The Coasts of Bohemia PDF Download

Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691050522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A cultural history of the Czech people, examining the significance of the small central European nation's artistic, literary, and political developments from its origins through approximately 1960.

Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline—a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life—the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps—that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.

Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691043809
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Asserts that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the twentieth century, describing how the city has experienced and suffered more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis.

Author: Jiri Janac
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9089645012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal promised to create an integrated waterway system across Europe, linking Black Sea ports to Atlantic markets and giving landlocked Czech nation its own connections to the ocean. The fascinating history of this never-completed project, European Coasts of Bohemia tells the story of the experts who confronted and contributed to different and often conflicting geopolitical visions of Europe. Jíra Janác shows how the canal-backers adapted themselves to various political developments, such as the break-up of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire and the integration into the Soviet Bloc, while still managing to keep the canal project alive.

Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657590
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Mr. Howells has always had a pretty taste in titles, and 'The Coast of Bohemia', by its name alone, brings pleasurable anticipations. Nor are they doomed to disappointment in this instance, for the story is pleasing in all its aspects. The Bohemia upon whose coasts it bids us linger is the somewhat sophisticated and denationalized Bohemia of the New York art schools and studios ; the flavor of its life is very different from that of the enchanted region which Murger opened for us, but its ways are engaging if decorous, and its denizens are very much alive while not too much in earnest. We do not discover among them any of the queer creatures that we have rather learned to expect in a novel by Mr. Howells — for once those creatures with their fads seem to have been shelved — but find merely a little group of humanly interesting men and women, leading lives rational in the main, and brought into relations which elicit the author's best powers of serious analysis, relieved by touches of his dry and delightful humor. The manner is still that of real ism, but a realism not too exclusive of the methods of art, and capable of giving the name of Charmian to one of the characters, no slight concession to the enemy. Moreover, the story is essentially a love-story, and it comes to the proper conclusion of love-stories, although there is one period of suspense when, knowing the perverse capabilities of the writer, the reader wonders if it really is going to end anywhere. It is well that there should be searchings of soul, but it is not well that they should rob stories — as Mr. Howells sometimes permits them to — of their legitimate endings.

Author: Peter Demetz
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429930357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.

Author: Micaela Baranello
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520379128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
"When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth‐century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life—one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

Author: Linda Leigh Paul
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789310708
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Cottages on the Coast: Fair Harbors and Secret Shores is a spectacular look at the extraordinary construction and interior design of coastal cottages on the shorelines of the Pacific, to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, to the beaches of the Atlantic. The 200 present-day and vintage full-color photographs of more than two dozen sea-loving residences illustrate the physical desire, wonder, and fear that draw visitors to make their home along these coastal views. Featured in this survey are Tennessee Williams’s Key West haven and the modern Puget Sound cabin of Thomas Bosworth. Design writer and editor Linda Leigh Paul is the author of Cottage and Cabin, Casa Bohemia: The Spanish-Style House, Ranches of the American West, and more.

Author: Shawn Chandler Bingham
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

Author: Charles Fort
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1613106424
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.