I love this book because it’s a cracking good story, full of intriguing
characters, beautifully written with passion and imagination, all illuminated
by a convincing political analysis.
Anna
Funder, in choosing to write a biography of the fascinating Eileen
O’Shaughnessy (Orwell’s wife) was faced with the fact that her subject had left
only nine letters. More significantly,
major biographies of Orwell had hardly mentioned his wife at all. In the end,
Funder has written the history of a person who had been systematically written
out of history.
Her text is a mix of
straightforward narrative based on both primary and secondary sources, Eileen’s
six surviving letters (set in italics), sections of perfectly plausible but
imagined context (clearly set off and indented), her feminist analysis, and
revelations of her own experience as “a writer and a wife” which show the
merging of the personal and the political.
At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.
"I've always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.
John
McPhee is probably my favorite contemporary author. By my count, he has written thirty-three
books, but this may be his last. At the
age of 92 he calls this latest book a “reminiscent montage.”
A long-time writer for the New Yorker,
he has produced countless fine articles, many of which formed the basis for one
or another of his books. He has written
about the geology of the American West, the way in which Native Americans
constructed birch-bark canoes, and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
His topics are fascinating. His empathetic
ability to question interesting people and his precise and clear prose style
make each a treasure. But some of his
ideas for articles, which he took to his editors, for one reason or another
never found their way to print. Some of
these abandoned subjects are collected here and one can only wish that they had
become books as well.
A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.
Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.
In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around…
Much has been written about the Holocaust but enough
can never be said. Tom Stoppard was born
in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a non-observant Jewish family forced to flee the
Nazi terror.
In his play Leopoldstadt
Stoppard follows the history of a family living in that Jewish suburb of
Vienna, from the turn of the 20th century to today. The story of the prejudice and restrictions
they experienced, as well as the hopes they had of transcending them through
business success and assimilation, are heartbreaking. A friend of mine came from such a family and
from his recollections I know that Stoppard has described the situation
accurately.
This play (as the family) is full of characters you care about
deeply, and knowing about the coming Holocaust, we want to cry out a warning to
them. We can’t. But this is a
warning about the future.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is…
From Playgrounds to PlayStation explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. I examine the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors―who often talk about "playing" at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention―have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand.
Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play.
