Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time

Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time PDF Author: Amos Elon
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this short biography of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), historian and journalist Amos Elon describes how the founder of the Rothschild dynasty started out by dealing in rare coins and traveling across Germany while still confined, as a Frankfurt Jew, to its Judengasse. Assisted by his five skilled sons, Rothschild subsequently built up a fortune by helping manage the investments of the Landgrave of Hesse, circumventing Napoleon’s blockade of England and funding Napoleon’s eventual defeat. “This slim, charming volume is actually a biographical essay, yet it succeeds in snatching its elusive subject from oblivion.” — Ron Chernow, The New York Times “This is a fascinating story.” — The New York Review of Books “A memorable first biography of a near-mythical founding father.” — Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly researched, fascinating, and altogether exemplary biography.” —Kirkus Reviews “Amos Elon’s portrait of the man who fathered a dynasty makes fascinating reading for anyone even mildly interested in money and power and their effects on history. Founder is a rich and colorful examination of [Meyer Amschel Rothschild]” — Morley Safer “Elon’s book... is a thoroughly researched and absorbing biography.” — St. Louis Jewish Light “A biography that’s a must read for today’s entrepreneurs.” — Houston Chronicle

Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time

Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time PDF Author: Amos Elon
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this short biography of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), historian and journalist Amos Elon describes how the founder of the Rothschild dynasty started out by dealing in rare coins and traveling across Germany while still confined, as a Frankfurt Jew, to its Judengasse. Assisted by his five skilled sons, Rothschild subsequently built up a fortune by helping manage the investments of the Landgrave of Hesse, circumventing Napoleon’s blockade of England and funding Napoleon’s eventual defeat. “This slim, charming volume is actually a biographical essay, yet it succeeds in snatching its elusive subject from oblivion.” — Ron Chernow, The New York Times “This is a fascinating story.” — The New York Review of Books “A memorable first biography of a near-mythical founding father.” — Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly researched, fascinating, and altogether exemplary biography.” —Kirkus Reviews “Amos Elon’s portrait of the man who fathered a dynasty makes fascinating reading for anyone even mildly interested in money and power and their effects on history. Founder is a rich and colorful examination of [Meyer Amschel Rothschild]” — Morley Safer “Elon’s book... is a thoroughly researched and absorbing biography.” — St. Louis Jewish Light “A biography that’s a must read for today’s entrepreneurs.” — Houston Chronicle

Founder

Founder PDF Author: Amos Elon
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571279783
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
By mid-nineteenth century, Meyer Amschel Rothschild's five sons controlled one of the most massive fortunes in Europe. The Rothschild name had become synonymous with the enormous political and social power that often accompanied that wealth, the amassing of which is remarkable considering the painfully modest beginnings of its founder. Born in the unimaginable squalor of Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto (where he chose to spend his entire life), Meyer Rothschild established a small trading and banking business that - despite political, legal, and social constrictions segregating Jews from the outside world -evolved into an empire that included the financial centers of the world. Founder is the story of Meyer Rothschild's times, of the condition of the Jews, of the city-states before they were overrun by Napoleon's troops. It is about the threshold of the modern era, when the world of aristocrats and gentlemen was profoundly influenced by a shrewd, dedicated, loyal father and his family. Amos Elon's rich and evocative depiction of life in mid-eighteenth-century Europe provides a vivid background against which we come to understand and marvel at the strength and perseverance driving this obviously extraordinary, humble man. 'Elon... has written a terrifically readable biography that does more than illuminate the formerly shadowy figure who served princes in what is now Germany. Through the prism of Mayer Rothschild's life, Mr. Elon gives us a fascinating glimpse into how Europe - and by implication, the New World - made the journey from mercantilism to modern entrepreneurship....Mr. Elon's feat is in chronicling all this with clarity and drama. Founder skillfully weaves history into this story of human endeavour to create a memorable narrative of Mayer Rothschild's time.' Deborah Stead, New York Times Book Review

Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty

Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty PDF Author: Herbert H. Kaplan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The story of how Nathan Mayer Rothschild financed Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo.

Herzl

Herzl PDF Author: Amos Elon
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Born in Budapest to a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and his family moved to Vienna when he was 18. He studied law before he began writing plays and pieces of journalism. Herzl became the Paris correspondent for Vienna’s leading newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, and covered the Dreyfus affair, which shocked and galvanized him to write The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, published in 1896. After the first Zionist congress of 1897, Herzl wrote in his diary: “In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I said this aloud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will agree.” “A great dramatic biography.” — Alfred Kazin, The New York Times “Any reader familiar with the sources can appreciate the brilliance, restraint and fidelity of Elon’s narrative... the excitement of events and the quality of their prime mover come through admirably.” — The New Republic “You could not put the book down without admiring Theodor Herzl’s courage and practical achievements — his romance turned into a Congress, a bank, a diplomacy.” — Bernard Avishai, The New Yorker “A quite astonishing portrait... positively rewarding” — Kirkus Reviews “Elon’s 1975 biography of Herzl... vividly portrayed the man with all his quirks, inventiveness and shortcomings” — Lawrence Joffe, The Guardian “considered one of the best biographies to date of Zionist founder Theodor Herzl” — Benjamin Spier, Jerusalem Post “arguably the best biography ever written of the founding father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl” — Tom Segev, Ha’aretz “A fascinating book ... it has the fascination of a novel on the grand scale.” — Arthur Miller, Washington Post “A skillfully written human look at the man whose life reads like a novel...” — Miami Herald

The Pity of It All

The Pity of It All PDF Author: Amos Elon
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312422813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A history of German Jews from the mid-eighteenth century to the eve of the Third Reich traces their transformation from cattle dealers and wandering peddlers to a successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, and activists.

The Women of Rothschild

The Women of Rothschild PDF Author: Natalie Livingstone
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250280206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
In The Women of Rothschild, Natalie Livingstone reveals the role of women in shaping the legacy of the famous Rothschild dynasty, synonymous with wealth and power. From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first. As Jews in a Christian society and women in a deeply patriarchal family, they were outsiders. Excluded from the family bank, they forged their own distinct dynasty of daughters and nieces, mothers and aunts. They became influential hostesses and talented diplomats, choreographing electoral campaigns, advising prime ministers, advocating for social reform, and trading on the stock exchange. Misfits and conformists, conservatives and idealists, performers and introverts, they mixed with everyone from Queen Victoria to Chaim Weizmann, Rossini to Isaiah Berlin, and the Duke of Wellington to Alec Guinness, as well as with amphetamine-dealers, suffragists and avant-garde artists. Rothschild women helped bring down ghetto walls in early nineteenth-century Frankfurt, inspired some of the most remarkable cultural movements of the Victorian period, and in the mid-twentieth century burst into America, where they patronized Thelonious Monk and drag-raced through Manhattan with Miles Davis. Absorbing and compulsive, The Women of Rothschild gives voice to the complicated, privileged, and gifted women whose vision and tenacity shaped history.

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
In these early 20th century literary essays, Stefan Zweig offers a Central European view of the writers he believed to be the “three greatest novelists” of the 19th century: Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. In Zweig’s view, Balzac set out to emulate his childhood hero Napoleon. Writing 20 hours a day, Balzac’s literary ambition was “tantamount to monomania in its persistence, its intensity, and its concentration.” His characters, each similarly driven by one desperate urge, were more vital to Balzac than people in his daily life. In Zweig’s reading, Dickens embodied Victorian England and its “bourgeois smugness”. His characters aspire to “A few hundred pounds a year, an amiable wife, a dozen children, a well-appointed table and succulent meats to entertain their friends with, a cottage not too far from London, the windows giving a view over the green countryside, a pretty little garden, and a modicum of happiness.” The ideal of middle-class respectability suffuses Dickens’ fiction. Dostoevsky drew on the struggles of his own life to illuminate the contradictions of the human soul. In Zweig’s view, his heroes had no desire to be citizens or ordinary human beings. While Balzac’s heroes “would gladly have subjugated the world, Dostoevsky’s heroes wished to transcend it.”

Freud by Zweig

Freud by Zweig PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) first wrote about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as part ofMental Healers. Published in Germany in February of 1931, it is one of the earliest studies of Freud’s work by a writer outside the psychoanalytic community and is a fresh reminder of the excitement that Freud’s revolutionary approach to the psyche engendered in Zweig and his contemporaries. Zweig had been sending his writing to Freud for feedback since the first decade of the twentieth century. Reading about himself was an ambivalent experience for Freud. In his letter of response to this essay, Freud wrote: “I could object that you overemphasize the element of petit-bourgeois rectitude in me — the fellow is a little more complicated than that!” but “I am probably not wrong in assuming that you were a stranger to psychoanalytical theory prior to the writing of this book. It is all the more to your credit, therefore, that you have absorbed so much of it since.”

The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche

The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Stefan Zweig’s literary portraits of three tormented giants of German literature, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche, contrasts them with Goethe who was anchored in place by profession, home and family. For Zweig, “everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles inevitably with his daemon” which Zweig describes as “the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being ... towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation and even self-destruction.” In these essays, Zweig depicts the tragic and sublime lifelong struggle by three great creative minds with their respective daemons.

Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Hailed as a parable for modern times, Erasmus of Rotterdam is the biography of a great humanist who, when pressed for a confession of faith, said, “I love freedom, and I will not and cannot serve any party.” At no time does Zweig mention Hitler by name, but it is obvious that his biography of a man who tried to remain above the battle, and who was torn to pieces by both Lutherans and Catholics, was aimed to illustrate the predicament of a man who refrains from activism and prefers to focus on his work. Erasmus believed in a united Europe, and thought that Luther was splitting it in two. He first tried to reconcile the Pope to Luther’s Wittenberg theses, then to bring the German Protestants together with the representatives of Rome. Zweig portrays a steadfast Erasmus, unwilling to let emotion betray the lucidity of his thought, who knew he was the most famous intellect of his age, and evaded any commitment that would bring a host of enemies down upon his head. In Erasmus, Zweig may have seen parts of himself. (adapted from “Book of the Times” by John Chamberlain, The New York Times, November 2, 1934) “Under Zweig’s magic pen Erasmus leaps into vital existence... The books is a quietly astounding bit of biographical and historical achievement.” — Percy Hutchison, The New York Times