the fashion houses of Paris and London, and quickly led to crimsons, violets, blues, and greens, earning its inventor a fortune Before mauve, chemistry was largely a theoretical science. Perkin's discovery sparked new interest in industrial applications of chemistry research, which later brought about the development of explosives, perfume, photography, modern medicine, and today's plastics industry.
Memoir of the Hawk James Tate's new book, Memoir of the Hawk, creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures.
Natural Remedies from the Chinese Cupboard This concise and informative work presents natural food remedies and herbal treatments for common illnesses, derived from both traditional Chinese and Western practices. Brief introductory chapters present the fundamentals of Chinese medical philosophy, while the main text presents alphabetically over 60 common illnesses or conditions, from allergies to urinary stones, from constipation to peptic ulcers. Definitions, causes, and symptoms of each malady are presented, and are followed by natural food remedies for each, as well as herbal preparations available at Chinese pharmacies. This is a well-organized and useful sourcebook for information about sensible alternative therapies. |
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Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency Described as "a man who would prefer a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon," George Augustus Frederick (1762-1830), the oldest son of King George III, was a pivotal and highly controversial figure in England's Regency period. Although his scandalous liaisons with prostitutes and duchesses, a "secret" marriage to his true love, the Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert, and a publicly ridiculed (bigamous) marriage to Caroline of Brunswick threatened to eclipse his contributions to British history, Saul David's engrossing biography Prince of Pleasure shows a man of high intelligence and political ambition. His actions reflected the ambivalent relationship of the monarchy to Parliament at a time when the nation was infected by revolution fervor in America and France.
The Myth of the State A great contemporary German philosopher attacks the explosive problem of political myth in our day. In this his final work Ernst Cassirer shows how the irrational forces symbolized by myth and manipulated by the state constantly threaten to destroy the independent mind of civilized man. Cassirer reveals how the myth of the state evolved from primitive times through Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Gobineau, Carlyle, and Hegel and how it prepared the way for the rise of the modern totalitarian state. The Myth of the State provides a thorough grounding in the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myth, in the author's belief that this is the only defense against the "violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations."
Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism Behind the profound social and economic changes now taking place in China is a complex history of communism's invention and loss of meaning. This history, form 1949 to the present, has been extensively studied by scholars using the methods of history and political science. Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution makes an innovative departure form these studies through a series of reflections on the history of communist China as a history of consciousness. It focuses on important aspects of the Chinese experience, such as memory and amnesia, energy and meaning, and the center and periphery mentality, that are amenable more to a philosophical and psychological approach than to an empirical one. The author goes beyond the concept of utopianism that is customarily applied to the Chinese communist experience by viewing this epoch in terms of the movement from utopianism to nihilism to hedonism. He traces the path of Chinese communism form the early belief that denial and hard work combined with Marxism and Maoism would create a utopia of material and spiritual abundance to the disappointment of this belief and the ensuing search for individual pleasure and prosperity.
Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora The Chinese Diaspora stretches all over the world. It represents the most widespread and prolonged series of migrations by one nation ever. In this rich blend of history, biography, and travel, noted author Lynn Pan recounts why emigrants have left China; how their dispersal has been shaped and stimulated by imperialist Western powers; and how the all-male frontier groups were transformed into complex communities organized by clan, dialect, and secret society. In the process, she takes us inside the supposedly closed world of the overseas Chinese and shows how, in a curious boomerang effect, these expatriates are currently changing the supposedly eternal face of China, perhaps forever. A new afterword by the author comments on the ironies that result when multiculturalism and emigrant culture meet head-on.
Empresses and Consorts: Selections from Chen Shou's Records of the Three States Early imperial China was comparable to the better studied Song and Ming-Qing transition periods in defining the role of Chinese women in government and society. The creation of imperial institutions and the attendant philosophic, economic, and social changes led to a fundamental transformation in the place of women. Symptomatic of these broader developments was the changing status of palace women in particular. Empresses and Consorts begins with a critical overview of developments in thought and institutions affecting palace women from earliest times through the Han, and shows how attitudes changed over time. The core of the book is a meticulous and richly annotated translation of the three fascicles of Chen Shou's (233-297) Records of the Three States devoted to palace women. Here rendered into English for the first time, these chapters provide important insights into the worlds of palace women and court politics, while revealing much about the lives of upper-class women in general at the close of the third century.
The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968 This book examines the development of France's male and female homosexual communities and its gay liberation movements after 1968. The book focuses on the construction of social institutions, treating gay activist organizations and their relation to post-1968 French feminism, gay ghettos in French cities, the gay press, the impact of AIDS on political identity, and the renewed militancy of the 1990s. While acknowledging the influence of America's gay liberation movement on the French situation, the author emphasizes the differences arising from the fact that homosexuality has not historically been criminalized in France as it has been in the United States. |
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