Search results for ""author peter wortsman""

Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down -- Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Fuhrer's Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution.

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'It was a very momentous day, the day on which I was to be slaughtered' Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to works of contemporary fiction, it includes Hoffmann's hallucinatory portrait of terror and insanity 'The Sandman'; Chamisso's influential black masterpiece 'Peter Schlemiel', where a man barters his own shadow; Kafka's chilling, disturbing satire 'In the Penal Colony'; the Dadaist surrealism of Kurt Schwitters' 'The Onion'; and Bachmann's modern fairy tale 'The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran'. Macabre, dreamlike and expressing deep unconscious fears, these stories are also spiked with unsettling humour, showing stylistic daring as well as giving insight into the darkest recesses of the human condition.Peter Wortsman's powerful translations are accompanied by brief overviews of the lives of each author, and an introduction discussing the notion of 'angst' and the stories' place in the context of German history.Translated, selected and edited with an introduction by Peter Wortsman

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The alumni of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) have made remarkable strides in medicine, academia, public health, and industry. In this they follow in the footsteps of Samuel Bard (1742–1821), a prominent early American physician and a founder of what would become VP&S. In The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, Peter Wortsman offers a selection of profiles of Columbia-educated doctors who have made a fundamental difference in the lives of others.The physicians profiled in this book represent the complete spectrum of MDs. They have charted new fields of medicine, resolved long-standing biochemical mysteries, discovered the causes and cures of diseases, developed vaccines, pioneered surgical procedures, helped halt epidemics, and cared for imperiled populations. Some have run hospitals, medical schools, universities, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, city health departments, and major pharmaceutical concerns. Others practiced at the White House, climbed mountains, or flew to outer space. Still others wrote pioneering papers, edited prestigious medical journals, and authored prize-winning books and best-selling novels. In each case, the clinical training, scientific thoroughness, and humanistic values inculcated at Columbia had a formative influence on their thinking and practice. In telling their stories, The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard illustrates the importance of clinical rigor and humanistic caring in the practice of medicine and offers readers a rare insight into the heart and soul of American medicine at its best.

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First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil's second book, consisting of two novellas, 'The Culmination of Love' and 'The Temptation of Silent Veronica.' Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.

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A philosophical fable from a great forgotten German fabulist Billed by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for “anonymous” backward)--as “the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus,” The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona’s philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as “a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.,” when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist. Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Children) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called Grostesken. His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

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