Best of
International

1955

Papa's Wife


Thyra Ferré Björn - 1955
    This novel follows the lives of a conservative, Swedish minister, Pontus Franzon, and his pretty young wife, Maria, through their years in a parsonage in Lapland, their eight children, and their journey to a new life in America.

Passport to World Band Radio


Lawrence Magne - 1955
    Only world band radio delivers this no matter what, and quick-access Passport to World Band Radio is the #1 seller to this market-over a million copies sold to date. Each edition is welcomed by established and emerging readers alike, as Passport delivers in nearly 600 pages what world band listeners seek: * Three-way guide to what's on from stations in dozens of countries: news, entertainment and opinion in English and other languages. All three formats: country-by-country, channel-by-channel, hour-by-hour. * Award-winning reviews of world band radios and accessories, with ratings of dozens of models from Sony, Grundig and others. Radios for emergencies, too. * Wealth of helpful how-to articles, along with a directory of station contacts, webcasts and a glossary. This annual title keeps readers coming back year after year, making it what one chain buyer hails as a quiet bestseller.

The Spider's House


Paul Bowles - 1955
    Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures—recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings—The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Crow Boy


Taro Yashima - 1955
    Pictures and text of moving and harmonious simplicity". - Saturday Review.

A Cure for Serpents


Alberto Denti di Pirajno - 1955
    The autobiography of the Duke of Pirajno, who worked for eighteen years as a doctor in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland.

Pan-Africanism or Communism


George Padmore - 1955
    For, next to the colossal figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, Padmore, the political revolutionary, holds an exalted position in the pantheon of Pan-Africanism, and in this, his chef d'oeuvre, he has presented us with a most vivid account of that movement in which he played so exemplary a role. Indeed, there was in Padmore an admirable double-faceted vis historica - the revolutionary's desire to make history and the writer's impulse to describe it and grasp its meaning.The name George Padmore is a nom de guerre that he adopted when he joined the Communist Party. His real name was Malcolm Nurse. He rose to become the foremost black figure in the Communist International - the Comintern - and he was commissioned into the Red Army as a colonel. He travelled extensively in Africa in an effort to create the nucleus of a Comintern-directed African leadership. In this book he gives a graphic exposition of the history of African, West Indian and American Negro mass movements from 1787 to 1957, and their flirtations with International Communism. He helped to shape much of the latter phases of that affair. Soviet policy finally induced Padmore's resignation from the Comintern and also from the Communist Party. As Aimé Césaire stated when he too broke with the Communists twenty-five years later: 'It's neither Marxism nor Communism I repudiate; the use certain people have made of Marxism and Communism is what I condemn. What I want is that Marxism and Communism be harnessed into the service of coloured peoples, and not coloured people into the service of Marxism and Communism. That the doctrine and the movement be tailored to fit men, not men to fit the movement. And - of course - that goes for others besides Communists.'But in severing connections with them, Padmore did not join the frenzied ranks of the professional anti-Communists in remorseful contrition and fulminations over the god that failed them. Nor did he reconcile himself to imperialism and the oppressions of African peoples. There was in him a need to intensify the struggle against imperialism as also against that Communism which has been polluted by the exigencies of Stalin's balance-of-power political struggles with the Western countries. Arthur Koestler once wrote that 'if we survey history and compare the lofty aims in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilization pollutes its own revolutionary offspring'. Such an observation would lead - as, curiously, it did not lead Koestler - to the conclusion that if indeed the 'revolutionary offspring', Communism, has been 'polluted' by the civilization against which it has revolted, the struggle against this pollution becomes at once and simultaneously the struggle against the polluted offspring as also and inevitably against the source of that pollution. Padmore drew this conclusion. For though conceived by him as a bulwark against Communism, yet 'Pan-Africanism recognizes much that is true in the Marxist interpretation of history, since it provides a rational explanation for a good deal that would otherwise be unintelligible.'– Azinna NwaforThis book recounts the great saga of the rise of black people from slavery to freedom on an intercontinental scale and brings us to the crucial crossroads - a hopeful resolution for black freedom and a partnership of races purged of terror, lynching and colour lines, etc., or a continental mass struggle conducted by Africans in Africa, a struggle that will duplicate the tragic upheavals in Asia. It is not [solely] up to black men to say how this issue will be resolved; but make no mistake: the black man will cling tenaciously to his dream of freedom!If my words carry any weight, I commend this volume for close study to the white governmental officials of the Western world, to white churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, and equally to the dour and brooding white rulers in the Kremlin. I would urge them to read it and get a true, human perspective of the hopes, fears, struggles and hard-bought progress of the Negro in the modern world.I, for one, salute and congratulate George Padmore for his having kept the faith and fought the good fight.– Richard Wright

From the Fair: The Autobiography of Sholom Aleichem


Sholom Aleichem - 1955
    He considered From the Fair his greatest achievement, a book that combined the story of his life and a cultural and spiritual history of his times. Aleichem called it “my book of books, the Song of Songs of my soul.”In 1908, a Russian newspaper in Kiev asked for an autobiographical sketch, and Sholom decided to use a third-person narrative voice for what became a memoir. From the Fair was published in short installments, serialized for newspaper readers. It takes us from the author’s childhood in a Pale of Settlement shtetl to his first love and his early attempts at writing fiction and drama.“I, Sholom Aleichem the writer, will tell the true story of Sholom Aleichem the man,” he writes, “informally and without adornments and embellishments, as if an absolute stranger were talking, yet one who accompanied him everywhere, even to the seven divisions of hell.”The result is essential background for Aleichem’s works of fiction.Curt Leviant is a prizewinning novelist, author of The Yemenite Girl and Passion in the Desert. His short stories and novellas have been published in many magazines and have been included in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories and other anthologies. He has won the Wallant Prize, an O. Henry Award, and is a Fellow in Literature of the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent lecturer on Yiddish and Hebrew literature, he has also translated three other Sholom Aleichem collections.