Search results for ""Author Ivan"

Mr. Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius—and pseudo-genius—at work, and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P.G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, he provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. A master of the genre, as collections of his pieces attest, none more impressively than this set. —Booklist Starred Review

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Prize-winning reporter Robert Shogan draws on the lessons of nine presidential elections to show where the press goes wrong in the making of the president. The media, Mr. Shogan argues, now play the role of enablers. Without fully realizing it, they allow and abet the abuse of the political process by the candidates and their handlers. Shogan has got it right....Bad News is a wake-up call for journalists everywhere. —Sam Donaldson, ABC News. If there is such a thing as a good book about 'bad news,' this is it. —David S. Broder, Washington Post

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From "Piss Christ" to elephant dung, a decade of art wars has agitated public opinion and incited art world fury but has yielded little conventional wisdom about what ails our art institutions. In this sharp-eyed and authoritative investigation, Lynne Munson identifies an intolerance that overtook the art world in the postmodern era. By exploring the personalities and workings of such major institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts and Harvard University's Department of Fine Arts, she shows how a new dogmatism established itself in museums, academia, and even the artist's studio, where postmodernism favored experimental art at the expense of the traditional, and placed limits on what might be funded, exhibited, studied, and created. Drawing on original research, including more than a hundred interviews with artists, scholars, curators, museum directors, critics, and government officials, Exhibitionism gets behind the façade of the NEA's visual arts program to document its shift from excellence to fashionability; describes how one community of New York painters survived by taking refuge in co-op galleries; examines the "new museology" that has revised not only the content of art exhibitions but the very shape of museums; explains how Harvard's arts program, a one-time beacon for connoisseurial study, has devolved into a theory-driven curriculum nearly divorced from objects. With an eye for art and an ear for politics, Ms. Munson has produced the most important contribution yet to the art debate. With 8 pages of full-color illustrations.

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There are many Stevensons behind the initials RLS, but the one that has endeared him to readers for so long is surely the fighter, battling to stay alive. Jorge Luis Borges described his brief life as courageous and heroic. In Philip Callow’s absorbing new biography, one can see why. Doctors, called repeatedly to what should have been his deathbed, would find a scarecrow, twitching and alive. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny. He escaped his Scottish town, his family, his friends who had mapped out a literary career for him in London, and instead went chaotically across the Atlantic and overland to California in poverty and despair to reach his beloved, whereupon he escaped into marriage and committed himself to being a nomad. He sailed the Pacific and dreamed of being an explorer; his restlessness was Victorian. With the power of a novelist and the grace of a poet (of which he is both), Philip Callow captures this great writer and his many contradictions. He was a born exile longing for home; a northerner who thrived on tropic sunshine; a near atheist who organized Sunday services for his Samoan workers. He has been called Scotland's finest writer of English prose, a more economical Walter Scott. As an essayist he equaled Hazlitt. In emotional crises he wept openly, to the embarrassment of his wife. “His feelings are always his reasons,” said Henry James, and caught in a sentence the secret of Stevenson’s popularity as one of the last of the classic storytellers. Louis brings him alive. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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One of the great short masterpieces of nineteenth-century thought, Physics and Politics is in essence a brilliant essay in social psychology. It defines with grim humor the conditions of stability and social progress. “Physics” in Bagehot’s book, refers to natural science; “politics” to social science. His vastly stimulating analysis was the first important effort to comprehend the implications of the new science (especially Darwinism) for the study of political affairs. In the process, Bagehot makes unforgettably clear the complex, often tragic relation between individual and collective happiness. Roger Kimball’s introduction and notes place Bagehot’s ideas in perspective for today’s reader and evaluate the continuing usefulness of his observations. "We go to Bagehot for something that seems very difficult to convey accurately through mere definition or single examples—the true character of political man. This character, in turn, is important to discover, because on it depends the possibility of leading a life above ‘physics,’ a life better than that of the jungle."—Jacques Barzun.

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In Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Kierkegaard's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Kierkegaard's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Kierkegaard within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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The only play in which Ibsen denies the validity of revolt, The Wild Duck suggest that under certain conditions, domestic falsehoods are entirely necessary to survival. In its open form, its harshly satirical tone, and its unresolved conclusion, the play contains the strongest criticism Ibsen ever directed against himself. Robert Brustein’s new adaptation makes The Wild Duck beautifully playable for today’s audiences.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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In Hegel in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Hegel's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Hegel's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Hegel within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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The most gripping of Ibsen’s later, brooding self-portraits, The Master Builder explores the nature of a messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully laboring to drag himself up again. Thanks to Mr. Rudall’s fresh translation, the language of the play is no longer archaic or Victorian.

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Most of the really invigorating action in the art world today is a quiet affair, Mr. Kimball observes. It usually involves not the latest thing but permaneZnt things—they can be new or old, but their relevance is measured not by the buzz they create but by the silences they inspire. With reviews and essays composed over the last twenty years and revised for this book, Art's Prospect illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art. There is much to be learned and enjoyed in these stimulating, provocative, and elegant essays. —Paul Johnson

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College tuition has risen four times faster than the rate of inflation in the past two decades. While faculties like to blame the rising costs on fancy athletic buildings and bloated administrations, professors are hardly getting the short end of the stick. Spending on instruction has increased twenty-two percent over the past decade at private research universities. Parents and taxpayers shouldn't get overheated about faculty salaries: tenure is where they should concentrate their anger. The jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with an ivory tower position is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, an alumna of one of the country's most expensive and best-endowed schools, explores how tenure has promoted a class system in higher education, leaving contingent faculty who are barely making minimum wage and have no time for students to teach large swaths of the undergraduate population. She shows how the institution of tenure forces junior professors to keep their mouths shut for a decade or more if they disagree with senior faculty about anything from politics to research methods. Lastly, she examines how the institution of tenure—with the job security, mediocre salaries, and low levels of accountability it entails—may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.

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Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, revisionist historians have been sympathetic to the racial justice motivations of the Radical Republican Reconstruction policies that followed the Civil War. But this emphasis on positive goals and accomplishments has obscured the role of the Republicans in the overthrow of their own program. Rich with insight, Michael W. Fitzgerald's new interpretation of Reconstruction shows how the internal dynamics of this first freedom movement played into the hands of white racist reactionaries in the South. Splendid Failure recounts how postwar financial missteps and other governance problems quickly soured idealistic Northerners on the practical consequences of the Radical Republican plan, and set the stage for the explosion that swept Southern Republicans from power and resulted in Northern acquiescence to the bloody repression of voting rights. The failed strategy offers a chastening example to present-day proponents of racial equality.

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In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born white Protestants after World War I, hooded knights pursued fraternal fellowship, community activism, local reforms, and paid close attention to public education, law enforcement (especially Prohibition), and moral/sexual orthodoxy. No recent general history of the 1920s Klan movement reflects these new perspectives on the Klan. One Hundred Percent American incorporates them while also highlighting the racial and religious intolerance, violent outbursts, and political ambition that aroused widespread opposition to the Invisible Empire. Balanced and comprehensive, One Hundred Percent American explains the Klan's appeal, its limitations, and the reasons for its rapid decline in a society confronting the reality of cultural and religious pluralism.

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The sudden disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater nearly 75 years ago led to perhaps the most famous missing persons case of the twentieth century. Crater, a justice of New York's state Supreme Court, vanished amid political scandal. Within days, questions arose about Judge Crater's finances and his liaisons with numerous women. A public frenzy about what happened to Crater provided impetus for scrutiny of New York's Tammany Hall political machine—and ultimately for the vanishing of Tammany Hall as well. The cast of characters in this book—the first-ever serious look at the Crater case—includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor who named Crater to the bench; Senator Robert Wagner, Crater's mentor, but also the leader with the most to lose from having Crater found; Al Smith, Tammany's ebbing leader and failed presidential candidate; Jimmy Walker, the rogue Mayor of New York City and the darling of Tammany Hall; and Fiorello La Guardia, the crusading reformer who finally came to power on the back of the scandals. Richard J. Tofel's Vanishing Point is a revealing look at New York as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, and at one of the most intriguing stories in the annals of urban America.

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What is life like for children coming of age in an era after feminism, after the sexual revolution? Kay Hymowitz explores the predicament of a generation growing up in a world where adults lavish them with Tommy Hilfigers, Gameboys, and Disneyland vacations but don't know how to provide them with the ordinary truths that give life meaning. Without a coherent moral and intellectual order to pass on to the young, Ms. Hymowitz argues, parents, teachers, school principals, the media, and the child-rearing experts know only how to celebrate the individual child, "empowering" him to find his own way even as MTV beckons. As Liberation's Children shows, some young people flounder in this spiritual and imaginative void. They curse out teachers and coaches; they try too much too soon; they turn from children into tweens by the time they are eight, and into jaded adults by the time they are fourteen. They become the malcontents of suburban communities. Meanwhile many others eagerly latch on to the one value that seems to cause their elders no ambivalence or embarrassment: personal achievement. As babies they listen to Mozart tapes and use lapware; as toddlers they watch Sesame Street and begin music lessons. By the time they are of school age, they are initiates in the religion of "ecstatic capitalism"-child development has become career preparation. In sharply drawn analyses which first appeared in City Journal, Ms. Hymowitz takes the measure of a young generation afflicted with a loss of deep connection, civility, and moral clarity, as well as a depleted vision of the human predicament.

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For the vast majority of Americans who lived in rural settings from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, the small town provided the most important context for their lives. The town was a focal point and trade center chiefly for farmers but also for fishermen, loggers, miners, and even industrial workers as long as industrial production depended upon waterpower. Rural Americans needed community, and towns filled their economic, political, social, and cultural needs. David Russo’s history of these communities is a unique and engaging work of history, an overview of the founding, development, and varieties of life of American towns from earliest colonial times to the present. His chronicle is wide-ranging in its description but specific in its illustrations of how towns came into existence, grew or declined, gave way to larger urban areas, and finally have reappeared in idealized forms that provide Americans with nostalgia for a past that most of them did not even experience. The most important aspects of real towns, Mr. Russo observes, is their past, their history. With a vast knowledge of the field and a deft use of illustrative facts, he re-creates the universal experience of the small town—its intimacy, its neighborliness, and human scale as well as intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and tendency to exclusivity. American Towns is a richly informed book that fills a large gap in the history of the United States. With 50 black-and-white photographs and drawings.

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A vivid portrait of Rubens's enormous life against a background of the turbulent history of his times. Without neglecting his paintings, Ms. Lescourret also gives the reader a fascinating picture of Rubens's career as an accomplished diplomat.

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William Appleman Williams, who died in 1990, was arguably the most influential and controversial historian of his generation. His revisionist writings, especially in American diplomatic history, forced historians and others to abandon old clichés and confront disturbing questions about America's behavior in the world. Williams defined America's social, moral, constitutional, and economic development in uncompromising, iconoclastic, and original terms. He saw history as "a way of learning;" and applied the principle brilliantly in books and essays which have altered our vision of the American past and present. In this rich collection, Henry Berger has drawn from Williams's most important writings—including "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," "The Contours of American History," and "The Roots of the Modern American Empire" to present his key arguments. There are twenty-one selections in all, from books, essays, and articles, including two never before published. Mr. Berger has added notes to the selections and an enlightening introduction which explores Williams's career and ideas. This is an exceptionally valuable book.

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Anthony Badger’s notably successful history is not simply another narrative of the New Deal, nor does the figure of Franklin Roosevelt loom as large in his account as in some others. What Mr. Badger does so well is to consider important aspects of New Deal activity agriculture, welfare, and politics, interpreting the history of each.

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Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization—all related processes—molded modern America. Growing up in crowded tenements, insular mill towns, rural ethnic enclaves, or middle-class homes, as they came of age they found themselves increasingly caught between Old World expectations and New World demands. The encounters of these children with ethnic heritage, American values, and mass culture helped shape the twentieth century in a United States still known symbolically around the world as a nation of immigrants.

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Following on his successful Guides to the plots and themes of Shakespeare's plays, Robert Fallon now explores the world of characters created by the Bard. Like Mr. Fallon's earlier books, A Theatergoer's Guide to Shakespeare's Characters is designed to enhance the playgoer's enjoyment of a performance, but it also makes for enlightening reading after the show. Intended for the general reader, it is written in plain but not inelegant English and avoids the specialized language of the theater and the academy. More than eight hundred characters appear in Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays—an astonishing variety of kings and queens, mothers and fathers, clowns and fairies, peasants and dukes, villains and heroes, the young and the old, the sinning and the sinned against. How could he have known so many in his diverse culture and portrayed them so convincingly? Mr. Fallon has chosen some sixty of these figures to examine. With few exceptions, they are the ones that modern theatergoers are most likely to encounter in performance, those that have captured the imagination of audiences over the centuries: Lear, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Portia, and the like. But some lesser-known characters are offered for their inherent interest and their example of Shakespeare's "infinite variety." Mr. Fallon locates each of them in the story of their play, relates them to other characters, shows how they change (or don't), and sums up their character and nature. Readers of his other Guides know they will find in Characters an entertaining and useful appraisal. "This book is as handy as they come...distilled without being dunderheaded—reader-friendly in the extreme."—American Theatre (on A Theatergoer's Guide to Shakespeare)

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Working in the children's cancer unit of a New York hospital for fifteen years, Norman Fried has been psychotherapist and counselor to both physically ill children and their worried families and friends. He has been part of scenes of bitterness and pain–and has observed how these sad moments have taught all concerned about life's important lessons. Sitting at the bedsides of children with life–threatening cancer, he has been sadly fortunate to hear their messages of hope and love, which have taught him how to help those they were leaving behind. The Angel Letters is his extraordinary book based on his experiences. It is intended for the living but is composed in the form of letters addressed to a dozen different children whose last days and months he shared intimately. From each experience he draws a lesson—in love, family, courage, belonging, etc.—that can help parents and family learn to suffer through the tragedy of their sick or lost child, drawing strength from their understanding of what has happened and from an appreciation for their child's perspective. "No story ends in death," Dr. Fried writes, "not in this book, and not in life. What happens after death is ours to ponder and struggle with. Some questions remain unanswered. But how a family lives after a death, how we as mourners can carry on–these are the questions I wrestle with here." In The Angel Letters he proves to be an inspiring companion for this difficult journey.

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Los mejores libros jamás escritos.Valor, bravos caballeros! El hombre muere, pero la gloria queda. Valor! Antes morir que ser vencidos!Inglaterra, siglo XII. Desterrado por querer casarse contra los deseos de su padre, el joven y valiente Wilfred de Ivanhoe se pone al servicio de Ricardo Corazón de León y parte como cruzado junto a sus tropas para reconquistar Tierra Santa. A su regreso, decidido a recuperar su honor y a reunirse con su amada pero prohibida Lady Rowena, rápidamente se verá en medio de una lucha por el poder entre el noble rey Ricardo y su hermano, Juan Sin Tierra, un traidor despreciable y sin escrúpulos. Solo Ivanhoe, con la ayuda de Robin de Locksley -el legendario Robin Hood-, tiene la clave para defender su buen nombre y el de la Corona.El estudio sociolingüístico del doctor Graham Tulloch analiza cómo Walter Scott demostró que escribir sobre el pasado puede ser un modo de opinar sobre el presente. Una cronología sobre el autor complet

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Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Set in a country weighed down by political, ideological and spiritual stagnation, Chekhov's compelling early play is rooted in the revolutionary atmosphere of Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov was first performed in 1887 at the Korsh Theatre in Moscow. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine, with notes on Further Reading, a Chronology and a Pronunciation Guide.

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Seventy-three poems from Sandburg's early years in Chicago, almost all of them never before in print. They show him as a critic of fast-changing conditions in urban America; a walker in the city; a sensitive poet born to immigrant parents. These poems are a reminder of why we revere Sandburg as an authentic American voice. Edited with an Introduction by George and Willene Hendrick, Sandburg's most accomplished interpreters. An absolutely exhilarating read...a genuine literary event, a virtual rediscovery of an American treasure. —Michael Van Walleghen

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These first two volumes of a projected five, in preparation for several years, begin a major publishing venture, collecting the complete essays of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. The first two volumes span the most productive period of Huxley's career. Volume I begins with his essays for Gilbert Murray's Athenaeum and his music essays for the New Westminster Gazette. Volume II continues through the 1920s and includes his controversial essays on India and the empire in "Jesting Pilate." The essays of both volumes range from nuanced assessments of art and architecture to political analyses, history, science, religion, and art, and a newly discovered series on music. Wide-ranging, allusive, and witty, they are informed by the probing skepticism of a highly educated and ironically incisive member of the English upper middle class. Huxley's fascination with the codes and conventions of European culture, his growing apprehensions about the menacing collapse of the European political order, and his awareness of the impact of science and technology on the post-Versailles world of England, France, Germany, and the United States form the basis for his critique. His subjects overlap with the satirical novels he wrote during the period between the wars, culminating in Point Counter Point and Brave New World. At their best, these essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature.

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Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury. Set in the reign of Richard I, Coeur de Lion, Ivanhoe is packed with memorable incidents - sieges, ambushes and combats - and equally memorable characters: Cedric of Rotherwood, the die-hard Saxon; his ward Rowena; the fierce Templar knight, Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert; the Jew, Isaac of York, and his beautiful, spirited daughter Rebecca; Wamba and Gurth, jester and swineherd respectively. Scott explores the conflicts between the Crown and the powerful Barons, between the Norman overlords and the conquered Saxons, and between Richard and his scheming brother, Prince John. At the same time he brings into the novel the legendary Robin Hood and his band, and creates a brilliant, colourful account of the age of chivalry with all its elaborate rituals and costumes and its values of honour and personal glory.

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Sigmund Stein was a prominent lawyer in the town of Hochburg, a German with deep roots in rural Germany. When fellow Jews urged Stein to leave Germany in the 1930s and after, he refused, arguing that he could best serve his people by acting as a buffer between the Jewish community and the Nazis. From 1933 to 1944 he was methodically stripped of his rights as a citizen and his dignity as a human being. The torment of his Jewish heritage and his proud German upbringing—the divided loyalty of a lifetime—was finally resolved in Auschwitz. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "An extraordinary and original book. This is the compelling biography of a man who lived during an incredibly complex period of history—a typical 'little man' who happened to be Jewish, always trying to take the easy way out, who walked to his doom small step by small step. This is the first single biographical account of a fairly assimilated German Jew who lived in Germany up to the very end."—Bruno Bettelheim. "Dickinson's narration of Stein's tragic life is written with the skill and style of a fine novelist."—Choice.

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The richness and variety of his pursuits are compelling features of this memoir in which Philip Klutznick displays his talent as a superb storyteller. Born into a modest home of immigrant parents in Kansas City, Missouri, Mr. Klutznick recalls his very Jewish upbringing, his school years, and his start in the law. His instinct for public service led him to Washington where he served Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as chief of public housing. The experience, plus his entrepreneurial bent, drew him to large-scale development after the war, most of it in the Chicago area. But he clung to his Jewishness through major service in Jewish organizations, notably as international president of the B'nai B'rith and later as president of the World Jewish Congress. In government or out, he has been astute but outspoken in championing the interests of American Jews and of the state of Israel, even when it has meant public disagreement with Israeli leaders. Mr. Klutznick's considerable experience at the United Nations and his tenure as Secretary of Commerce under Jimmy Carter placed him in strategic positions involving the Middle East and threw him together with some of the world's most interesting and powerful players. Indeed, his experience with the great and near-great form some of the most entertaining portions of his book. Angles of Vision is a remarkable memoir of our age and a reaffirmation of the opportunities of American life. Illustrated with eight pages of photographs.

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It's back. Following on the cheers of baseball fans for The Baseball Entertainer, Robert Kuenster has compiled-no, not Son of Baseball Entertainer, but The Baseball Entertainer #2. It's an all-new compendium of challenging quizzes, crossword puzzles, brain teasers, rules challenges, humorous anecdotes, and eye-opening statistical charts-all about baseball and all drawn from more than sixty years of the most popular baseball publication in America, Baseball Digest. You won't find a better leisure-time and take-along book for baseball fans. Tumbling from its pages are the stories of old-time stars like Cobb, Gehrig, Mathewson, and Musial as well as such recent luminaries as Willie Mays, Johnny Bench, Albert Pujols, and Hank Aaron. Trivia buffs will be challenged by questions like: What two players hit five home runs in one World Series? Who is the oldest pitcher (43 years, 59 days) to win a league ERA title? What batter holds the record for most strikeouts (223) in a single season? In a handy paperback format, The Baseball Entertainer #2 is guaranteed pleasure for passengers on planes, trains, and automobiles, and a great little gift any time of year.

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Was he a sadistic mass killer who lured innocent people to their deaths, or a hero of German-occupied Paris who liquidated members of the Gestapo and helped persecuted Jews escape from tormented France? This was the question as one of the twentieth century's most sensational murder cases came to trial in Paris in 1946. Thomas Maeder meticulously reconstructs one of the most horrifying true stories in the annals of crime: the vile crimes themselves (presumably Dr. Petiot dismembered his victims, then buried them in a lime pit), an incisive psychological portrait of the doctor, and a re-creation of his Daumieresque trial, in which he was charged with luring twenty-seven people with the promise of escape, then murdering them for plunder. Just how the murders were committed was a secret Dr. Petiot took to his grave; why he committed them remains to this day a chilling mystery.

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The story of baseball in America begins not with the fabled Abner Doubleday but with a generation of mid-nineteenth-century Americans who moved from the countryside to the cities and brought a cherished but delightfully informal game with them.

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When Eleanor Agnew, her husband, and two young children moved to the Maine woods in 1975, the back-to-the-land movement had already attracted untold numbers of converts who had grown increasingly estranged from mainstream American society. Visionaries by the millions were moving into woods, mountains, orchards, and farmlands in order to disconnect from the supposedly deleterious influences of modern life. Fed up with capitalism, TV, Washington politics, and 9-to-5 jobs, they took up residence in log cabins, A-frames, tents, old schoolhouses, and run-down farmhouses; grew their own crops; hauled water from wells; avoided doctors in favor of natural cures; and renounced energy-guzzling appliances. This is their story, in all its glories and agonies, its triumphs and disasters (many of them richly amusing), told by a woman who experienced the simple life firsthand but has also read widely and interviewed scores of people who went back to the land. Ms. Agnew tells how they found joy and camaraderie, studied their issues of Mother Earth News, coped with frozen laundry and grinding poverty, and persevered or gave up. Most of them, it turns out, came back from freedom and self-sufficiency, either by returning to urban life or by dressing up their primitive rural existence—but they held onto the values they gained during their back-to-the-land experience. Back from the Land is filled with juicy details and inspired with a naïve idealism, but the attraction of the life it describes is undeniable. Here is a book to delight those who remember how it was, those who still kick themselves for not taking the chance, and those of a new generation who are just now thinking about it.

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Politics in America today is more than just a contest between left and right, liberal and conservative, argues Steven Malanga in The New New Left. He describes an emerging new political dynamic: the contest between those who benefit from an ever-expanding public sector and those who pay for this bigger government—in other words, between tax consumers and taxpayers. Mr. Malanga traces the rise of the tax consumers' movement to two sources. One is the growth of public-sector employee unions beginning in the 1950s, which produced an increasingly powerful and influential lineup of organizations that are essentially political. The second is the War on Poverty, whose funding of grassroots social service groups in the 1960s created a new type of neighborhood "political club," sustained by and organized around public funding. Unlike the original New Left, which evolved from a naive but genuine effort to create a better society, these new groups, in Malanga's view, pursue an agenda based on their own narrow economic interests. The leading edge of this new movement has engulfed New York City, but it has begun to emerge forcefully in other American cities too, especially in California. In all these locales the New New Left concentrates its political energies toward larger government and higher taxes—to benefit the public sector. And the ideas behind the movement have effectively infiltrated American college campuses. Understanding how American politics works today is incomplete without Mr. Malanga's important book.

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: "Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal

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Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented. Applause for Paul Strathern's Philosophers in 90 Minutes series: "Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe "Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise."—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal In preparation: Jane Austen, Borges, Cervantes, Chekhov, Conrad, Dante, Dickens, Faulkner, Hardy, Hemingway, Hugo, Henry James, Joyce, Mann, Tolstoy, Twain, Virginia Woolf.

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With Brecht and Meyerhold, Antonin Artaud was one of the great visionaries of twentieth-century theatre, best known perhaps for what he called the "Theatre of Cruelty." This revised and updated edition of Artaud on Theatre contains all of his key writings on theatre and cinema from 1921 to his death in 1948, including new selections which have never before appeared in English. Together with an Introduction, biographical notes, and commentary, the collection charts Artaud's work from his early association with surrealism, through his founding of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, to the invocation of his compelling vision in his most famous manifesto, The Theatre and Its Double. Artaud's poetic and inspirational writings called for a fundamental regeneration of Western art. He wanted to return the theatre to its roots in ritual and to transform the audience through total emotional, psychic, and physical involvement. Anarchic and disruptive, he was misunderstood, silenced, and ostracized in his lifetime, but was later championed as an icon of the sixties counterculture. His ideas have inspired the work of Genet, Arrabal, The Living Theatre, Grotowski, Brook, and most of the experimental drama and performance work of recent decades. "One of the great daring mapmakers of consciousness in extremis."—Susan Sontag

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The record of the American economy since 1945 offers an embarrassment of riches for the historian, and Wyatt Wells has brought them together in a compact and incisive history. His theme is how greatly many economic circumstances changed—and how many other features remained essentially the same. He shows how throughout the period the United States enjoyed not only the world's largest economy but by most measures its most diverse and sophisticated. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed extraordinary change: the development of entirely new industries, such as television and computers; the decline of established industries, such as steel and textiles; the impact of international trade and competition on growing numbers of Americans. As the boom of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to "stagflation" in the 1970s, the 1980s became a time of extensive reorganization, which in turn laid the foundation for another boom in the 1990s. Still, as Mr. Wells notes, industry remained in private hands; political debate consistently returned to the same issues involving the proper role of government in the economy; and the country remained committed to an open international economic system. American Capitalism examines the development of economic policy (government spending, taxes, regulation, and monetary policy), economic structure (companies, markets, technology, and labor), and ideas about both, explaining the complex interaction of these factors over the past half-century. The book offers an essential short course on American economic development over these years.

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The winner in the third annual contest for the New Criterion Poetry Prize, Skywriting and Other Poems is a triumphant book by an acknowledged master of the craft. Charles Tomlinson's unfailing sensitivity and decorum toward the visual world is brilliantly realized in this new book. Willard Spiegelman calls him "a patient looker at landscape." Whether his subject is a temple in Japan, the landscapes of his native England, or the "lithe iambics" of two runners on a beach in Italy, Mr. Tomlinson's extraordinary perception is everywhere evident. It is a perception that lights up the world, "as lightning explores the sleeping face of nature." His ethical sense emerges not from politics or a social agenda but from his precise and fastidious evaluation of the perceived world. Donald Hall calls him "a master of the craft....His poems have the finality of form which you find only among the first-rate."

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This evocative picture of a lost London and a vanished culture is also the story of a bookish boy discovering his own path. John Gross is the son of a Jewish doctor who practiced in the East End of London from the 1920s to World War II and beyond. His parents were the children of immigrants, steeped in Eastern European customs, yet outside the home he grew up in a very English world of comics and corner shops, sandbags and bomb sites, battered school desks and addictive, dusty cinemas. Mr. Gross looks back on his childhood with humor and insight, tracing this double inheritance. Religion underpins family life: the richness of the Yiddish language, stories, jokes and music-hall humor, the rituals and mysteries of the synagogue, are set against the life of the streets, where boxers and gangsters are heroes and patients turn up on the doorstep at all hours. And in the background, behind the wit and the color, lie the shadows of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

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A quirky, wry, and often hilarious odyssey through the baseball fields of Latin America—both sports book and travelogue, political reportage and meditation on New World identity. With wit and style, John Krich evokes a world where barefoot kids perfect their swings with stalks of sugar cane, midget mascots dance the merengue atop dugouts, and wily scouts compete with dictators for the souls of promising shortstops. "El Beisbol sparkles with keen observation and irreverent humor."—Washington Post Book World

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In Leibniz in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Leibniz's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Leibniz's writings; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Leibniz within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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New writings on race, politics, and theatre, as well as Mr. Brustein's incisive theatre reviews and deft portraits of stage luminaries. Brustein is an elegant and eloquent voice in the wilderness of contemporary American culture. —Robin Lippincott, New York Times Book Review

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In Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Aquinas's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Aquinas's writings; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Aquinas within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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