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4.22/5 by 185 users

20 January 2017

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

by Ian Bostridge

An exploration of the world's most famous and challenging song cycle by one of the world's most renowned singers, a leading interpreter of the work, who teases out the themes - literary, historical, psychological--that weave through the twenty-four songs comprising this legendary masterpiece.

Written in 1828, in the last months of the young Schubert's life, 'Winterreise' ("Winter's Journey"), has come to be considered the single greatest piece of music ever written for the male solo voice. Deceptively brief - the twenty-four short poems are performed uninterrupted in 70 minutes - it nonetheless has an emotional depth and power that no music of its kind has ever equalled.

Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of 'Winterreise' now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Drawing on his firsthand experience with this work (he has performed it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Ian Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each song, exploring the world and the states of heart and mind in which Schubert created them, and the exquisite resonance and affinities that continue, even today, to move us so profoundly.

Title	:	Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	030796163X
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	502 pages

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4.42/5 by 160 users

20 January 2017

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia

by David King

The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade. For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes. The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself. The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history.

Title	:	The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0805052941
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	192 pages

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3.13/5 by 121 users

20 January 2017

The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction

by Leofranc Holford-Strevens

Why do we measure time in the way that we do? Why is a week seven days long? At what point did minutes and seconds come into being? Why are some calendars lunar and some solar?
The organization of time into hours, days, months, and years seems immutable and universal, but is actually far more artificial than most people realize. For example, the French Revolution resulted in a restructuring of the French calendar, and the Soviet Union experimented with five and then six-day weeks.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens brings us this fascinating study of time using a range of examples from Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar's imposition of the Leap Year to the 1920's project for a fixed Easter. Those interested in time, history, and the development of the calendar will enjoy this absorbing exploration of an aspect of our lives that we all take for granted.

Title	:	The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0192804995
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	144 pages

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4.05/5 by 3648 users

20 January 2017

Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics, and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.

From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

Title	:	Moonglow
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0062225553
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	430 pages

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3.85/5 by 155 users

20 January 2017

Scenes from the Bathhouse: And Other Stories of Communist Russia

by Mikhail Zoshchenko

Uproariously funny stories that give a behind-the-scenes look at daily life in the Soviet Union of Zoshchenko's time...

Title	:	Scenes from the Bathhouse: And Other Stories of Communist Russia
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0472060708
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	272 pages

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4.16/5 by 483 users

20 January 2017

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

by Anthony Powell

A Dance to the Music of Time ? his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and other...

Title	:	Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0099472449
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	240 pages

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3.69/5 by 64 users

20 January 2017

Fossils: A Very Short Introduction

by Keith S. Thomson

Fossils have been vital to our understanding of the formation of the earth and the origins of life. However, their impact has not been limited to debates about geology and evolution: attempts to explain their existence has shaken religion at its very roots, and they have remained a subject of ceaseless fascination for people of all ages and backgrounds. In this readable and wide-ranging book, Keith Thomson provides a remarkably all-encompassing explanation of fossils as a phenomenon. How did Darwin use fossils to support his theory of evolution? What are "living fossils"? What fossils will we leave behind for future generations to examine? Beyond the scientific aspects, Thomson highlights the impact of fossils on philosophy and mythology, our concept of time, and today's popular culture. From the black market to the Piltdown Man, and from mythological dragons to living dinosaurs, fossils hold a permanent place in the popular imagination.

Title	:	Fossils: A Very Short Introduction
Edition Language	:	English
ISBN	:	0192805045
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	147 pages