Author: Henry Adams Publisher: Standard Ebooks ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 562
Book Description
One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Author: David Stradling Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801445101 Category : Environmentalism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy.
Author: Marc Bennetts Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0753520257 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.
Author: Virginia Postrel Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1439135320 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century. In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.
Author: Analicia Sotelo Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN: 1571319778 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 104
Book Description
Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.” A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. A daughter abandoned by her father. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts. “A Mexican American fascinator.” At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self. Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets.
Author: David S. Brown Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1982128259 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 464
Book Description
A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Author: Bailey Van Hook
Author: Henry Adams
Author: David Stradling
Author: Martin M. Horvat
Author: Marc Bennetts
Author: Lynn White (Jr.)
Author: Virginia Postrel
Author: Analicia Sotelo
Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Author: David S. Brown