Whittaker Chambers had just participated in America's trial of the century in which Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a full-standing member of the political establishment, was a spy for the Soviet Union. This poetic autobiography recounts the famous case, but also reveals much more. Chambers' worldview--e.g. "man without mysticism is a monster"--went on to help make political conservatism a national force.

    But you'll want to read it most for Karen's own words: 'I can walk, I can talk. I can read. I can write. I can do anything."- The New York Times Yes, these are Karen's own words. The words of a small, pig-tailed, freckle-faced child. Yet, no truer words were ever spoken, for Karen had just lived a miracle. "Extraordinary is the word to be used first, last, and repeatedly about this book. Anyone who meets Karen, even on paper, will postpone resigning from the human race." The Saturday Review.

    Here in an abridged edition.

    This longer, more detailed account includes many of Taylor's personal writings that express his vision, faith and frustrations. It also provides a careful account of the many miracles that took the young mission agency into the inalnd and barbaric provinces of China. The first volume covers Tyalor's life, and the second, more about the mission itself.

    It covers the first 26 years of his life and ends with his joining the Communist Party in 1931, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny.In the years before 1931, Arthur Koestler lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the University if Vienna; a collective farm worker in Galilee; a tramp and street vendor in Haifa; the editor of a weekly paper in Cairo; the foreign correspondent of the biggest continental newspaper chain in Paris and the Middle East; a science editor in Berlin; and a member of the North Pole expedition of the Graf Zeppelin.Written with enormous zest, joie de vivre and frankness, Arrow in the Blue is a fascinating self-portrait of a remarkable young man at the heart of the events that shaped the twentieth century.The second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography is The Invisible Writing.

    Recommended in Laura Berquist Second Grade Syllabus Author: Edgar D Aulaire Grade: 1-6 Pages: 42, Paperback Publisher: Beautiful Feet Books ISBN: 0-9643803-7-4

    The story of his triumphs, tragedies, successes & failures.

    Eliezer Ben Yehuda devoted his life to making Hebrew the language of Palestine and to furthering the establishment of a Jewish state there.

    Her life was one of peace and happiness in which she and her husband served faithfully their people. When World War I comes, her quiet world is shattered and, following the Treaty of Versailles, nothing is the same for her or for her beloved country as economic and political upheavals threaten and destroy the customs of ages.

    Originally published in France in 1952, during the years of Prince Youssoupoff's exile from Russia, Lost Splendor has all the excitement of a thriller. Born to great riches, lord of vast feudal estates and many palaces, Felix Youssoupoff led the life of a grand seigneur in the days before the Russian Revolution. Married to the niece of Czar Nicholas II, he could observe at close range the rampant corruption and intrigues of the imperial court, which culminated in the rise to power of the sinister monk Rasputin. Finally, impelled by patriotism and his love for the Romanoff dynasty, which he felt was in danger of destroying itself and Russia, he killed Rasputin in 1916 with the help of the Grand Duke Dimitri and others. More than any other single event, this deed helped to bring about the cataclysmic upheaval that ended in the advent of the Soviet regime.~The author describes the luxury and glamour of his upbringing, fantastic episodes at nightclubs and with the gypsies in St. Petersburg, grand tours of Europe, dabbling in spiritualism and occultism, and an occasional conscience-stricken attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor.~Prince Youssoupoff was an aristocrat of character. When the moment for action came, when the monk's evil influence over the czar and czarina became unbearable, he and his friends decided that they must get rid of the monster. He tells how Rasputin courted him and tried to hypnotize him, and how finally they decoyed him to the basement of the prince's palace. Prince Youssoupoff...is perfectly objective, remarkably modern and as accurate as human fallibility allows. His book is therefore readable, of historical value and intimately tragic. It is as if Count Fersen had written a detailed account of the last years of Marie Antoinette. --Harold Nicholson, on the first English edition, 1955 By Prince Felix Youssoupoff. Hardcover, 5.25 x 8.25 in./300 pgs / 0 color 14 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20143

    William Makepeace Thackeray, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, George Eliot, and Queen Victoria are among the players in the drama of his life: a drama in which he appears as one of the most complex figures of his time, a man whose political and social crusades against illiteracy, capital punishment, unjust penal systems, and child abuse are as compelling as his literary achievements. As the original 2-volume edition of Charles Dickens: His Tragedy & Triumph appeared, Lionel Trilling wrote: "We cannot say less of Mr. Johnson's book than it is the definitive life of Dickens. & to say that is to say that it is a splendid achievement & a work of superlative interest & charm."V1 The anvil & the iron: 1812-33: Birth & backgroundThe happy time The challenge of despairAmbition's ladder First love Climb to fame: 1833-37: The career takes shapeBoz is born Catherine Pickwick triumphantKnight of the joyful countenanceTroubles & triumphs: 1837-39: Metamorphosis of a journalistLost love Ascent of the rocketThe break with BentleyThe will in command Deeper cast: 1839-41: The thieves' den & the worldMaster Humphrey's clock strikes one Emergence of a radical The neglected & misusedTriumph in Scotland & the eve of a new departureThe new World: 1842: The American dream Conquest with undertonesNot the republic of my imaginationReturn journey Home again: valedictory on America Crescendo of restlessness: 1843-46: Year of disappointmentSelfishness & the economic man Battles & Italinan air-castles From the bells of Genoa ...To the chimes of LondonLast days in Italy Birth pangs of the daily newsV2 At grips with himself: 1846-51: Difficulties with DombeyThe want of something The world of DombeyismA haunted man Myself into the shadowy world His favorite child Household words Splendid barnstormingFog over England The anatomy of societyThe heaviest blow in my powerCritique of materialism Fire bursts out Nobody's fault Old hell shaft The prison of societyBreaking point The track of a stormSurface serene The tempest & the ruined gardenIntimations of mortality The great dust-heap The bottom of the cup: 1865-70: Pilgrim of Gad's Hill To the loadstone rock Last rally The dying & undying voiceThe narrow bed

    482 pages, 4 plates, boards, very good. From the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition: George Sand, pseud. of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dudevant 1804-76, French novelist. Other variant forms of her maiden name include Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. Born of an aristocratic father and a lower-class mother, she was reared by her austere paternal grandmother on a country estate in Berry. After entering a convent in Paris, she returned to the countryside and led an unconventional life, donning the male clothes that became a mark of her rebellion. In 1831, after eight years of a marriage of convenience with Baron Dudevant, a country squire, she went with her two children to Paris, obtaining a divorce in 1836. She wrote some 80 novels, which were widely popular in their day, supporting herself and her children chiefly by her writing. Her earlier novels were romantic; later ones often expressed her serious concern with social reform. Her liaisons-with Jules Sandeau, Musset, Chopin, and others-were open and notorious, but were only part of her life. She demanded for women the freedom in living that was a matter of course to the men of her day.

    Compelling narrative of Norman Bethune, revolutionary doctor in Mao's China.

    Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and William Randolph Hearst. In a series of articles originally published in The New Yorker, playwright S.N. Behrman evokes the larger-than-life Duveen and reveals the wheeling and dealing, subterfuge, and spirited drama behind the sale of nearly—but not quite—priceless Rembrandts, Vermeers, Turners, and Bellinis.

    Professor Baker has also written two new chapters in which he discusses Hemingway's two posthumously published books, A Movable Feast and Islands in the Stream.CONTENTS: Introduction. I. The Slopes of Montparnasse. II. The Making of Americans. III. The Way It Was. IV. The Wastelanders. V. The Mountain and the Plain. VI. The First Forty-Five Stories. VII. The Spanish Earth. VIII. The Green Hills of Africa. IX. Depression at Key West. X. The Spanish Tragedy. XI. The River and the Trees. XII. The Ancient Mariner. XIII. The Death of the Lion. XIV. Looking Backward. XV. Islands in the Stream.

    

    A biography of the Venetian traveler whose trips throughout Asia and China gave the European world its first knowledge of the Far East.

    1 An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant: he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this "break" is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual rebeginnings of an individual history. What matters is that Genet lives and continues to relive this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant. ____________________ 1 Pass?iste: one who is not adapted to the present age, who is not a man of his time, who "lives in the past."--Translator's note. ____________________ ? ? To say "instant" is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life. One feels oneself to be one's own self and another; the eternal is present in an atom of duration. In the midst of the fullest life, one has a foreboding that one will merely survive, one is afraid of the future. It is the time of anguish and of heroism, of pleasure and of destruction. An instant is sufficient to destroy, to enjoy, to kill, to be killed, to make one's fortune at the turn of a card. Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant which has lost none of its virulence, an infinitesimal and sacred void which concludes a death and begins a horrible metamorphosis. The argument of this liturgical drama is as follows: a child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child. One would have to speak of resurrection, to evoke the old initiatory rites of shamanism and secret societies, were it not that Genet refuses categorically to be a man who has been resuscitated. 2 There was a death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man. If he appears to be still alive, it is with the larval existence which certain peoples ascribe to their defunct in the grave. All his heroes have died at least once in their life. "After his first murder, Querelle experienced the feeling of being dead. . . . His human form--what is called the envelope of flesh-continued nevertheless to move about on the surface of the earth." His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern his future death, his being-to-die, but rather his being-dead, his death as past event. This original crisis also appears to him as a metamorphosis. The well-behaved child is suddenly transformed into a hoodlum, as Gregor Samsa was changed into a bug. Genet's attitude toward this metamorphosis is ambivalent: he both loathes it and yearns for it.

    With astonishing power Period Piece brings us into the real presence of the late Victorian past.

    An account of the life and achievements of England's most famous nurse, showing how her early desire to help sick animals and people became translated into a career in the London hospitals and on the battlefronts of the Crimean War.

    

    Illustrated by Wesley Dennis

    A biography of the Marquis de Sade, the French aristocrat & writer who "Sadism" is named after.

    Now available in a paperback edition, this book explores the relationship between Hemingway the man and Hemingway the author, offering perspectives that remain fresh and insightful.

    

    Townsend from writing this biography saying that as a friend he was apt to be prejudiced in his favor. As was probably noted by Professor Frank Tannenbaum in his foreword to this book, he states that "it is difficult for anyone who has known General Cardenas to write about him dispassionately."General Cardenas is represented as a man of honor, nobility,, integrity, tact, idealism, moderation, modesty, sincerity, liberalism, tolerance, vision-and countless other virtues. As page after page was read, and as the number of the virtues mounted, one might search for some confession of shortcoming, some fall from virtuous grace. On the very few occasions when the fact of error was conceded, this was defended by the author as an extenuating circumstance. For example, when President Cardenas, who stood for honest elections and noninterference by the Executive (sic), winked at the fraudulent counting of the votes after the Almazan-Camacho election, it was because Almazan's threat to revolt had caused the President "to lose concern about the counting of the votes."William Cameron Townsend, who has spent most of his adult life among Indian tribes of Mexico and Guatemala, first became acquainted with Lazaro Cardenas in 1935 when the President of Mexico discovered Mr. and Mrs. Townsend living in an Indian village in Morelos teaching the Indians to read in their native Aztec language. A long and intimate friendship developed, affording Mr. Townsend an excellent opportunity to become well acquainted with Lazaro Cardenas, the man. The particular value of this book, therefore, is to be found in the warm, sympathetic character delineation of General Cardenas rather than in the sketchy, disjointed, and thoroughly inadequate chapters on the Cardenas administration. For a more penetrating, comprehensive, and orderly view of the problems and achievements of the Cardenas administration we must still rely on the Weyls' Reconquest of Mexico.

    A biography of the Yugoslavian leader by a colleague from pre-WW2 days, telling his story from his early life, his captivity in Russia, organisation of Communist cells in Yugoslavia, the epic story of the Partisan War 1941-45 and his break with Stalin.

    The first of a two-volume biography published in 1952