Biography & True Stories
March 2002
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Biography & True StoriesFebruary 1905Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, after he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it "flawless as a work of art." His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style," and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written." The novel remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 Time poll of 125 contemporary authors in which Anna Karenina was voted the "greatest book ever written".
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Biography & True Stories2020The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
by Stanislav Aseyev
There is a prison operating in present-day Ukraine, where horrific torture techniques are being utilized. This prison is, in reality, a concentration camp, beyond whose fencing no laws reach. Life there is lived in humiliation, fear, and uncertainty. Wounds and burn marks cover bodies that are filled with pain from broken bones and, often too, broken wills. The principal tasks here are surviving after the desire to live has forsaken you and nothing in the world depends on you any longer, preserving your sanity as you teeter on the brink of madness, and remaining a human being in conditions so inhuman that faith, forgiveness, hate, and even a torturer locking eyes with his victim become laden with manifold meanings. The journalist Stanislav Aseyev, imprisoned in this torture camp on trumped-up charges of “espionage,” wrote this frank, emotional, and probing memoir in an attempt to both survive and recover from the hell he was cast into. He offers more questions than answers in this book, as testament to the fact that the lives of those released from the prison at 3 Paradise Street will forever remain divided into “pre-” and “post-.”
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True stories2020The case of Vasyl Stus
by Vakhtanh Kipiani
Poet and civil rights activist Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) could not attend any of his book presentations. He published his literary works only abroad. Participation in the movement of protesters to the Russification and anti-Ukrainian politics and an active people’s rights protection stance led Stus to the court bench to times and both for the anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. This book contains documents from a six-volume criminal case, which is stored on the shelves of the former Committee for State Security archive of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in Kyiv. The book contains archival documents of the case of Vasyl Stus (records of searches, interrogations, letters, articles, etc.), photographs, articles wrote by Vakhtang Kipiani. The last lifetime notes of Stus are also added - "From the camp notebook", secretly passed to his friends from the soviet camp. Preface to the book is written by Vakhtang Kipiani.
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True stories2020Lost Island
by Natalia Gumenyuk
The Lost Island is a collection of reportage pieces from the Russian- occupied Crimea by a well-known journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, who visited the peninsula in 2014– 2019. Her book tells the true stories and tragedies of people whose lives took a drastic turn after 2014. Some of these Crimean residents live under occupation, others in a different country. What is the unvarnished truth of their stories? Businessmen and retirees, Crimean Tatars, students and activists, human rights advocates and soldiers, people of varied political and ideological affiliations tell their stories: some want to share their quiet, long suppressed pain while others are tired of silently succumbing to fear.
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Biography & True Stories2016The Universe behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs and Reflections of a Dissident
by Myroslav Marynovych
The author of the book served 10 years in prison in a concentration camp and was in exile in Brezhnev times for participating in the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group (UHG). It was the first legal, not underground, group of the Resistance Movement, which, acting for a long time, revealed to the whole world the situation with the human rights in Ukraine under the Soviet rule. Born in Galicia after the World War 2 and brought up in a Soviet school, the author shows in his memoirs the role of the Galician family in shaping the position of resistance to the totalitarian regime. He tells vigorously, interestingly and frankly about life in Kiev under the Soviets in the era of the Helsinki movement, about the activities of the UHG and its members, about unjust arrests, and Soviet crooked justice. He recounts in detail the life of political prisoners in a concentration camp, describes the circumstances of his exile in Kazakhstan. He pays great attention to the spiritual growth of a person, shares his reflections on dissidence and the nature of totalitarianism. And conclusively, he condemns the communist system.
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Memoirs202277 days of February. Ukraine between two symbolic dates of the Russian war ideology
by Marichka Paplauskaite (Compiler), Authors: Inna Adrug, Anna Argirova, Kateryna Babkina, Tetyana Bezruk, Oleksandra Gorchynska, Inna Zolotukhina, Vera Kuriko, Olena Livytska, Olga Livytska, Svitlana Oslavska, Marichka Paplauskaite, Eva Raiska, Anya Semenyuk, Zoya Khramchenko, Margarita Chimyris, Iryna Yaroshynska
As a child, she could not understand why people in films about the blockade of Leningrad were always lying down. And when Mariupol was besieged by the Russians, and she and her husband lived for many days without water, food and heat under constant shelling, she realized that when you lie down, you save strength and energy. "77 Days of February" included reports written by journalists of the Reporters media in the period between February 23 and May 9 — two symbolic dates for Russian military ideology. The invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine stopped the number of days and pushed Ukrainians back to the intervening time, where February — the month of the beginning of the great war — still lasts. In the meantime and in these candid stories, there is pain, fear, hatred, and sometimes despair. But the main thing is hope. This is a bare nerve and an honest voice of the new Ukrainian reality.
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Science & MathematicsNovember 2017Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology
Birds, books and business
by Henry A. McGhie
This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838-1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is largely based on previously unpublished archival material. Dresser travelled widely and spent time in Texas during the American Civil War. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds from Europe, North America and Asia, which formed the basis of over 100 publications, including some of the finest bird books of the late nineteenth century. Dresser was a leading figure in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement; his correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists.
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Science & MathematicsNovember 2017Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology
Birds, books and business
by Henry A. McGhie
This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838-1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is largely based on previously unpublished archival material. Dresser travelled widely and spent time in Texas during the American Civil War. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds from Europe, North America and Asia, which formed the basis of over 100 publications, including some of the finest bird books of the late nineteenth century. Dresser was a leading figure in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement; his correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists.
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Biography & True StoriesSeptember 2017Dearest Jean
Rose Macaulay’s letters to a cousin
by Martin Smith
These candid letters from Rose Macaulay to her first cousin Jean Smith are previously unknown. Macaulay was one of the most versatile, successful, and significant women writers in the first half of the twentieth century, Smith a talented but diffident and depressive poet who was briefly an Anglican nun before converting to Roman Catholicism, a move that caused some difficulty between the two in the 1950s, when Macaulay exchanged High Church agnosticism for committed Anglicanism. Macaulay's letters to Smith, meticulously edited by a nephew of the recipient, throw fascinating and often amusing light not only on the writer's private life, unconventional character, and varied career, but also on the lively literary and social circles in which she moved. Although the letters span the years 1913-1958, more than half were written between 1919 and 1926, an important period in Macaulay's life and one previously ignored in published collections of her letters.
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Biography & True StoriesJune 2014A Biography of Paul Watzlawick
The Discovery of the Present Moment
by Andrea Köhler-Ludescher
This book, the world's first biography of Paul Watzlawick, written by his great-niece, describes the life of this philosopher, therapist, and best-selling author. Paul Watzlawick had a talent for languages and he led an adventurous life, from his childhood in Villach to studying in Venice after the war, to analyst training under C. G. Jung in Zurich, an attempt at establishing himself in India and then in El Salvador as a therapist, and finally to the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in the United States, headed by Don D. Jackson, a venerable scientist. This marked the beginning of the second half of his life, his amazing career as a communication researcher, a pioneer of systemic therapy, a radical constructivist, and a great thinker regarding the divisions between East and West. With many letters, lectures, interviews, and statements from contemporary witnesses and family members, this book makes Paul Watzlawick accessible as a human being and as a spiritually inspired, leading 20th century thinker. It includes a variety of unpublished material from Watzlawick, and introduces a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientist and cosmopolitan person, Paul Watzlawick. Target Group: For people interest in Paul Watzlawick, communication sciences, systemic therapy, and constructivism.
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Biography & True StoriesJanuary 2018Anne Clifford's autobiographical writing, 1590–1676
by Jessica L. Malay
Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) was a prominent noble woman in the seventeenth century. During her long life she experienced the courts of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. She fought a decades long battle to secure her inheritance of the Clifford lands of the north, providing a spirited and legally robust defense of her rights despite the opposition of powerful men, including James I. She eventually inherited the Clifford lands, and she describes her subsequent struggles to reclaim her authority in these lands still mired in the civil wars. Her autobiographies reveal her joys and griefs within a vivid description of seventeenth-century life. They reveal a personality that was vulnerable and determined; charitable and canny. Her autobiographies provide a window into a vibrant world of seventeenth-century life as lived by this complex and intriguing seventeenth-century woman.
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Biography & True StoriesJanuary 2018Anne Clifford's autobiographical writing, 1590–1676
by Jessica L. Malay
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Biography & True StoriesJanuary 2014Beyond Writing
by Ibrahim Abdelmeguid
One of Egypt’s leading literary voices offers a first-hand look at political, social, cultural events of the last 40 years and how they influenced his writing. Ibrahim Abdelmeguid, called “the quintessential writer about Alexandria” by The National newspaper, looks back over his decades-long writing career this book, which what he calls a “literary autobiography.” In it, he reflects on the social, political, and cultural influences in Egypt and elsewhere that have shaped him as a writer. He shares his views on major political events, such as the 1967 defeat after the Six-Day War, and explanations of their profound impact on his personal life and works of fiction. Abdelmeguid devotes a portion of his work to discussing the development of his views on Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, over the course of his turbulent tenure in office. The book is divided into a brief introduction and four chapters. Abdelmeguid guides the reader through his literary career, moving masterfully between the factual and the meditative. He explores how each of his novels and many of his short stories was conceived. He also describes cultural, political, and social contexts in which his writing evolved and was received by literary critics and casual readers. He spends considerable time describing the creative process behind his Alexandria trilogy— No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Birds of Amber, and Clouds Over Alexandria. The first book, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, is set during World War II. Abdelmeguid visited numerous key sites in Alexandria and surrounding areas and read every newspaper he could get his hands on. The result of his devotion to research is a vibrant portrayal of Alexandria that shines throughout the epic novel. Of particular note is his successful communication of the cultural and religious diversity of the city and the impact of that on the promotion of a culture of tolerance. Beyond Writing is a rare and important addition to the modern Arabic literary map. Few Arab authors are willing to so transparently share their writing process, preferring to highlight the polished final product while concealing the hard work that brought it into existence. Readers are lucky that it is a writer as prominent, thoughtful, and engaging as Abdelmeguid is willing to draw back the curtain.
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Biography & True StoriesFebruary 2017Jackie Chan：Never Grow Up, Only Get Older
by Jackie Chan, Zhu Mo
This is an autobiography of Chinese Kongfu star Jackie Chan. The book is a true recording of this international superstar’s growth and life experience for the last 50 years. It tells us the legendary actor’s stories, and also reflects a fantastic acting age.
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Biography: historical, political & militaryMarch 2017Bob Crow: Socialist, leader, fighter
A political biography
by Gregor Gall
Bob Crow was the most high-profile and militant union leader of his generation. This biography focuses on his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts. As RMT leader, Crow oversaw a rise in membership and promoted a more assertive and successful bargaining approach. While he failed to unite all socialists into one new party, he established himself as the leading popular critic of neo-liberalism, 'New' Labour and the age of austerity.
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Biography: historical, political & militaryMarch 2017Bob Crow: Socialist, leader, fighter
A political biography
by Gregor Gall
Bob Crow was the most high-profile and militant union leader of his generation. This biography focuses on his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts. As RMT leader, Crow oversaw a rise in membership and promoted a more assertive and successful bargaining approach. While he failed to unite all socialists into one new party, he established himself as the leading popular critic of neo-liberalism, 'New' Labour and the age of austerity.
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Biography: historical, political & militaryMarch 2017Bob Crow: Socialist, leader, fighter
A political biography
by Gregor Gall
Bob Crow was the most high-profile and militant union leader of his generation. This biography focuses on his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts. As RMT leader, Crow oversaw a rise in membership and promoted a more assertive and successful bargaining approach. While he failed to unite all socialists into one new party, he established himself as the leading popular critic of neo-liberalism, 'New' Labour and the age of austerity.
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Biography & True StoriesJune 2017Austerity baby
by Janet Wolff
Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word.
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Biography & True StoriesJuly 2017Charlotte Brontë
Legacies and afterlives
by Amber Regis, Deborah Wynne
Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë's legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author's diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
