Austria Books

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

List Price: $20.00 By: Beacon Press Amazon Marketplace: 25 new & used starting at $3.88

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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:

The inspirational story of Viktor Frankl's struggle to hold onto hope during his three years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl's training as a psychiastrist brings a remarkable perspective to the psychology of survival.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

Amazon Price: $10.40 List Price: $13.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Beacon Press Amazon Marketplace: 90 new & used starting at $4.00

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Mental Health -> Compulsive Behavior

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.

The Royal Hungarian Army in World War II (Men-at-Arms)

Nigel Thomas, Laszlo Szabo

Amazon Price: $12.21 List Price: $17.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Osprey Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 33 new & used starting at $9.21

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Subjects -> History -> Military -> Weapons & Warfare -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

The Royal Hungarian Army was Germany's largest ally on the Eastern Front, providing a vital contribution in terms of both men and equipment. Information about the Hungarian Army in English is rare, and in this book co-authors Nigel Thomas and Hungarian expert Laszlo Szabo fill in the gaps about an important German ally.

Deployed in Ukraine at the beginning of the war, the Hungarian Army were involved in a number of brutal encounters with the Red Army, including stubborn resistance in Transylvania in the summer of 1944 and the brave defence of Budapest in the face of overwhelming odds. The Hungarian Army was a varied and colorful force, ranging from mountain troops and tank units to horse cavalry and specialist infantry. All of these are illustrated in full color artwork, and the text is full of details about the Hungarian Army's own, quite distinct uniforms and insignia as well as many of its own weapons and tanks. With so little of this information readily available outside of Hungary, this is an essential starter resource for war gamers, modelers, re-enactors and military historians.

Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

Ian Kershaw

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton & Company Amazon Marketplace: 62 new & used starting at $7.35

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. Hitler here emerges from obscurity to uncontested rule over a disillusioned people desperate to escape from political and economic chaos. Hitler's path to power leads from the anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna through the First World War, the nationalism of Bavaria in the 1920s, and the undermining of German democracy by extremists of the right and left that opens the door for his seizure of the state in 1933. Drawing on previously untapped sources--including Joseph Goebbels's diaries, recently discovered in Moscow--this volume ends with the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the fringes of society and the march of the German army into the Rhineland, Hitler's first step toward the abyss of war. Horrifying, unstoppably readable, rich with analysis whose implications remain all too relevant as we near the end of Hitler's century, this is "biography of profound importance" (Thomas Childers, Boston Globe).

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke

Timothy Snyder

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Wilhelm Von Habsburg wore the uniform of the Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a saber, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself. In this exhilarating narrative history, prize-winning historian Timothy D. Snyder offers an indelible portrait of an aristocrat whose life personifies the wrenching upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, as the rule of empire gave way to the new politics of nationalism. Coming of age during the First World War, Wilhelm repudiated his family to fight alongside Ukrainian peasants in hopes that he would become their king. When this dream collapsed he became, by turns, an ally of German imperialists, a notorious French lover, an angry Austrian monarchist, a calm opponent of Hitler, and a British spy against Stalin. Played out in Europe’s glittering capitals and bloody battlefields, in extravagant ski resorts and dank prison cells, The Red Prince captures an extraordinary moment in the history of Europe, in which the old order of the past was giving way to an undefined future-and in which everything, including identity itself, seemed up for grabs.

Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Carl E. Schorske

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born.

"Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete."

-- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review

"Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument."

-- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic

"A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books

"A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing."

-- Newsweek

Klimt (Big Art)

Gottfried Fliedl

Amazon Price: $10.19 List Price: $14.99 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: Taschen Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $9.75

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Revealing, Educational and Loads of Photos 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 27 people found this review helpful.

First of all, the book is not covered as shown in the amazon photo which shows the famous "kiss" painting. The book, apparently updated in 2006, shows a cover photo of Klimt's famous Danae (1907-8) oil on canvas painting. I think this cover is more provacative and more organic and softer than the famed Kiss painting which reveals a couple entwined in gold looking rather stiff. Danae was certainly a better choice for the cover. The book is definitely not written for the casual art reader. It is written with extreme depth as what I'd expect from a historian of the arts on a university research level. As verbose as it is, it has plenty, if not hundreds of photos of the famous works, including all of Klimt's paintings and lesser known sketches. The author discusses several of Klimt's famous paintings in depth and reviews various critics of Klimt's time period as well as Klimt's personal opinions and struggles. Culture, politics, and various movements in the arts is also discussed at length. This book is too deep for the casual browser or reader but makes a great coffee table book if only for the pictures alone. It is a high quality book and the pages are high quality (acid free) and glossy. The painting photos are rich and fully colored, better than other books I've bought on Klimt (where the precious gold paint is reduced to lousy brownish or greenish prints). The gold tones in this book, so famous in Klimt's work, are reproduced extremely well as well as the other vivid colors so characteristic of Klimt's work. It's a bargain to get this book at the price.

Editorial Review:

The Kiss of Klimt: the most fascinating painter of Vienna’s Belle Epoque ...

Gustav Klimt’s art is thoroughly fin de siècle.It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna’s upper-middle-class society — a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt (1862–1918) and his contemporaries found — or hoped to find — in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death, and death therefore plays an important role in Klimt’s art. Klimt’s fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form." Author Gottfried Fliedlalso discusses the Secession movement and Klimt’s role within this important group of artists.

The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

John Stoye

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Pegasus Books Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $7.25

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"In his splendid study The Siege of Vienna, the Oxford historian John Stoye provides a detailed account of the intricate machinations between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Mr. Stoye's description of the siege itself is masterly. He seems to know every inch of ground, every earthwork and fortification around the Imperial City, and he follows the action meticulously."-The Wall Street Journal

"Worthy of the pen of Herodotus. . . . It is a measure of the fascination of Mr. Stoye's subject that one should think of comparing his treatment of it with the work of the greatest historians."-The Times Literary Supplement

"John Stoye is the master of every aspect of his subject."-Daily Telegraph

The siege of Vienna in 1683 was one of the turning points in European history. So great was its impact that countries normally jealous and hostile sank their differences to throw back the armies of Islam and their savage Tartar allies.

The consequences of defeat were momentous: The Ottomans lost half of their European territories, which led to the final collapse of their empire, and the Habsburgs turned their attention from France and the Rhine frontier to the rich pickings of the Balkans. That hot September day in 1683 witnessed the last great trial of strength between the East and the West-and opened an epoch in European history that lasted until the First World War.

John Stoye, the author of several books on European history, is a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he lives.

Hundertwasser: 1928-2000; Personality, Life, Work (Midi S.)

Wieland Schmied

List Price: $24.99 By: Taschen Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $35.79

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

a readable, interesting art book 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Any book about art or an artist that doesn't make me fall asleep gets five stars from me. The only downside (but it still gets five stars) as that you don't get the full representation of the pictures and need to look at the description to see the medium. For example the foil overlay. Still wonderful. (Feb 17, 2008)

I eventually found a small, beautiful, cloth-bound catalogue of his Australian and New Zealand exhibitions (the one I have was produced in 1973 by cicero, gmbh and titled 'Hundertwasser 1974 Australia') and there you get glimpse of the phosphoric metallic brilliance that I find missing in many of the books about Hundertwasser - although for the price of these books, no complaint. This book and the catalogue are a good combination. The catalogue I was able to find at a very reasonable price of $30, but it took a bit of searching. (April 16, 2008)

Editorial Review:

A portrait of the artist by the artist himself (TASCHEN's 25th anniversary special edition) Friedensreich Hundertwasser: born as Friedrich Stowasser, he lived and died as Friedensreich (meaning "realm of peace") Hundertwasser?a name he chose for himself. Architect, ecologist, painter, designer, writer, innovator? his list of talents goes on and on. Hundertwasser reinvented the art of living as an artist 24 hours a day. This book comprises Volume I from the limited-edition Hunderstwasser book set, with selected paintings, architecture works, projects, and manifestos. The text by Wieland Schmied, a longtime personal friend of Hundertwasser, traces the life and work of one of the century's most fascinating artistic personalities. Produced in collaboration with Hundertwasser (who supervised the project and designed the layout himself) just before his untimely death, this book is not only a testament to his unparallelled career but a living legacy.

Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis

Ian Kershaw

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton & Company Amazon Marketplace: 59 new & used starting at $8.54

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

To be sure, military historians may be upset because Kershaw doesn't cover every little thing when it comes to the war, but this is the place to start and finish when it comes to Hitler from 1936-1945. The book is very well written and highly readable. If you want more info on the war, there are certainly other places to go, but if you want to know about Hitler, start with Kershaw's 1st volume and move on to this.

Editorial Review:

The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume masterpiece "as close to definitive as anything we are likely to see, " and that promise is fulfilled in this stunning second volume. As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head.