Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events

Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events PDF Author: Murray Kempton
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
A man congenitally suspicious of all nostrums. Murray Kempton's method is that of the magnifying glass: Under his scrutiny no important detail of our sad century has passed unnoticed. And like the magnifying glass, a ray of truth caught in Kempton's lens for too long becomes concentrated light: it catches fire.

Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events

Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events PDF Author: Murray Kempton
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
A man congenitally suspicious of all nostrums. Murray Kempton's method is that of the magnifying glass: Under his scrutiny no important detail of our sad century has passed unnoticed. And like the magnifying glass, a ray of truth caught in Kempton's lens for too long becomes concentrated light: it catches fire.

Part of Our Time

Part of Our Time PDF Author: Murray Kempton
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the “ruins and monuments of the Thirties” include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

The Trials of Harry S. Truman PDF Author: Jeffrey Frank
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501102907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the “beguiling” (The New York Times) first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how a seemingly ordinary man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman’s presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic bomb and the development of far deadlier weapons; the start of the Cold War and the creation of the NATO alliance; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight a costly “limited war” in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens and fought for a national health insurance plan. While he was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans and came to support stronger civil rights laws, he never relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of instinct and combativeness, as when he asserted a president’s untested power to seize the nation’s steel mills. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible and “intimate” (The Washington Post) portrait of a man, born in the 19th century, who set the nation on a course that reverberates in the 21st century, a leader who never lost a schoolboy’s love for his country and its Constitution.

Nixon at the Movies

Nixon at the Movies PDF Author: Mark Feeney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226239705
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
“People will be arguing over Nixon at the Movies as much as, for more than half a century, the country at large has been arguing about Nixon.”—Greil Marcus Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913, and they shared a long and complex history. The president screened Patton multiple times before and during the invasion of Cambodia, for example. In this unique blend of political biography, cultural history, and film criticism, Mark Feeney recounts in detail Nixon’s enthusiastic viewing habits during his presidency, and takes a new and often revelatory approach to Nixon’s career and Hollywood’s, seeing aspects of Nixon’s character, and the nation’s, refracted and reimagined in film. Nixon at the Movies is a “virtuosic” examination of a man, a culture, and a country in a time of tumult (Slate). “By Feeney's count, Nixon, an unabashed film buff, watched more than 500 movies during the 67 months of his presidency, all carefully listed in an appendix titled ‘What the President Saw and When He Saw It.’ Nixon concentrated intently on whatever was on the screen; he refused to leave even if the picture was a dud and everyone around him was restless. He was omnivorous, would watch anything, though he did have his preferences…Only rarely did he watch R-rated or foreign films. He liked happy endings. Movies were obviously a means of escape for him, and as the Watergate noose tightened, he spent ever more time in the screening room.”—The New York Times

Brazilian Legacies

Brazilian Legacies PDF Author: Robert M. Levine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315503840
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Focusing on Brazil, this text covers issues such as: the legacy of colour; social realities; and diversions and assertive behaviour.

The Hurt Business

The Hurt Business PDF Author: George Kimball
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1781312052
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
From Jack London to Joyce Carol Oates, The Hurt Business is the ultimate boxing book covering a century of the greatest fighter and the writers who have followed 'the sweet science'. Beginning with Jack London's account of the 1910 championship bout between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries (for which the Call of the Wildman called for and coined the term "The Great White Hope"), and ending with Carlo Rotella's 2002 homage to Larry Holmes ("Champion at Twilight"), The Hurt Business is a near century's worth of rip-roaring reveal. Some of it comes ringside, like Norman Mailer et; some of it comes from the gym, like Pete Hamill's "Up the Stairs with Cus D'Amato"; and some of it comes from so far behind the scenes you feel as if you've been eavesdropping - Thomas Hauser's excerpt from The Black Lights. For fans of Norman Mailer's The Fight or George Kimball's Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing, The Hurt Business belongs on the shelves of any fan of boxing or sublime sports writing.

The Company They Kept, Volume Two

The Company They Kept, Volume Two PDF Author: Robert B. Silvers
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Anna Akhmatova on Osip Mandelstam • Virgil Thomson on Gertrude Stein • Jonathan Miller on Lenny Bruce • Robert Lowell on John Berryman • Stephen Spender on W. H. Auden • Mary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt • John Thompson on Robert Lowell • James Merrill on Elizabeth Bishop • Isaiah Berlin on Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova • Joseph Brodsky on Nadezhda Mandelstam • Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale on George Balanchine • John Richardson on Douglas Cooper • Hector Bianciotti on Jorge Luis Borges Gore Vidal on Dawn Powell • Bruce Chatwin on George Ortiz Philip Roth on Ivan Klíma • Elena Bonner on Andrei Sakharov Elizabeth Hardwick on Murray Kempton • Aileen Kelly on Isaiah Berlin • Murray Kempton on Frank Sinatra • Adam Michnik on Zbigniew Herbert • John Updike on Saul Steinberg Jonathan Mirsky on Noel Annan • Alison Lurie on Edward Gorey Ian Buruma on John Schlesinger • Darryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick • Colin Thubron on Patrick Leigh Fermor TWENTY-SEVEN MEMOIRS OF TRANSFORMING PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WRITERS AND ARTISTS FROM THE PAGES OF THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS A sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney’s description of the premises of The New York Review of Books itself, from whose offices these writings were edited and in whose pages they first appeared: “Books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent, every contributor was at the center of a drama called his or her ‘piece.’ Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone’s laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family.” The New York Review of Books, with an international circulation of more than 130,000, began during New York’s 1963 newspaper strike when the present editor, Robert B. Silvers, and founding co-editor Barbara Epstein, along with Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds would discuss current books and issues in depth. Since then, every two weeks, The New York Review has continued to be the journal where the most important issues in American life, culture, and politics are discussed by writers who are themselves a major force in world literature and thought. “The secret of its success, The New York Times wrote, “is this: Its editors’ ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas.” Many of the contributors to The New York Review of Books have written about deep and abiding relationships— both personal and intellectual—with fellow poets, writers, and artists. The Company They Kept, Volume II is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing (as Robert Lowell writes about John Berryman: “Hyperenthusiasms made him a hot friend, and could also make him wearing to friends—one of his dearest, Delmore Schwartz, used to say no one had John’s loyalty, but you liked him to live in another city”). There are historic moments—Isaiah Berlin’s conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti’s account of the death of Borges—as well as lighthearted ones—Bruce Chatwin’s hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz, and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale’s subway ride with George Balanchine (“…like a mythical guide he made the dingy steps, the sinister train, the underground arrival at the State Theater a Tiepoloesque flight into heaven”). Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as “a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole”; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell’s living room suddenly realizing “this is a ménage à trois in Greenwich Village. My martini runs over”; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon (Steinberg sent one, and another, nearly fifty years later, when Updike turned sixty). Each portrait is written with feeling and fullness of heart.

Hope and History

Hope and History PDF Author: William J. vanden Heuvel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738194
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Hope and History is both a memoir and a call-to-action for the renewal of faith in democracy and America. US Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel presents his most important public speeches and writings, compiled and presented over eight decades of adventure and public service, woven together with anecdotes of his colorful life as a second-generation American, a soldier, a lawyer, a political activist, and a diplomat. He touches upon themes that resonate as much today as they did when he first encountered them: the impact of heroes and mentors; the tragedy of the Vietnam War; the problems of racism and desegregation in America; tackling the crisis in America's prisons; America and the Holocaust; and the plight and promise of the United Nations. Along the way, he allows us to share his journey with some of the great characters of American history: Eleanor Roosevelt, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, President John F. Kennedy and RFK, Harry S. Truman, and Jimmy Carter. Throughout, vanden Heuvel persuades us that there is still room for optimism in public life. He shows how individuals, himself among them, have tackled some of America's most intractable domestic and foreign policy issues with ingenuity and goodwill, particularly under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and those who sought and still seek to follow in his footsteps. He is not afraid to challenge the hatred and bigotry that are an unfortunate but undeniable part of the American fabric. He exhorts us to embrace all the challenges and opportunities that life in the United States can offer.

Making Words Dance

Making Words Dance PDF Author: Robert Schmuhl
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449400256
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Making Words Dance: Perspectives on Red Smith, Journalism, and Writing is a timely and timeless collection of lectures examining both the writer's art and the role of journalism in American culture. Making Words Dance features lectures by fifteen of the country's most respected journalists and writers, given as part of the lecture series at the University of Notre Dame honoring award-winning columnist Red Smith. Edited by Robert Schmuhl, director of the Red Smith Lecture in Journalism since its inception in 1983, the collection offers assessments of the news business and writing by Ted Koppel, Frank McCourt, Jim Lehrer, Judy Woodruff, David Remnick, and James Reston, among others. Notably, the book also includes the final lecture on journalism given by Tim Russert before his untimely death in 2008. The collected lectures are complemented by sixteen articles and columns by Smith, a stylist and reporter whose writing always danced and taught lessons about the craft. Both an entertaining tutorial on the writer's art and an incisive commentary on the state of contemporary media, Making Words Dance is a fitting celebration of the life and work of one of American journalism's most notable figures.

Eleanor

Eleanor PDF Author: David Michaelis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439192049
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
Presents a breakthrough portrait of America's longest-serving first lady that covers her major contributions throughout critical historical events and her essential role in advancing international human rights.