derrida biography
Julie Andrews: A Life on Stage and Screen
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Windeler, Robert, PUBLISHER: Birch Lane Press, In she celebrated fifty years in show business, having made her professional singing debut at the London Hippodrome in -- at age twelve. In the half century since those last days of British vaudeville through her smash Broadway comeback in Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews has triumphed as an entertainer. At thirteen Andrews performed for the Queen of England; at nineteen she was a Broadway star. At twenty-one, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, she became a theatrical legend. By thirty, she was the highest-paid and most beloved actress in the world, with an Academy Award for her first movie, Mary Poppins, and almost instant worldwide box-office championship with The Sound of Music. Her remarkable body of work had stamped her indelibly with an image she would come to hate; the quintessence of perky, wholesome innocence. After two flop musicals, Star and Darling Lili, the press and the public seemed to ignore her. She had turned into box-office poison in Hollywood. But even in semi-exile she worked in an Emmy-winning television variety series, wrote two successful children's books, and concentrated on her growing family. Julie Andrews had become a superstar before she became her own person, and now she made up for lost time. When she reemerged in movies in the s, it was in sensationally different roles, many of them created for her by her husband, Blake Edwards. After Duet for One, The Man Who Loved Women, and A Fine Romance there was no going back to Mary Poppins. In the s she returned to concert tours, musical recordings, and Broadway. She also returned to controversy, by refusing her nomination for an almost certain Tony Award to stand with the "egregiouslyoverlooked" -- the rest of the cast and crew, especially her writer-director husband. Here at last is the full life story of Julie Andrews -- her meteoric rise, her devastating fall, and her remarkable comeback; from the little English girl with the freaky four-octave, crystalline voice to the dynamic legend who has outlasted her critics. Robert Windeler's affectionate and insightful biography reveals the full-blooded woman behind the high and low notes.
Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Stewart, John Lawrence, PUBLISHER: University of California Press, When Ernst Krenek's opera "Jonny spielt auf" (Jonny plays on) opened in Leipzig in , it became an instant and spectacular success. Performed in over a hundred cities and translated into a dozen languages, it became the most popular opera of this century. And Austrian-born Krenek, easily one of this century's most prolific major composers, became a wealthy man. Ten years later, however, he found himself a destitute refugee, fleeing to the United States as Hitler's troops invaded Austria. His work, always avant-garde, had become increasingly political; Hitler banned it and labeled Krenek a "cultural Bolshevist." The composer endured long periods of hardship and neglect before his music, which was much admired by such colleagues as Stravinsky and Alban Berg but strange to American ears, was rediscovered by Europeans after the war. Eventually it brought him financial security and many honors, including the Gold Medal of Vienna and the Cross of Austria, and it has been celebrated by festivals in Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, and other cities. Krenek, who in became an American citizen, has been as experimental and broad-ranging in his compositions as he has been prolific. His 240 musical works illustrate brilliantly the principal musical trends of the century: Neoromantic tonality, Neoclassicism, free atonality, the twelve-tone technique, integral serialism, and electronic music. In addition, Krenek has also been an accomplished teacher and writer. He has taught some of America's leading composers and has several collections of essays in both German and English to his credit. In this first major biography of Krenek, Stewart chronicles both the personal and the professional events of this brilliant, resilient composer's life. He not only explains Krenek's music in terms that enable us to comprehend and appreciate its character but vividly illustrates how Krenek's imagination has been affected by his experiences, his associates, and the massive social and artistic changes of the twentieth century. Many of the most important music figures cross the landscape of this life--Franz Schreker, Artur Schnabel, T. W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau--confirming Krenek's position as one of the world's foremost composers.
Whoopi Goldberg: Her Journey from Poverty to Megastardom
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Parrish, James Robert / Parish, James Robert, PUBLISHER: Birch Lane Press, Karen Johnson, born in , was raised by her mother in the racially mixed Chelsea district of New York City. By ninth grade she had quit school and spent most of her time in Central Park searching for drugs. While Karen Johnson's experiences may seem like many urban horror stories, hers took a dramatic turn the day she decided to move west and change her name to Whoopi Goldberg. Relocating to San Diego with Alexandrea, her daughter from her first marriage to her drug counselor, was not easy. She lived on welfare and scrambled for whatever jobs she could get, including work as a bricklayer and a makeup artist for a mortician. While in San Diego, Whoopi joined an improvisational troupe where she honed her comedic talents. She began doing standup comedy, eventually moving to San Francisco, where her one-woman program was discovered by director/producer Mike Nichols. Nichols brought her show to Broadway, and she won a Grammy for it. But her big break came when Steven Spielberg cast Whoopi in the demanding role of Celle in the film version of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, a performance that won a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. She went on to win an Academy Award for her role in Ghost. Whoopi Goldberg had finally made it big. Whoopi Goldberg: Her Journey From Poverty to Mega-Stardom goes behind the scenes to examine: - How her secret romance with married actor Ted Danson climaxed in the "notorious" Friars club roast - Whoopi's confrontation with her absentee father, who died of AIDS in - Her three failed marriages and her once troubled relationship with her daughter - Her legendary feud with Disney studio management over the making of Sister Act -Why her precedent-setting hosting of the Academy Awards ceremonies in and set the film industry on edge - Her verbal confrontations with prominent African Americans, including Jesse Jackson and Spike Lee This insightful biography traces the life and career of this multitalented artist, exploring what makes her tick, how her irreverent and irrepressible persona gets her into trouble, why she is such a workaholic, and how this unconventional lady has earned the unexpected reputation as a femme fatale.
Catherine the Great: Life and Legend
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Alexander, John T., PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Catherine II of Russia is one of the most colorful characters in modern history. Born a minor German princess, she was betrothed to the Grand Duke Peter of Russia at 15, through the designs of the childless Empress Elizabeth and her own scheming mother. By 33, she had overthrown her husband in a bloodless coup and established herself as Empress of the multinational Russian Empire, the largest territorial political unit in modern history. Portrayed variously as a political genius who restored to Russia the glory it had known in the days of Peter the Great and a despotic foreign adventuress who usurped the Russian throne, murdered her rivals, and tyrannized her subjects, she was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. Catherine the Great, the first popular biography of the mpress based on modern scholarship, provides a vivid portrait of Catherine as a mother, a lover, and, above all, an extremely savvy ruler. Concentrating on her long reign (), John Alexander examines all aspects of Catherine's life and career: the brilliant political strategies by which she won the acceptance of a nationalistic elite; her expansive foreign policy; the domestic reforms with which she revamped the Russian military, political structure, and economy; and, of course, her infamous love life. Alexander begins with an account of the dramatic "palace revolt" by which Catherine unseated her husband and a background chapter describing the circumstances of her early childhood and marriage, then proceeds chronologically through the 34 years of reign. In compelling narrative fashion, he describes such events as the incursion of bubonic plague on Moscow, the uprising of the Ural peasants, and the six political murders the empress sanctioned. Catherine is presented here in more human terms than in previous biographies, with numerous quotations included from her reminiscences and notes. We learn, for instance, not only the names and number of her lovers, but her understanding of what many considered a shocking licentiousness. "The trouble is," she wrote, "that my heart would not willingly remain one hour without love." The result of 20 years' research by one of the leading narrative historians of modern Russia in the U.S., this is truly an impressive work. Alexander delved into little-known sources (including a collection of Catherine's love notes which is included here as an appendix) as well as popular and specialized accounts to arrive at this much-needed, balanced appraisal of one of history's most scandal-ridden figures.
John Keats:,
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Bate, W. Jackson / Bate, Walter Jackson, PUBLISHER: Belknap Press, The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is possible with most writers; and there are times during the period of his greatest creativity when his personal as well as his artistic life can be followed week by week. The development of Keats's poetic craftsmanship proceeds simultaneously with the steady growth of qualities of mind and character. Mr. Bate has been concerned to show the organic relationship between the poet's art and his larger, more broadly humane development. Keats's great personal appeal--his spontaneity, vigor, playfulness, and affection--are movingly recreated; at the same time, his valiant attempt to solve the problem faced by all modern poets when they attempt to achieve originality and amplitude in the presence of their great artistic heritage is perceptively presented. In discussing this matter, Mr. Bate says, "The pressure of this anxiety and the variety of reactions to it constitute one of the great unexplored factors in the history of the arts since . And in no major poet, near the beginning of the modern era, is this problem met more directly than it is in Keats. The way in which Keats wassomehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to transcend it, has fascinated every major poet who has used the English language since Keats's death and also every major critic since the Victorian era." Mr. Bate has availed himself of all new biographical materials, published and unpublished, and has used them selectively and without ostentation, concentrating on the things that were meaningful to Keats. Similarly, his discussions of the poetry are not buried beneath the controversies of previous critics. He approaches the poems freshly and directly, showing their relation to Keats's experience and emotions, to premises and values already explored in the biographical narrative. The result is a book of many dimensions, not a restricted critical or biographical study but a fully integrated whole.
The Life of Adam Smith
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Ross, Ian Simpson, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Few would argue that Adam Smith was one of the great minds of the eighteenth century. He is perceived through his best-known book, The Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science, and his ideas about the free market and the role of the state (in relation to it) continue to influence modern economic thought. Yet Smith achieved even more as a man of letters, as a moralist, historian, and critic. The Life of Adam Smith, the first full-scale biography of Smith in a hundred years, is a superb account of Smith's life and work, encompassing a career that spanned some of the defining moments in world history, including the American and French Revolutions. Here author Ian Simpson Ross examines Smith's family life, education, career, intellectual circle (including David Hume and Francois Quesnay), and his contemporaries (the likes of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson), bringing to life this great thinker and author. Readers will meet Smith as a student at a lively Glasgow University and at a sleepy Oxford; a freelance lecturer delivering popular classes on rhetoric; an innovative university teacher ("by far the most useful, and therefore," Smith wrote, "by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life"); then a tutor travelling abroad with a Duke; an acclaimed political economist; a policy advisor to governments during and after the American Revolution; and finally, if paradoxically in view of his strongly held tenets, a Commissioner of Customs coping with free traders in the smuggling business. But it his impact as a writer that continues to set Adam Smith apart today. The Wealth of Nations, published in , as the British Parliament was deep in debate about the American colonies, continues to influence modern economic theory throughout the world. Ross sheds new light on this classic work and on its meaning for today. And he also paints a vivid portrait of Smith's personal life, revealing a man of singular generosity of spirit, who believed that with wit and logic and sensitivity to our feelings, we might aspire to virtue rather than wealth, and so become members of a truly civil society. Upon Adam Smith's death in , a friend wrote of him, "Happy are those who at the close of life can reflect that they have lived to a valuable purpose by contributing, as he did, to enlighten mankind, and to spread the blessings of peace and liberty and virtue." The Life of Adam Smith illuminates the world of a man whose legacy of thought concerns and affects us all.
The Way of the Fog (the Ark of Light, Volume One)
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Fuchs, A. P., PUBLISHER: Coscom Entertainment, At the end of Time there was Armageddon; the Earth was unprepared. The forces of Heaven and Hell warred and, presiding over the battle, was the Ark of Light, the arbiter of Armageddon. Then, what was supposed to have been the end of History suddenly came to a halt when the Ark of Light vanished from its post. The armies of Light and Darkness faded from the Earth and Time went on. Aeons passed and what happened that day long ago faded into legend. It is now the year 134 of the Fifth Aeon. Peter Jones, a poet from the Broken City of Garathen, looks for a life outside the confines of his small city and its concealing forest ring. Late one night, a little girl named Catina comes into the city on a quest of her own: to find her grandfather and take him back to Grek, where a mysterious illness is claiming the lives of the townsfolk and of her parents. Together, Peter, Catina and her grandfather set out cross-country to rescue the little girl's parents before it's too late. Thus the journey begins. While traveling West, they meet up with Aiyesha Elnaa, a fugitive running from the Dembatstayr Army, a lethal force clearing the land in the name of Peace, paving the way for the Master's Second Coming. Together, they continue on their journey and pick up two more travelers along the way: Mr. Nibbetts, a furry Flistablare from the Tanturee Forest, and a dog, Belina. Away from the security of his Garathen home, Peter begins to have doubts about his belief in the Master. As his doubts grow and his heart yearns for peace, he begins seeing a man in a gray cloak, but every time he gets close to him, the man vanishes. As the man's hauntings grow more frequent and the mysterious illness that plaguesCatina's parents begins to take hold of Peter and his friends, they learn of the Ark of Light and the prophecy it will one day reappear. When death seems all but inevitable, a creature from the Purple Fog launches his attack on the group. Who is he? Who sent him and what does he want? As History once again draws to a close and the Ark of Light awakens from its hidden resting place, a new power rises from the Coast of Seryn, the Island of the Dead. Strange events are set in motion and the race for the Ark of Light begins, and the long postponed war looms once again. Author Biography: A.P. Fuchs is the author of Magic Man, A Red Dark Night and A Stranger Dead. He is also the author of April, written under the pseudonym, Peter Fox. He writes from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Visit him online at www.apfuchs.com
Women Writers of Great Britain and Europe: An Encyclopedia
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Wilson, K. / Wilson, Katharina M. / Schlueter, June, PUBLISHER: Routledge, A valuable survey and reference resource It is hard to imagine a more needed and more useful literary reference work than this one, which gives students and readers quick access to the lives and work of a wide range of notable female writers from England and the Continent, from Aphra Behn to Emily Bronte, from Simone de Beauvoir to Isak Dinesen, from Bridget of Sweden to Hannah Arendt. Writers in more than 30 languages are included: French, Czech, Greek, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and more. Covers years and all major genres Going back 15 centuries, the "Encyclopedia" covers the authors of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, criticism, social commentary, feminist manifestos, romances, mysteries, memoirs, children's literature, biography, and other genres. In signed entries, some of which are mini-essays, experts in the field examine writers' lives and achievements, comment on individual works, place artistic efforts in historical context, provide insights and analyses, and present more information than can be easily found elsewhere without undertaking more exhaustive research. Each entry is followed by a bibliography of primary works. Indexed by language, nationality, genre, and century. Spotlights the interesting lives of notable writers In these pages students and readers will meet hundreds of interesting women writers who made lasting contributions to the intellectual and popular culture of their countries while often leading fascinating lives, among them: * AGATHA CHRISTIE, who wrote her first book in response to her sister's demand for a detective story that was harder to solve than the popular fiction of her day, and whose work has been translated in more languages than Shakespeare's. * HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, the 12th-century German mystic, who wrote profusely as a prophet, a poet, a dramatist, a physician, and a political moralist, often communicated with popes and princes, and exerted a tremendous influence on the Western Europe of her time * MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, whose masterpiece "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus " became a literary sensation around the world * ILSE BLUMENTHAL-WEISS, one of the few concentration camp survivors to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust in German verse * LINA WERTMULLER, who in addition to her work in films, has written plays for the stage and a novel, and who once was a member of a short-lived puppet theater that staged the works of Kafka. Special features: Ideal for quick reference and student research * Multicultural-covers over 30 languages and 15 centuries * Includes many contemporary writers * Provides essential biographic data on each writer * Each entry is followed by a chronological listing of the writer's published book-length works * Offers critical evaluations of major works * Indexes help find writers by country...research by ti
The Stranger's Child
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Hollinghurst, Alan, PUBLISHER: Vintage Canada, INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The Stranger's Child is Alan Hollinghurst's masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance, The Stranger's Child can be placed in the great tradition of the novel alongside epics by Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell. And yet, in its subtly political exploration of homosexuality in English society, it deals with an utterly contemporary subject in an utterly contemporary way. The Stranger's Child""begins with sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle sitting in a hammock in the garden of Two Acres, the family home in suburban London. She is making a show of reading Tennyson before her brother George arrives to visit with his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a handsome, assured and sometimes outrageous young man with a burgeoning reputation as a poet. After a tantalizing and dramatic weekend Cecil writes a long poem in Daphne's autograph album as a parting gift. It is titled "Two Acres," and both Daphne and George (whose feelings for Cecil also go well beyond mere friendship) immediately see how important the poem is - but none of them can foresee the complex and lasting effects it will have on all their lives. When the next section of the novel begins, everything has changed: Daphne is married to Cecil's brother Dudley Valance; George to a historian named Madeleine; and Cecil is dead, killed by a sniper in World War One. A Cabinet officer and man of letters named Sebastian Stokes has come to Corley Court, the Valance family's country home, to put together an edition of Cecil's poemsand speak to each family member in turn about him. He is especially curious about Cecil's personal (and passionate) letters and unpublished poems, papers that seem to have gone missing, and whose absence will loom paradoxically through the rest of the novel. The book leaps forward and we are at another party, this one to celebrate Daphne's seventieth birthday. George is now the acclaimed historian G.F. Sawle; Daphne's son Wilfrid, a charming boy in the previous section, has grown into a nervous and somehow fractured adult. We meet Peter Rowe, a music teacher at the boarding school that now occupies Corley Court, and his boyfriend, Paul Bryant, a bank employee with a feeling for Cecil's poetry. Soon Paul is taking up an idea that Peter abandoned: to write a biography of Cecil Valance. It means making some startling discoveries about a past that the Valance family would prefer to keep in sepia and shadows. The Stranger's Child""is by turns a gripping literary mystery, an absorbing social study of some pivotal moments in history, and a sensuous and beautiful exploration of the secret passions that determine our lives. From Edwardian suburbs to the offices of the "Times Literary Supplement" in the s, from High Table wit to the realities of life working behind the counter at a provincial bank, it seems there is no corner