Search results for ""Ivan R Dee, Inc""

In late 1913 the newly formed Federal League declared itself a major league in competition with the established National and American Leagues. Backed by some of America’s wealthiest merchants and industrialists, the new organization posed a real challenge to baseball’s prevailing structure. For the next two years the well-established leagues fought back furiously in the press, in the courts, and on the field. The story of this fascinating and complex historical battle centers on the machinations of both the owners and the players, as the Federals struggled for profits and status, and players organized baseball’s first real union. Award winning author, Daniel R. Levitt gives us the most authoritative account yet published of the short-lived Federal League, the last professional baseball league to challenge the National League and American League monopoly.

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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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In November 2002 the Chicago Tribune broke the astonishing story that Chicago-based Poetry magazine had received a bequest of more than $100 million from the amateur poet and pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly, making it at once the richest as well as the most famous literary organization in the United States. What happened before and after this remarkable gift is now revealed in Between the Lines, edited by Poetry's longtime editor Joseph Parisi and its former senior editor Stephen Young. It is a concluding episode in the book that follows on the editors' Dear Editor (2002), which chronicled Poetry's first fifty years through its poignant, hilarious, and brutally frank correspondence with its contributing poets. Dear Editor told the story of Poetry's central role in the Modernist movement and its rise to a position as the acknowledged "magazine of verse." Between the Lines carries the narrative through the second revolution in American poetry, set against the backdrop of the restive early sixties, the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War, and the social upheavals of the last four decades. Virtually all of the close to five hundred letters in the book have never been printed before. In them, famous and aspiring authors tell Poetry's editors of their artistic aspirations, rivalries, problems and successes, unvarnished opinions, and reactions to events of the day, unfolding the improbable tale of how perennially impoverished Poetry survived to make literary—and financial—history. The book is abundantly illustrated with candid photographs, drawings, posters, programs, and clippings from newspapers and magazines.

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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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A history of Ireland from the twelfth century to the present, following on the author's highly successful In Search of Ancient Ireland. In addition to plumbing the historical record, Ms. McCaffrey discusses the leading Irish families and their social roles, and the great castles and homes that dot the Irish countryside. The history comes alive for the present-day reader. Illustrated.

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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 more than five hundred entries, from A to Z, providing information on the most important plays and playwrights (dead or alive) performed today, The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights is the most useful and comprehensive reference book for contemporary theatre now available. It is both biographically detailed and critically up to date, and offers an extensive cross-referencing system that allows for wider perspectives and new discoveries. For example: The entry on Carlo Goldoni provides his dates of birth and death; a complete listing of his plays with the dates they were written; approximately 300 words of biography and critical commentary on Goldoni's work; and references to other plays and playwrights that are similar in subject and treatment (in this case, for instance, "Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro for its treatment of servant and master relationships; Molière, writing in a more formal style is more savage in exposing bourgeois and aristocratic hypocrisies;...") Stimulating, observant, and informative, The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights is an essential companion and reference tool for producers, directors, actors, teachers, and anyone with an active interest in drama. Illustrated with 34 black-and-white photographs.

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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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“The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,” wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems,” Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America’s most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades—an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents—along with several lesser known—in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry “an American institution.” The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.

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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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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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What began at colleges in the sixties as a rejection of parental authority and the Vietnam War rapidly evolved into a social movement, one with lasting influences in diverse areas of American life. As anti-Communist and Great Society Democrats lost control of the Vietnam War and the unrest in America's inner cities, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the chief organization of the campus-based New Left, gained strength, ending the decade with 100,000 members. From political protest, SDS and its faculty and intellectual allies moved to violent confrontation with university and government officials. Sit-ins, building takeovers, riots, and strikes hit more than 300 of the nation's 2,000 campuses in the 1960s. Between January 1969 and April 1970, young radicals bombed 5,000 police stations, corporate offices, military facilities, and campus buildings. Twenty-six thousand students were arrested and thousands injured or expelled while engaged in protest activities. Meanwhile 57,000 youths, many of whom lacked the financial means to attend college and secure draft deferments, died in Vietnam. Against a backdrop of student protest, the campus drug culture blossomed. In Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels (a quote from Free Speech leader Mario Savio), Mr. Heineman plays no favorites in indicting foolishness and absurdity on both left and right. While his account may make us wonder what happened to our common sense in those years, his assessment of the causes and consequences of the sixties revolt is impossible to evade. Heineman's sensible survey of student protest in the 1960s neither celebrates upheaval nor condemns the reform impulse. As a result, members of both camps can read his chronicle of events at Berkeley and elsewhere with nostalgia and for insight. —Dallas Morning News

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This third volume of a projected six reinforces Huxley’s stature as one of the most acute and informed observers of the social and ideological trends of the years between the world wars. It contains the important collection of essays "Music at Night" as well as the majority of Huxley’s journalistic writing for the Hearst newspapers in the United States and for a variety of British periodicals such as Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, the Evening Standard, and Time and Tide. Much of the attraction of the Hearst essays lies in their vivid period detail: references to the raucous voices of Nazi broadcasters, speeches by Roosevelt and Stalin, Soviet five-year plans, and the effects of the Great Depression combine to provide a rich context for Huxley’s increasingly active role in organized pacifism and his sense of standing on the threshold of a new era. The essays of "Music at Night" define this trend as “the New Romanticism,” a celebration of Enlightenment modernity and an excessive faith in instrumental reason and applied science. Huxley was both intrigued by and suspicious of state planning and centralized bureaucratic authority. The essays in Volume III (and the volume to follow) register his growing ambivalence about the role of technocracy and science in an era of experimentation in the concentration of executive and legislative power. At their best, Huxley’s essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "He was among the few writers who...played with ideas so freely, so gaily, with such virtuosity, that the responsive reader...was dazzled and excited."—Isaiah Berlin.

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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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In an age when the American public relies more on television for its news than any other medium, Edward Jay Epstein's detailed, probing analysis of the decision-making process in network news organizations has achieved the status of a classic. Mr. Epstein shows how internal corporate policy and budget requirements shape the direction of television news coverage. What we see on the network evening news, he demonstrates, does not mirror reality because TV's essential aim is not to inform but to excite viewers enough to induce them to "stay tuned." "The best book ever written about any aspect of television."—Richard Schickel. "The book is burnished with insights on virtually every page. Epstein's analysis seems to me incontestable, and is offered with great cogency, elegance, and sophistication."—Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University. "A complex, fascinating book....Mr. Epstein shows that no educated citizen should rely exclusively or principally on TV news, but also that none should fail to watch it."—Wall Street Journal.

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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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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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How and why have American labor unions grown in the century and a half since the industrial revolution? In this concise and illuminating history of the labor movement, Daniel Nelson traces the ebb and flow of union activity since the early nineteenth century. Rejecting an emphasis on individual leadership or the uniqueness of American “conditions,” he instead looks to three factors to explain labor’s record: the role of the autonomous worker, the threat of employer reprisals, and the influence of external forces such as government policy. His chief concern is to describe and document the historical experience, especially the erratically rising level of union membership from the close of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, and the reversal of that phenomenon in recent decades. Mr. Nelson devotes special attention to miners’ unions in the years up to the 1950s, to government policy in the New Deal years and after, and to the development of sophisticated anti-union employer strategies in recent years. The strength of Shifting Fortunes lies not only in the scope of its coverage but in its evenhanded portrayal of employer-worker relations.

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Since its first publication more than fifteen years ago, Literature Against Itself has achieved wide recognition as the first major critique of post-1960s cultural radicalism—and still, one of the best. In it, Gerald Graff argues that the reigning strategies for defending literature now end up by trivializing it, and he analyzes why and how they have gone wrong. He charges that our leading literary critics, whether they claim to be traditionalists or innovators, have taken positions that ultimately undermine the authority of art, literature, and criticism itself. "An extraordinarily important book, biting and cogent on every page."—Robert Boyers, Salmagundi. "In this recoil from the current anarchy of interpretation, Graff has affirmed that `literary thinking is inseparable from social and moral thinking."'—New York Times Book Review. "A wonderfully trenchant and illuminating inquiry… the shrewdness and cogency of his commentary are constantly arresting."—Virginia Quarterly Review.

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"For centuries," Daniel Horowitz writes, "Americans have worried about the consequences of comfort, affluence, and luxury. They have often greeted a rising standard of living with a mixture of pleasure and disquiet. Anxious about the impact of ease on the commitment to hard work, savings, and self-control, and ambivalent about the implications of increased wealth, many in the United States have expressed concern about new levels and kinds of consumption. This book traces the development of such misgivings." "Clear, judicious, thorough and unfailingly interesting; a solid work on a most significant topic."—Technology and Culture. "An illuminating study...intelligent and perceptive...full of interesting insights."—Reviews in American History. "Daniel Horowitz has made creative use of diverse sources in order to integrate several fascinating strands of American cultural history.... His findings have broad implications...."—American Historical Review. "An imaginative and carefully researched study.... The Morality of Spending accomplishes what it sets out to do: not a sociology of money but a history of ideas about money."—Journal of Social History.

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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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Rather than fitting the journalistic stereotype of a "New Woman" of the 1890s, this novel's heroine must earn her own living in a society whose power and values are rooted firmly in a patriarchal system. In struggling to make her way, she sees the need for solidarity among women. The Story of a Modern Woman lays bare the relationship between social expectations and women's capacity to achieve self–fulfillment.

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On October 12, 1994, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen—three of Hollywood's biggest players—announced they would form a new studio to produce feature films, television series, and pop music recordings. It didn't have a name, though Katzenberg's reference to his partners as the "Dream Team" eventually led to the company being dubbed DreamWorks. What the three men were attempting hadn't been done in more than sixty years: create a movie studio that could compete with the already existing major players. In The Dream Team, Daniel Kimmel tells the behind-the-scenes story of DreamWorks' rise—and the end of the dream eleven years later, when most of the company was sold off or shut down. Its plan for 1,087 acres of studio facilities that would include residences and retail operations came to naught. Its animation division was split off and went public. Its principals had already begun to go their own ways. Mr. Kimmel explores DreamWorks' successes: best-picture Oscars for American Beauty and Gladiator; a near miss (but box office success) for Saving Private Ryan; a smash animated hit Shrek winning the first Oscar ever for best animated feature and pointing the industry toward computer animation. But he also investigates why an enterprise with such promise failed to reach the heights. Was it the company's diffuse management style, or had the industry changed and consolidated so greatly that it was now impossible for new players to break into the ranks? Mr. Kimmel offers intriguing answers, showing how, more often than not, the guys tilting at windmills usually end up on the ground.

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While film genres go in and out of style, the romantic comedy endures—from year to year and generation to generation. Endlessly adaptable, the romantic comedy form has thrived since the invention of film as a medium of entertainment, touching on universal predicaments: meeting for the first time, the battle of the sexes, and the bumpy course of true love. These films celebrate lovers who play and improvise together, no matter how nutty or at what great odds they may appear. As Eugene Pallette mutters in My Man Godfrey (1936), "All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people." Daniel Kimmel's book about romantic comedy is like watching a truly funny movie with a knowledgeable friend.

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After an initial honeymoon with historians, in recent years John F. Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized, resulting in a wide variety of assessments of his presidency and his life. Michael O'Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, has distilled the findings of his heavily detailed biography of a few years ago into a compact life that touches on all the important issues and incorporates the findings and judgments of major works since the president's death. He offers nuanced interpretations of the influence of Kennedy's parents, his early life, his struggles with health problems, his intellectual development, his heroism in World War II, his House and Senate career, and the paramount moments of his presidency, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his stand on civil rights, tax policy, and other domestic matters.

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On the night of November 7, 1841, the Creole, a brig transporting at least 135 slaves from Richmond, Virginia, to the auction block at New Orleans, was about 130 miles northeast of the Bahamas. In the darkness, a band of 19 slaves led by Madison Washington seized the crew and its captain. Over the next several days they forced the Creole to sail into Nassau harbor, where the British authorities offered freedom to the slaves on board, touching off a diplomatic squabble and continuing legal ramifications. In The Creole Mutiny, George and Willene Hendrick have pieced together, from scant information and remote sources, the story of this successful slave revolt and of the mysterious figure of Madison Washington, a fugitive slave who had been recaptured while trying to free his wife. With careful attention to background details, the authors describe what is known of Washington's life; the efforts of fugitive slaves to free other family members; the methods of slave traders and the operators of slave pens; the conditions on slave ships; and the sexual exploitation of female slaves, some mere children. In an Appendix, the authors show how Madison Washington has taken on mythic qualities in the works of major African-American writers, from Frederick Douglass to Theodore Ward. With 24 black-and-white illustrations. "Fascinating...compelling history."—Vernon Ford, Booklist

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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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Why do so many different people with widely dissimilar ideas and customs get along as Americans? In American Beliefs, John McElroy identifies and explains those essential ideas that keep a big country and a diverse people united, tracing them historically from their origins in the earliest experiences of the American colonists. A powerful antidote to decades of concentration on the differences among Americans. A magnificent and timely book. John McElroy picks up where de Tocqueville left off. —Charles Moskos.

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These artful new translations of nine of Schnitzler's most important stories and novellas reinforce the Viennese author's remarkable achievement.

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The race for the White House in 1968 was a watershed event in American politics. In this brilliantly succinct narrative analysis, Lewis L. Gould shows how the events of that tumultuous year changed the way Americans felt about politics and their national leaders; how Republicans used the skills they brought to Richard Nixon's campaign to create a generation-long ascendancy in presidential politics; and how Democrats, divided and torn after 1968, emerged as only crippled challengers for the White House throughout most of the years until the early twenty-first century. Bitterness over racial issues and the Vietnam War that marked the 1968 election continued to shape national affairs and to rile American society for years afterward. And the election accelerated an erosion of confidence in American institutions that has not yet reached a conclusion. In his lucid account, now revised and updated, Mr. Gould emphasizes the importance of race as the campaign's key issue and examines the now infamous "October surprises" of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as he describes the extraordinary events of what Eugene McCarthy later called the "Hard Year."

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Franklin Roosevelt was the first great hero of American Jews. FDR's promise of economic and social justice was consonant with the mainstays of Jewish culture and with the ethos of the Old Testament and the prophets. And of course these themes were especially resonant during the desperate days of the Great Depression. The Jews who so deeply admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government, commerce, and the arts. Yet by the time Franklin Roosevelt died in office, six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis while neither FDR nor American Jews lifted much more than a finger to help them. How did the president, the nation he led, and American Jewry allow this to happen? There is no simple answer, but Robert Shogan seeks a partial explanation by examining the behavior of a handful of Jews, so close to Roosevelt and supposedly so influential that they could be considered "the president's Jews." Most prestigious was Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis. Next was Felix Frankfurter, Harvard law professor and later Supreme Court justice. Sam Rosenman, FDR's chief speechwriter from the time he was governor of New York. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was an old Dutchess County neighbor of Roosevelt's. Benjamin V. Cohen crafted the major financial reforms of the early New Deal. Their actions, and often inaction, illuminate the strengths and limits of interest-group politics, the system invented by FDR that dominated American politics for the remainder of the century. Taken broadly, the response of the president's Jews to the Nazi threat illustrates with heartbreaking intensity the dilemma of politics—the conflict between conscience and self-interest, between principle and expediency. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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The seventh winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's Foiled Again. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth, with formal poems-traditional, hybrid, and nonce-and just as many shaped by the loopy trajectory of their associative momentum. At the heart of Rosser's work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic, wryly cheerful pilgrimage through the maze of bafflement, loneliness, and love that constitutes our experience.

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In the years before the Curse of the Bambino descended on New England, the Boston Red Sox rode major league baseball like a colossus, capturing four World Series titles in seven seasons. Blessed with legendary players like Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper, and Smokey Joe Wood, and a brand new, thoroughly modern stadium, the Red Sox reigned as kings of the Deadball Era. Just in time for the centenary of baseball's hallowed Fenway Park and the dawn of the Red Sox dynasty, Thomas J. Whalen gracefully recounts the rise and fall of one of baseball's greatest teams.

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"Steroids are ruining the game of baseball. It has faced no more serious threat since gamblers gained control of the World Series in 1919." Or are we overreacting? The problem of steroids, recreational drugs, and other performance enhancers is one of the fundamental issues facing not only baseball but all of sports and society. With pundits pointing fingers and former players naming names, a drug-induced McCarthyism is tarring some of the greatest players ever to take the field. In The Juice, Will Carroll, an acknowledged authority on baseball conditioning and injuries, calls for a scientific, reasoned approach to the steroids problem. He first explains the science of steroids and other drugs, describes how athletes are tested, considers the scientific evidence of effects and side effects, and, most important, analyzes whether and how these drugs impact the game. He explores the grey area of legal supplements, covers the BALCO story, and speculates on the next generation of performance enhancers. And he profiles the motivations and experiences of professional players, student athletes, and baseball trainers. Carroll has interviewed hundreds of players, executives, owners, and experts. His information from players who have used steroids will surprise everyone with the reasons why players cheat. His exclusive conversation with the creator of some of baseball's most abused substances will make The Juice the season's most widely discussed baseball book. For readers who want to understand why baseball has a drug problem, how the drugs work, and how they have affected the game, Carroll provides the answers. They are surprising—and should lead to new and better questions.

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Widely acknowledged as the most authoritative art critic of his generation, Hilton Kramer advanced his comments and judgments largely in the form of essays and short pieces. Thus this first collection of his work to appear in twenty years is a signal event for the art world and for criticism generally. The Triumph of Modernism not only traces the vicissitudes of the art scene but diagnoses the state of modernism and its vital legacy in the postmodern world. Mr. Kramer bracingly updates his incisive critique of the artists, critics, institutions, and movements that have formed the basis for modern art. Appearing for the first time in greatly expanded form is his consideration of the foundations of modern abstract painting and the future of abstraction. The aesthetic intelligence that Mr. Kramer brings to bear on certain tired assumptions about modernism—many of them derived from methodologies and politics that have little to do with art—helps rescue the artwork itself and its appreciation from the very institutions, such as the art museum and the academy, that purport to foster it. Always clear-eyed and vastly illuminating, Hilton Kramer’s art criticism remains among the very finest written in the past hundred years. Readers of The Triumph of Modernism will be treated to an exhilarating experience.

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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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A bumptious narrative history of American newspapermen in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when serious journalism still went hand in hand with relative poverty, good times, and a carefree spirit cultivated by eccentric personalities. An absorbing and delightful book.

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In The Dream Team, Daniel Kimmel investigates why an enterprise with such promise and guided by the celebrity leadership of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen failed to reach the heights. Was it the company's diffuse management style, or had the industry changed and consolidated so greatly that it was now impossible for new players to break into the ranks?

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More than most wars in American history, the long and contentious Vietnam War had a profound effect on the home front, during the war and especially after. In At the Water's Edge, Melvin Small delivers the first study of the war's domestic politics. Most of the military and diplomatic decisions made by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Mr. Small shows, were heavily influenced by election cycles, relations with Congress, the state of the economy, and the polls. Although all three presidents and their advisers claimed that these decisions were taken exclusively for national security concerns, much evidence suggests otherwise. In turn, the war had a transforming impact on American society. Popular perceptions of the "war at home" produced a dramatic and longstanding realignment in political allegiances, an assault on the media that still colors political debate today, and an economic crisis that weakened the nation for a decade after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. Domestic conflict over the war led to the abolition of the draft, the curtailment of the intelligence agencies' unconstitutional practices, formal congressional restraints upon the imperial presidency, and epochal Supreme Court rulings that preserved First Amendment rights. The war ultimately destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and indirectly forced the resignation of Richard Nixon. Those presidents who followed through the remainder of the twentieth century constructed their foreign policies mindful that they would not survive politically if they were to lead the nation into another protracted limited war in the Third World.

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