A
searing, brutally honest, brilliantly written depiction of the war that
defined an era in American history and a period in my life and in the lives of millions
of young men (and women) in the 1960s.
Dozens of portraits of compelling characters caught in hellish
conditions and carrying out seemingly impossible missions against impossible
odds.
It is a celebration of incredible
bravery by Marines as well as a lament over the appalling waste of human lives
and national wealth. A condemnation of
myopic and criminal foreign policies, of politicians for their cynical
self-interest and ignorance, and of some senior military officers for their
egotism and blindness. But also simultaneously
a celebration of other commanders for their humanity and wisdom. A portrait of tragic race relations that
would spill over into civilian life.
It is a novel about love, ambition, tragic failure, and personal transformation.
Fire Support Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved out of the grey-green mountain jungle. Cold monsoon clouds wreath its mile-high summit, concealing a battery of 105-mm howitzers surrounded by deep bunkers, carefully constructed fields of fire and the 180 marines of Bravo Company. Just three kilometres from Laos and two from North Vietnam, there is no more isolated outpost of America's increasingly desperate war in Vietnam.
Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in…
A
bravura performance by a brilliant author with total control of her writing skills
and an exhaustive mastery of literary traditions, which she deploys with the
panache of Horowitz playing Chopin.
Oates has written a neo-Gothic novel filled with demonic manifestations
and overwhelming passions that take place against the background of American
society (and Princeton University) with all its salient characteristics and
problems in the first decade of the 20th century.
The novel is also, and not incidentally,
filled with wonderful, three-dimensional portraits of major American cultural
and political figures of the time—Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain,
Teddy Roosevelt, Jack London, and others. Oates’ emotional range is marvelous, and she can communicate the feelings
and psychic churnings of a stiff Calvinist on a pulpit as readily as those of a
tremulous young woman in a rose garden.
A
funny, eerie, assured, and extraordinarily entertaining work.
This eerie tale of psychological horror sees the real inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Princeton fall under the influence of a supernatural power. New Jersey, 1905: soon-to-be commander-in-chief Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton University. On a nearby farm, Socialist author Upton Sinclair, enjoying the success of his novel 'The Jungle', has taken up residence with his family. This is a quiet, bookish community - elite, intellectual and indisputably privileged. But when a savage lynching in a nearby town is hushed up, a horrifying chain of events is initiated - until it becomes apparent that the families of Princeton have been beset…
A
brilliant, exhaustive biography of one of the most important figures in the
history of Western ballet and the godfather of American classical ballet.
Homans studied every conceivable source of written information about
Balanchine, both published and unpublished, interviewed everyone who could
contribute anything to her understanding of him, and went everywhere that had
been important in his life, including Georgia in the Caucasus and Russia.
She informs her exhaustive documentation with
a professional dancer’s nuanced and deep understanding and appreciation of
Balanchine’s towering balletic legacy.
The result is an unforgettable portrait of a man and a great artist for
whom dance and dancers, especially the great ballerinas he loved, were nothing
less than an embodiment of his ceaseless quest to elevate the human to the
divine, or to use human movement set to music to reach a Platonic ideal.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • “A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography and the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize
Based on a decade of unprecedented research, the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called…
The life of the enigmatic Russian revolutionary about whom Winston Churchill said "few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people," and who remains a legendary and controversial figure in his homeland today.
Although now largely forgotten outside Russia, Boris Savinkov was famous, and notorious, both at home and abroad during his lifetime, which spans the end of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Soviet Union. A complex and conflicted individual, he was a paradoxically moral revolutionary terrorist, a scandalous novelist, a friend of epoch-defining artists like Modigliani and Diego Rivera, a government minister, a tireless fighter against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and an advisor to Churchill. At the end of his life, Savinkov conspired to be captured by the Soviet secret police, and as the country’s most prized political prisoner made headlines around the world when he claimed that he accepted the Bolshevik state. But as this book argues, this was Savinkov’s final play as a gambler and he had staked his life on a secret plan to strike one last blow against the tyrannical regime.
