I am an economics professor at Victoria University of Wellington. As a previous Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury and Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, I have had quite a bit of experience watching economists’ ideas succeed and fail in the real world. I have written a number of books about policy economists and their lives in peace and wartime. (And a couple of novels too!)
This is a heavier read taking us through a group history of the Austrian School of Economics from the coffee houses of Imperial Vienna to the modern-day Libertarians. Economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter originated ideas that have had a big impact on economics and politics, and have been much debated ever since.
A group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party
The Austrian School of Economics-a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right-is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter built the School's international reputation with their work on business cycles and monetary theory. Their focus on individualism-and deep antipathy toward socialism-ultimately won them a devoted audience among the upper echelons of business…
I read this
book as part of the research I did for my WIP, a WW2 novel. Hitler does not
play a significant role in my novel, but it is impossible to study the modern
history of Europe without wondering what turned a talented young Austrian
artist into the most hated man of the 20th
Century.
The
Secret Journals of Adolf Hitler, Volume 1: The Anointed is
Part One of a two-part biography. Presented as a
personal journal, this well
researched expertly written revelation follows
the formative years of Hitler’s life. This exploration seeks to help the
reader understand the desperate journey that turned an ordinary
child into a charismatic madman, who after more
than seven decades, still remains one of the greatest enigmas of all time.
An insightful must- read for any 20th
Century History Junkie.
What happenings and environments wrought the most hated manin history? How does a child become a young man who evolved into a self-proclaimed messiah? Why did this oneman become a psychotic who was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 million people?
This book follows the first, formative years of Adolf Hitler's life. Presented as a personal journal, this is a fact-supported re-telling of a desperate existence, as viewed by Hitler, and tracks the points of pain that forged his beliefs. From a childhood of abuse and cheating death to an agonizing…
A touching and sympathetic
biography of one of Europe’s greatest twentieth-century writers, best known as
the author of The Radetzky March, and
an essential introduction to his other novels (too little read in English).
We
follow Roth as he flits between Europe’s cultural centres, his melancholy mood
tracking the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. With Pim as our guide, it
is impossible not to sense the fragile state of more contemporary political
unions, as Roth’s plight in a way becomes our own.
The first English language biography of the great European writer Joseph Roth, exploring his genius and his tragic life story, lived in the shadow of war.
The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of…
I am late, late to Eva Ibbotson, who died in 2010, but when I discovered her this
year, I devoured the lot.
As a child, she fled the Nazis with her family from
Austria, came to England, and, later, wrote prizewinning books for children. Her
adult novels have recently been reissued, and, bitter-sweet but never
sentimental, Madensky Square is my favourite.
Set in 1911, it’s the story of what happens in the square
during the year and to Susanna Weber, a gifted dress designer. She is an observer,
a friend, wry and as sharp as one of her needles, and in love with a married army
officer. Above all, she is an independent woman (in an age which frowns on
female independence) and possesses great resilience.
It is all woven together
with the lightest of touches, a tough and acute capacity to observe, and deep
affection for the characters.
Madensky Square is Eva Ibbotson's magical novel set in that most poignant of all times and places - Vienna before the First World War.
Susanna's dress shop stands in the delightful Madensky Square and is the very hub and heart of life. Susanna sympathizes with her neighbours, watches over Signi, the wretched, orphaned child prodigy, and with her infallible eye for dress, turns an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.
Of all the colourful characters in Madensky Square, only her dear friend Alice has the slightest inkling that Susanna hides more than one secret. This hidden life, full of passion…
Most of my public success has been as a novelist. My MFA, from the Iowa Writers Workshop, is in poetry. When I grow up, I want to be a short story writer. The dirty truth is, though, I’ve been making trouble with stories since I was a kid. During my first attempt in 10th grade, I wrote a story that got me suspended for two weeks. No explanation. No guidance. Just a conference between my parents, teachers, and principal (I wasn’t present), and they came out and banished me. I dropped out of school shortly after. I reckon that experience, both shameful and delicious, shaped my life and love of narrative.
The title alone sets the stage. This is meta at its most meta-ness. Who is narrating? Who is listening? Is the author complicit in the sometimes catastrophic, always deeply strange, events that unfold in these tiny tales? More importantly, do we the readers play a role? Less is more. Lesser still is even more more. The reach of suggestion. A knockout punch of inference.
The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corruption of the modern world, the dynamics of totalitarianism, and the interplay of reality and appearance.
In this stunning translation of The Voice Imitator, Bernhard gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes-some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay-this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories inevitably indict the sterility and callousness of modern life,…
I am a graduate in Philosophy with a Masters degree in Contemporary Culture so this theme is enormously interesting for me. My passion has been shifting from literature to contemporary society and culture in general. I love to find the connexions between the current state of affairs and the past. I honestly think that if we look at the lives and times of the great thinkers we can get hints about the state of contemporary society. Understanding what makes us behave and think the way we do it is my main motivation.
The figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein has always been quite enigmatic for me.
The enormous contradictions of his life and the intensity of it are difficult to understand in the abstract. Ray Monk's biography contextualizes the life and work of the Austrian philosopher who set out to solve all the problems of philosophy.
Monk's biography stands as a testament to Wittgenstein's enduring influence on our understanding of language, thought, and reality.
I am J.R. Hoyle Chair of Music at the University of Sheffield, UK, elected life member of the Academy for Mozart Research at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and current President of the Royal Musical Association, and I have been writing about Mozart’s life and music for more than 25 years. Across five monographs, my interests have broadened from Mozart’s piano concertos, to stylistic issues in his Viennese instrumental music, to biographical, philological, reception- and performance-related topics in the Requiem and the last decade of his life in general, and (most recently) to a comparative study of his and contemporary Joseph Haydn’s reception in the long nineteenth century.
This thoroughly researched and engaging biography starts before the beginning of Mozart’s life and ends long after it. In short–and as indicated in the book’s subtitle–it is not simply about Mozart, but about how his life intersects with the lives of those closest to him, namely father Leopold, sister Nannerl, and wife Constanze.
Leopold emerges as central to Mozart’s story until his death in 1787, and Constanze too from their courtship in 1781, through Mozart’s death a decade later and beyond it as well, when she tirelessly developed his legacy and reputation.
The family into which Mozart was born has never received a rigorous contextual study which does justice to the complexity of its relationships or to its interactions with colleagues, friends, and neighbours in Mozart's native city, Salzburg. Most biographies of Mozart have undervalued the many passages in the rich family correspondence which do not bear directly on him. This book draws on the neglected material, most of which has never been translated into English. At the heart of the work is a detailed examination of the letters, supplemented by little-known archival material from the papers of the Berchtold family, into…
I’m a long-time correspondent for American media across the world. I reported on Europe and Asia for the Wall Street Journal, and on Southeast Asia for Bloomberg News. I was always fascinated by deep historical layers to be found in ancient societies like those of Europe, and the sometimes accurate clichés about European tribes and their strange customs; no European tribe is weirder than the Germans, for a long time the wildest of the continent and then the most cultured and sophisticated until they came under the spell of a certain Austrian. The twelve years that followed still rank as the most insane historical period for any nation ever.
Kershaw’s double biography of the Nazi leader (the second part, almost entirely about World War II, is called Hubris) is a classic, and remains the best, most approachable look at the unusual upbringing of a young boy from provincial Austria who once wanted to be an artist, and felt in debt with the Jewish doctor who (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) treated his mother’s cancer. Hubris is most remarkable for the glimpses it provides of a different fate for that young boy Adolf: how he was scarred by family tragedy and by failure at multicultural Vienna, and how the Great War gave him an opening to become the worst possible version of himself.
From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in this century. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried…
Since I was four years old, I have been in love with Christmas! I’m the kind of person who starts humming carols in October and puts up their first decorations the moment Halloween ends. I’ve got a Christmas Sweater for every day and a card or a present for every friend I bump into. Without a doubt, the Holiday Season is the best time of the year!
I love weird and mostly overlooked Christmas-related stuff, and there are few Holiday characters as weird and overlooked as the Krampus!
I loved the full-color photographs Ridenour includes of the Krampus (and adjacent figures), many of which I had never seen before. And a lot of the pictures feature a very menacing Krampus! There’s more to Christmas than just Santa Claus.
With the appearance of the demonic Christmas character Krampus in contemporary Hollywood movies, television shows, advertisements, and greeting cards, medieval folklore has now been revisited in American culture. Krampus-related events and parades occur both in North America and Europe, and they are an ever-growing phenomenon.
Though the Krampus figure has once again become iconic, not much can be found about its history and meaning, thus calling for a book like Al Ridenour's The Krampus: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. With Krampus's wild, graphic history, Feral House has hired the awarded designer Sean Tejaratchi to take on Ridenour's book…
Watson's writing did more than just explain the First World War from the perspective of Germany and Austria-Hungary - although that alone would have been enough to make it a fascinating read - but on top of that it gave me a window into the people themselves as the world they knew was torn apart and their future quite literally blown up before their very eyes.
Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History's 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Year
For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a…
