It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life.But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Without language no knowledge would be possible; here we see how language is at once the source and the reservoir of all we know.

    

    

    In the course of the book's unfolding, the United States enters the military phase after Pearl Harbor. This comes just as the European powers and China are only just establishing their military infrastructure, through Africa and the Middle East and Russia, and the Far East. German forces are meeting stiff resistance in Russia and North Africa, though the Japanese are pushing through South Asia, threatening India. Through the author's experiences, we read of the patriotism of the Free French, the exiled Poles, the British colonial hierarchy, the Russian Red Army, and the Chinese, both the leadership and the rank and file. We also get a glimpse of the struggles between local concerns and global warfare on all fronts. For example, she expresses the difficulty in understanding the Indian self-absorption in independence and lack of concern in face of the encroaching Japanese-Axis threat. In this unfolding chaos it is little short of amazing that any reporter is capable of traversing the globe and acquiring access to all the leading military and political leaders to learn of their plans and visions for the war itself and its hoped for aftermath and witness their actual efforts and those of their followers.Ms. Curie has presented a whirlwind tour of a world in turmoil. For the year 1942, she gives the reader the sense that the War is at a turning point. Despite the demoralizing retreats in Europe of the previous two years and the surging Japanese in Asia, the author still expresses a note of hope that the Allied cause would yet prevail.

    

    

    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

    Miss Giles, a feature writer for the Boston Globe, sought employment at the General Electric Company, Lyon, Mass, "to write the glamour out of women in war." The book is a collection of daily columns she wrote during the several months she was a "war worker" in a factory that manufactured flight instruments for World War II bombers.

    This book concentrates on Riksmål, the language of the capital and of the most populous part of the country. Pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary are fully covered, and the text includes numerous exercises and examples to introduce the reader to the life and culture of Norway.

    The foremost authority on opera presented in the comprehensive volume all that the opera-goer, radio listener, music-lover & confirmed operamane will wish to know about them. It's unique as both guide & armchair companion. Ernest Newman's gigantic grasp of his subject is clear at every turn, as are his sheer writing ability & wit. He larded his treatment of the operas with biographical & historical materials acquired in a long lifetime of study & writing. This is the first volume of the trilogy of books (the other two being The Wagner Operas & Seventeen Famous Operas with which Newman wished to replace his earlier book, Stories of the Great Operas.

    

    The book utilizes a simple system that employs letters so that readers can have the right pronunciation at a glance and features over 21,000 entries.

    Lloyd George, telegraphed to Professor Masaryk, as President of the Czechoslovak National Council, "Your nation has rendered inestimable service to Russia and to the Allies in this struggle to free the world from despotism; we shall never forget it." On September 27, 1938 (almost exactly twenty years later) another British Prime Minister, broadcasting to the Empire, tried to justify his surrender by describing the Czechoslovaks as "people of whom we know nothing."The present volume is an attempt to deprive future politicians of any excuse for repeating this ineptitude. No one is more conscious than its author, of its imperfections and improvisations. It was originally planned as a companion to A History of the Roumanians (published in 1934), and to a still unfinished History of Jugoslav Unity; and it also incorporates fragments from a History of Austria-Hungary under the Dual System, begun before the last war. The only valid excuse for its completion at high pressure and its production in time of war, is that for good or for ill it is the first history which covers the whole ground, from the earliest times right on to the Gestapo Terror of to-day, and that it contains a collection of facts which, if fully accessible at the time and clearly interpreted, might have served as a timely warning.Czechoslovakia was in may ways the most promising and normal of the political creations of the Great War, full of life and ideals, led by men of high purpose and intellectual calibre. None the less this reconstituted State was the subject of many misconceptions and even calumnies and these can only be cleared away by a study of its history and origins. From this study Bohemia emerges as one of the earliest national states in Europe, with a highly developed consciousness at a time when not only Germany and Italy, but even France and Spain were still disunited. On the one hand she possessed one of the best natural frontiers in Europe, only inferior to the Alps and the Pyrenees—one which till its overthrow in 1938 had stood for more than ten centuries. On the other hand she was handicapped by her landlocked position; her attempts to reach the Baltic or the Adriatic inevitably failed. The fatal legacy bestowed upon her by geography made of the Czechs an exposed salient jutting far into the German positions; and this became all the more marked as with the centuries the tenfold more numerous Germans pushed their frontiers eastwards from the Elbe and Saale to the Oder and on towards the Vistula, at the expense of the Slav, applying the alternate methods of extermination and assimilation. But on the physical map of Europe Bohemia still stands out lozenge-shaped in the very centre of the picture. Bismarck used to call bohemia “a natural fortress erected in the centre of our Continent.” Let those who ignored this warning in 1938 be careful to complete the quotation in 1943-44; “Bohemia in the hands of Russia,” he said, “would be Germany’s enslavement, Bohemia in our hands would be war without mercy or truce with the Empire of the Czars.” A free and independent Czechoslovakia offers the only true solution.‘The great object in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific,’ wrote Lord Acton, ‘is to get behind men and to grasp ideas.’ The history of Bohemia is that of a small nation which has from early times stood in the van of intellectual, religious and political freedom. What gave its conflict with the Germans an added bitterness was that it almost always found them on the side of reaction, from the Council of Constance till the Protectorate and the Heydrich Terror. Politically there have always been ‘ragged fringes’ between German and Czech, between Magyar and Slovak; and as a ‘clean cut’ proved impossible in 1918, the new Republic of necessity rested upon two conflicting principles—in Bohemia the historic rights of the Crown of St. Wenceslas, in Slovakia the principle of Nationality, which led logically to Czechoslovak Unity. Above all, there stands out form the pages of Czech history a marked preference for leaders of the intellectual rather than the military or narrowly political type, and a no less marked capacity for recognizing and following such leaders when they appear. The reader, will, it is hoped, be able to trace a clear continuity of political thought, on what are to-day somewhat arbitrarily called ‘democratic’ lines. It will be for him to decide whether Czechoslovakia was (as its enemies contend) a mere passing aberration, at whose door some of our present ills might fairly be laid, or whether on the contrary it was a natural evolution from a long and history past, a noteworthy experiment in political and social progress, such as had already won for it a key-position amid the vast schemes of European reconstruction which must follow the agonies of war. For my part, I have endeavoured to follow the example set by a revered colleague, the late Ernest Denis, who prefaced his History of Bohemia since the White Mountain with these words: —Je n’ai dissimulé aucune des erreurs des patriotes tchèques; je crois malgré tout qu'ils ont écrit une des plus belles pages de l'historie de l'humanité. [I have concealed none of the mistakes of the Czech patriots; I believe despite everything that they wrote one of the most beautiful pages in the history of humanity]R. W. Seton-WatsonSeptember 3, 1943