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The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914

Philipp Blom

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Europe, 1900–1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.

In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.

From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.

Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

To hell and back

Audie Murphy

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Subjects -> History -> Military -> World War II -> General

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Total reviews: 88 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The classic bestselling war memoir by the most decorated American soldier in World War II, back in print in a trade paperback

Originally published in 1949, To Hell and Back was a smash bestseller for fourteen weeks and later became a major motion picture starring Audie Murphy as himself. More than fifty years later, this classic wartime memoir is just as gripping as it was then.

Desperate to see action but rejected by both the marines and paratroopers because he was too short, Murphy eventually found a home with the infantry. He fought through campaigns in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. Although still under twenty-one years old on V-E Day, he was credited with having killed, captured, or wounded 240 Germans. He emerged from the war as America's most decorated soldier, having received twenty-one medals, including our highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. To Hell and Back is a powerfully real portrayal of American GI's at war.

The Good War

Studs Terkel

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Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Oral History

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Negative "cherry pickin'" 1 out of 5 stars.
7 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I expected a history of the war through eyewitness accounts, but got a collection of cherry picked anecdotes selected to make an anti-war statement. Some of the stories are interesting and revealing of aspects of the time, but this is not a definitive history of WWII by any means.

Absolute, Must-Read Oral History of World War II 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

If you have even the slightest interest in history in general, or just World War II specifically, you HAVE to read this book! The Good War is a national treasure containing a broad cross-cut of the generations of men and women who lived through a horrible and fascinating era. This is not a history as you've known history. This is history as a living, breathing entity. If you're skeptical of my enthusiasm, just try to get through the first chapter without wanting to read the rest of them.

These interviews are guaranteed to affect you. This is the perspective that history so often overlooks: the views of the everyday man, woman, and child at ground zero--those who experience history first-hand.

Editorial Review:

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

OVER FIVE MONTHS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST

Endurance

Lansing Alfred

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Total reviews: 392 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Just Incredible Account ,Absolutely Incredible 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This account of Shackelton's expedition to Antarctic is a read like no other. I could not put this book down,nor could I believe the constitution each person on the crew had to continue forth under such insurmountable odds. The author, Lansing has provided a compelling book. His research of events are smoothly seamed together captivating the reader. Even if ones interest usually doesn't lean toward the topic of explorer, I promise you this book will consume you. Its message is especially good for any of us who may be feeling "overwhelmed" by what our lives are tossing our way... you will be giving thanks at the comforts you have by comparison to this expeditions minimal articles to provide their continued existence. As another reviewer mentioned, buy the hard or soft-cover not paperback version as these include all of Hurley's photographs which are essential to this book-seeing is believing and you won't believe what this photographer captured. Enjoy, you will share the events of this book over and over with many.

Editorial Review:

Described by the Chicago Tribune as "one of the most gripping, suspenseful, intense stories anyone will ever read," Endurance is, without a doubt, a book listeners will talk about whenever man's durability is discussed.

The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Art Spiegelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 192 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

At last! Here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker). It now appears as it was originally envisioned by the author: The Complete Maus.

It is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Alison Weir

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 141 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fill in the holes, if you have read other books about this period. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

A must read if you have been enticed by the interesting tale of the period... Perhaps you have read some of the fluffier books with more romance and fictional license. This is book fills in many of the holes. This book is a nice enjoyable read with great details that touch on the people in a Titan's wake.

The women come to life.
The politics and decisions that baffle us, centuries later, come into focus as you understand the rival nations and religious reform of the era. GREAT NOVEL.

This author did research and portrayed the characters factually and clearly.

Her Eleanor of Aquitaine novel is excellent as well.

Editorial Review:

The tempestuous, bloody, and splendid reign of Henry VIII of England (1509-1547) is one of the most fascinating in all history, not least for his marriage to six extraordinary women. In this accessible work of brilliant scholarship, Alison Weir draws on early biographies, letters, memoirs, account books, and diplomatic reports to bring these women to life. Catherine of Aragon emerges as a staunch though misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn, an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour, a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves, a good-natured and innocent woman naively unaware of the court intrigues that determined her fate; Catherine Howard, an empty-headed wanton; and Catherine Parr, a warm-blooded bluestocking who survived King Henry to marry a fourth time.

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

Jon Meacham

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( R ) -> Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 59 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children.

Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill.

Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history.

Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle.

Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.


From the Hardcover edition.

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme

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Total reviews: 119 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.


Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 289 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A fine, fine book! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a wonderful book to read merely because of it's main message. Read it and find out the meaning of the title.

Reality for today and yesterday 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I first read this book in college many years ago as I was working on my degree in psychology. An excerpt from it is in John McCain's autobiographical book, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir. I was glad to be reminded of this book which I had not read in years. I found my old copy on the shelf but I am also glad to learn it is still available.

The comparison between Frankl and McCain as prisoners is striking. Both of them emphasize the basic human need for meaning and purpose. Both share incredible horrors of prison camp as well as the human ability to look beyond present circumstances, to keep the horrid memories from continuing as sources of torture years after the actual experiences.
We can apply this ability to many of the unfortunate experiences in our lives. It is not only an attitude of forgive and forget, it is the need to keep the horrors or smaller angers from continuing to torment us.

It is more than a little frightening that there are people who deny that the Holocaust even happened. I hope you read Frankl's book. Fully grasp the reality of his day and apply it to today's needs and problems.

Editorial Review:

Now in its 60th year -- the landmark bestseller by the great Viennese psychiatrist remembered for his tremendous impact on humanity

Internationally renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps. During, and partly because of, his suffering, Dr. Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy. At the core of his theory is the belief that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning.

Cited in Dr. Frankl's New York Times obituary in 1997 as "an enduring work of survival literature," Man's Search for Meaning is more than the story of Viktor E. Frankl's triumph: It is a remarkable blend of science and humanism and "a compelling introduction to the most significant psychological movement of our day" (Gordon W. Allport).

The guns of August

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman

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Total reviews: 161 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good literature, mediocre history 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

First, I really enjoyed this book. I believe Tuchman did a masterful job of giving life to the people and events that led to WWI. This book is well worth reading, but only for what it is: half-history, half-literature.

This is not the place to start if you want to understand what led to WWI. The author does have a distinct anti-German bias that glosses over most of the complexities that influenced Germany's actions. Given when the book was written, this bias is understandable, but it does affect its historical value. Moreover, Serbia and the Hapsburgs are essentially footnotes in this book when in reality, they are essential for understanding the causes of the war. When you ignore Serbia and Austro-Hungary, well, all you're left with is Germany acting like a belligerent punk under the hand of the man-child Wilhelm II.

Also, Tuchman definitely prefers some individuals over others. For example, she gives Sir French pretty short-shrift in comparison to Lord Kitchener when in reality, there was more than enough incompetence to go around (not that I would have done any better than they).

I do whole-heartedly recommend this book, but only as a halfway step from history to fiction, perhaps sandwiched between A World Undone and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Editorial Review:

"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.