! Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos

When some people checking out you while reviewing Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos, you may feel so proud. However, rather than other people feels you should instil in on your own that you are reading Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos not as a result of that factors. Reading this Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos will offer you greater than individuals admire. It will certainly overview of know greater than the people looking at you. Already, there are numerous resources to discovering, checking out a publication Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos still comes to be the first choice as a wonderful method.

Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos. Discovering how to have reading practice resembles learning how to attempt for consuming something that you truly do not really want. It will certainly need more times to aid. Moreover, it will likewise bit force to offer the food to your mouth as well as ingest it. Well, as checking out a book Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos, occasionally, if you ought to read something for your brand-new works, you will feel so woozy of it. Also it is a book like Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos; it will make you really feel so bad.

If you obtain the printed book Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos in on-line book shop, you might likewise find the same trouble. So, you have to move store to establishment Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos and also hunt for the offered there. Yet, it will certainly not occur below. Guide Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos that we will provide here is the soft documents principle. This is exactly what make you could effortlessly discover and get this Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos by reading this website. We provide you Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos the best product, constantly and also constantly.

Never doubt with our offer, since we will certainly constantly offer what you require. As like this upgraded book Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos, you may not discover in the other area. However here, it's extremely easy. Simply click and also download, you could have the Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos When simplicity will reduce your life, why should take the difficult one? You could buy the soft documents of guide Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos here as well as be member people. Besides this book Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos, you can additionally discover hundreds lists of the books from lots of resources, collections, authors, and also authors in all over the world.

By clicking the web link that our company offer, you can take the book Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos completely. Hook up to net, download, as well as save to your tool. What else to ask? Reading can be so very easy when you have the soft data of this Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos in your gizmo. You could likewise replicate the file Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos to your workplace computer or at home and even in your laptop. Simply share this great news to others. Recommend them to see this page and also get their hunted for publications Down The Rabbit Hole: A Novel, By Juan Pablo Villalobos.

"A brief and majestic debut." ―Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines, and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants, and the odd corrupt politician or two. Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award, Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.

• Sales Rank: #77227 in Books
• Brand: FSG Originals
• Published on: 2012-10-02
• Released on: 2012-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.53" h x .26" w x 4.98" l, .17 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• Great product!

Review

“Perfectly formed . . . Although easily devoured in one sitting, this clever little book is to be contemplated at length afterwards.” ―The Guardian

“Showing how a child absorbs violence without awareness that something is wrong is a tricky endeavor. Mr. Villalobos nails it.” ―Susannah Meadows, The New York Times

“Down the Rabbit Hole is a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective . . . A deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.” ―Adam Thirlwell

“Juan Pablo Villalobos brilliantly encapsulates the chaos of a lawless existence in which, under the sway of drug lords, anything might happen and everything goes . . . Down the Rabbit Hole is an astonishing debut.” ―Lucy Popescu, The Independent

“If you're going to have an imprisoned child narrate a novel, then not so much as a word should be out of place. There are no such slips in Juan Pablo Villalobos's debut novella. We have here a control over the material which is so tight it is almost claustrophobic . . . This is a novel about failing to understand the bigger picture, and in its absence we can see it more clearly.” ―Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, Choice of the Week

“Villalobos creates Tochtli's half-corrupt, half-innocent world . . . with a brilliant, tragi-comic light touch.” ―Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

“Juan Pablo Villalobos has done a masterful job creating a child narrator . . . Down the Rabbit Hole is, on the surface, innocent, clever and lovable, but its implications are deeply disturbing . . . [it] is a remarkable reflection on the uncontrollable narco violence that defines contemporary Mexico. And it's an absolute must read.” ―The Coffin Factory

“The riveting voice of Tochtli grasps our hearts as we realize that this is a world where even fate can be governed by power. In this miasma of pathos and politics, Down the Rabbit Hole brilliantly incorporates dreams, loyalty and the loss of innocence.” ―Alice Tao, The Houston Chronicle

“With this book we have discovered Juan Pablo Villalobos, a linguistic virtuoso able to penetrate the elusive world of literature, shedding light on many of its mysteries.” ―José Antonio Aguado, Diari de Terrassa

“With Down the Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos has made a dramatic entrance into the literary world. It is a book that must be read for its great aesthetic value and darkly humorous tone. A book that throws a clear light on a dark subject.” ―Teresa García Díaz, Amerika

About the Author

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
 

Some people say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious. They say I look older. Or the other way around: that I’m too little to know words like that. Or back-to-front and the other way around, sometimes people think I’m a dwarf. But I don’t think I’m precocious. What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except I pull words out of the dictionary. Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary. My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest. Yolcaut doesn’t think I’m precocious either. He says I’m a genius, he tells me:
“Tochtli, you’re a genius, you little bastard.”
And he strokes my head with his fingers covered in gold-and-diamond rings.
Anyway, more people say I’m odd: seven. And just because I really like hats and always wear one. Wearing a hat is a good habit immaculate people have. In the sky there are pigeons doing their business. If you don’t wear a hat you end up with a dirty head. Pigeons have no shame. They do their dirty business in front of everyone, while they’re flying. They could easily do it hidden in the branches of a tree. Then we wouldn’t have to spend the whole time looking at the sky and worrying about our heads. But hats, if they’re good hats, can also be used to make you look distinguished. That is, hats are like the crowns of kings. If you’re not a king you can wear a hat to be distinguished. And if you’re not a king and you don’t wear a hat you end up being a nobody.
I don’t think I’m odd for wearing a hat. And oddness is related to ugliness, like Cinteotl says. What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m sad Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:
“Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.”
Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn’t like it when I call him Daddy. He says we’re the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometers. Yolcaut is a realist and that’s why he doesn’t say we’re the best gang in the universe or the best gang for 8,000 kilometers. Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is. Yolcaut told me that. Reality is like this and that’s it. Tough luck. The realist’s favorite saying is you have to be realistic.
I think we really are a very good gang. I have proof. Gangs are all about solidarity. So solidarity means that, because I like hats, Yolcaut buys me hats, lots of hats, so many that I have a collection of hats from all over the world and from all the different periods of the world. Although now more than new hats what I want is a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. I’ve already written it down on the list of things I want and given it to Miztli. That’s how we always do it, because I don’t go out much, so Miztli buys me all the things I want on orders from Yolcaut. And since Miztli has a really bad memory I have to write lists for him. But you can’t buy a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that easily, in a pet shop. The biggest thing they sell in a pet shop is a dog. But who wants a dog? No one wants a dog. It’s so hard to get a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that it might be the only way to do it is by going to catch one in Liberia. That’s why my tummy is hurting so much. Actually my tummy always hurts, but recently I’ve been getting cramps more often.
I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.
*   *   *
I nearly always get on well with Mazatzin. He only annoys me when he’s strict and makes me stick to our study plan rigidly. Mazatzin, by the way, doesn’t call me Tochtli. He calls me Usagi, which is my name in Japanese, because he loves everything from the empire of Japan. What I really like about the empire of Japan are the samurai films. I’ve seen some of them so many times I know them off by heart. When I watch them I go on ahead and say the samurai’s conversations out loud before they do. And I never get it wrong. That’s because of my memory, which really is almost devastating. One of the films is called Twilight of the Samurai and it’s about an old samurai who teaches the way of the samurai to a little boy. There’s one bit where he makes the boy stay still and mute for days and days. He says to him: “The guardian is stealthy and knows how to wait. Patience is his best weapon, like the crane who does not know despair. The weak are known by their movement. The strong by their stillness. Look at the devastating sword that knows not fear. Look at the wind. Look at your eyelashes. Close your eyes and look at your eyelashes.” It’s not just this film I know off by heart, I know lots more, four.
One day, instead of teaching a lesson, Mazatzin told me his life story and it’s really sordid and pathetic. What happened is that he used to do really good business in TV advertising. He earned millions of pesos by making up adverts for shampoo and fizzy drinks. But Mazatzin was always sad, because he’d actually studied to be a writer. This is where it gets sordid: someone earning millions of pesos being sad because they’re not a writer. That’s sordid. And so in the end, because he was so sad Mazatzin went to live very far away, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain I think. He wanted to sit down and think and write a book about life. He even took a computer with him. That’s not sordid, but it is pathetic. The problem was that Mazatzin didn’t feel inspired and meanwhile his business partner, who was also his best friend, scammed him out of his millions of pesos. He wasn’t a best friend at all but a traitor.
That’s when Mazatzin came to work for us, because Mazatzin is educated. Yolcaut says that educated people are the ones who think they’re great because they know lots of things. They know things about science, like the fact that pigeons transmit disgusting diseases. They also know things about history, such as how the French love cutting the heads off kings. That’s why educated people like being teachers. Sometimes the things they know are wrong, like if you want to write a book you have to go and live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain. That’s what Yolcaut says, that educated people know lots of things about books, but nothing at all about life. We live in the middle of nowhere too, but we don’t do it for inspiration. We do it for protection.
Anyway, since I can’t go to school, Mazatzin teaches me things from books. At the moment we’re studying the conquest of Mexico. It’s a fun topic, with war and blood and dead people. The story goes like this: On one side there were the kings and queens of the Spanish empire and on the other side there were the Indians who lived in Mexico. Then the kings and queens of Spain wanted to be the kings and queens of Mexico, too. So they came and they started killing all the Indians, but only to scare them and make them accept their new kings. Well, the truth is they didn’t even kill some of the Indians, they just burned their feet. This whole story makes Mazatzin furious, because he wears calico shirts and leather sandals as if he was an Indian. And he starts with one of his lectures. He says:
“They stole our money, Usagi, they plundered our country!”
It’s almost as if the dead Indians were his cousins or his uncles. Pathetic. By the way, the Spanish don’t like cutting the heads off kings. They still have living kings and queens with their heads stuck on their shoulders. Mazatzin showed me a photo in a magazine. That’s really pathetic, too.
*   *   *
One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.
“One bullet in the heart.”
“Corpse.”
“Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.”
“Alive.”
“Three bullets in the pancreas.”
“Too early to tell.”
And we carry on like that. When we run out of body parts we look up new ones in a book that has pictures of all of them, even the prostate and the medulla oblongata. Speaking of the brain, it’s important to take off your hat before you put bullets into somebody’s brain, so it doesn’t get stained. Blood is really hard to get out. This is what Itzpapalotl, the maid who does the cleaning in our palace, always says.
Yes, our palace: Yolcaut and I are the owners of a palace and we’re not even kings. The thing is we have a lot of money. A huge amount. We have pesos, which is the money of Mexico. We also have dollars, which is the money of the United States. And we also have euros, which is the money of the countries and kingdoms of Europe. I think we have thousands of millions of all three kinds...

Most helpful customer reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Winning praise and awards
By Thad McIlroy
In the New Statesman magazine in the U.K. Sarah Churchwell made it her book of the year, writing that Down the Rabbit Hole "is that rarest of animals, a book that is, to all intents and purposes, perfect." The Guardian newspaper has it shortlisted for Guardian First Book Award. In the U.K. it's published by a new small subscription publisher, And Other Stories Publishing. There's no word if there will be a U.S. publisher: I may have to order it from overseas.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful story
By M. G. Azevedo
This a story of Tochtli, a seven year old who all wants in life is to have a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. He is the son of a very rich man and anything is possible...

His father is a drog lord and Tochtli describes the strange circunstances, somewhere in Mexico, they live their lifes, sometimes horrific, sometimes funny, even when the things he discusses are horrendous.

Tochtli lives in a bizarre heavily-guarded world of obscene luxury, and brutal amorality,and he is both childishly innocent and also horribly knowledgeable about things like bullets, corpses, and their disposal.

This is a sharp story and a very much enjoyable novella and to give too much detail would be to spoil what is a wonderful read.

`

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A good read!
By D. henderson
Tochtli (his name translates as 'Rabbit') is the young son of a Mexican drug lord. All he wants in life is the proper hat for the task at hand. All he wants for his birthday is a pygmy hippopotamus. Is that too much to ask? It's funny; it's sad in a way I wasn't expecting. It's an all around good read. And at only 70 pages, you have no excuse for dodging this one.

See all 19 customer reviews...

Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos PDF
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos EPub
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Doc
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos iBooks
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos rtf
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Mobipocket
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Kindle

! Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Doc

! Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Doc

! Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Doc

! Ebook Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel, by Juan Pablo Villalobos Doc

~ Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing

Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing

As one of guide compilations to propose, this Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing has some strong factors for you to check out. This book is extremely suitable with exactly what you require now. Besides, you will likewise like this publication Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing to review because this is among your referred publications to check out. When getting something new based upon encounter, amusement, and also various other lesson, you could utilize this book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing as the bridge. Starting to have reading routine can be gone through from various ways and from variant sorts of publications

Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing

Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing

Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing. Pleased reading! This is exactly what we intend to say to you that like reading a lot. Just what concerning you that assert that reading are only responsibility? Never ever mind, reviewing habit must be begun with some particular reasons. Among them is reading by commitment. As exactly what we want to supply here, the book qualified Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing is not kind of required publication. You can enjoy this book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing to read.

Well, book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing will certainly make you closer to just what you want. This Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing will certainly be consistently excellent friend whenever. You might not forcedly to consistently finish over reading a book in brief time. It will be only when you have leisure and spending couple of time to make you feel pleasure with just what you check out. So, you could obtain the definition of the message from each sentence in the e-book.

Do you know why you ought to read this website as well as exactly what the relation to reading book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing In this contemporary age, there are many means to acquire guide as well as they will certainly be a lot easier to do. One of them is by getting guide Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing by on the internet as exactly what we inform in the link download. Guide Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing could be a selection due to the fact that it is so correct to your need now. To get the book on-line is quite easy by simply downloading them. With this possibility, you can review guide any place as well as whenever you are. When taking a train, awaiting list, and waiting for a person or other, you could read this online book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing as a good friend once more.

Yeah, reviewing a book Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing can add your close friends checklists. This is just one of the solutions for you to be effective. As understood, success does not imply that you have wonderful things. Understanding and knowing greater than various other will certainly provide each success. Close to, the message as well as perception of this Queen Bee Of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, By Ben Downing could be taken and picked to act.

"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests.
Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism.
Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany.

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013

• Sales Rank: #808539 in Books
• Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2013-06-18
• Released on: 2013-06-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.21" h x 1.19" w x 6.41" l, 1.26 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• Used Book in Good Condition

From Booklist
Janet Ross was the type of woman we’re trained not to expect in history: someone who, in an earlier era, conducted her life with a freedom and breadth of experience we associate with women in the late twentieth century. Born in 1842 into an eccentric and well-traveled family, she married young, lived in Egypt and Italy, and eventually settled in Florence. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with many of the luminaries of her day, wrote, painted, raced horses, managed estates, and made her home the hub of the Anglo-Florence community. The small anecdotes that make up most of this history—attendance at a ball, renovating a new house, a visit from Mark Twain, the comings and goings of minor figures and their feuds—should be of interest to cultural historians of the time period. It will be of less interest for general readers looking for a rousing yarn. --Lynn Weber

Review

“Queen Bee of Tuscany is so amusing, in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin the praise . . . This is a perfect book for the bedside, poolside or, if you're really lucky, that long long plane ride to Italy . . . Let me stress that none of what I've said quite conveys the pleasure of reading Queen Bee of Tuscany. This isn't merely a history of Janet Ross and her family or of the long-standing Anglo-Florentine colony. It's a compendium of literary and historical vignettes, a showcase for it author's excellent prose, and quite simply one of the best books of the year.” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Downing has assembled an immense amount of information, not only about this remarkable family of literate, artistic, and well-connected women writers . . . but about the vast cast of foreigners who, from the end of the Napoleonic wars, made Tuscany their home . . . Queen Bee of Tuscany provides a rich historical survey of a lost and charmed age.” ―Caroline Moorehead, The Wall Street Journal

“Now and then, there appear certain lives that serve as lenses onto an entire generation--those lucky few who happen to live at a place and time of particular foment and historical import, and whose personal destinies intersect with the great movements of art, literature, and politics that define an age . . . Janet Ross--whose story is detailed in rollicking fashion in Ben Downing's new book, The Queen Bee of Tuscany--is just one such character . . . She'd been born amid the optimistic expansion and bustle of Victorian empire; she passed away in the brief pause between Europe's most deadly and debilitating wars. In between, she led, in Downing's words, ‘one of the fullest lives imaginable,' and her ‘forceful personality made, for better or worse, a strong impression on all those who met her.' We may not remember the name Janet Ross these days, but Downing's book stands a fair chance of changing that--and if he succeeds, the history of women . . . will be all the richer.” ―Katie Baker, The Daily Beast

“Through his loving portrait of Janet Ross and her complex connections to the native and expatriate communities of Tuscany, Downing has created an engrossing and wonderfully readable narrative of this captivating woman, her coterie, and the era in which she lived.” ―Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

“I knew nothing of Janet Ross before I opened this exhilarating book and began to relish her crowded, convivial life and appetite for thrills. Ben Downing is a skilful and enthusiastic writer who knows how to tell a good story. He works like an accomplished artist, painting a vivid cultural and historical background and then placing his subject in a memorable Florentine landscape. Reading this blend of biography and social history is like taking a first-class time-traveling journey into mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth- century Europe. I greatly enjoyed keeping company with such a forceful and surprising character--and so will many readers.” ―Michael Holroyd, author of A Book of Secrets

“Ben Downing's life of the extraordinary Janet Ross reads like deep, delicious gossip from a bygone era. Combining a wonderfully incisive account of Anglo-Florentine society with some marvelous portraits of its eccentric members and their febrile entanglements, Queen Bee of Tuscany is both instructive to read and great, great fun.” ―Miranda Seymour, author of Thrumpton Hall and Mary Shelley

“The Anglo-Florentine colony was a remarkable and singularly long-lived phenomenon. Dominating it for sixty years was that extraordinary grande dame Janet Ross: bluff, outspoken, multilingual, at once a canny estate manager and a social queen bee nonpareil. Ben Downing's study of this unique tranche of social history, built around Ross's reign, is a tour de force. Based on formidable research, it always wears its learning lightly, and with style. Elegantly written, packed with anecdotes, it's a real page-turner, and also slyly witty throughout. This is the best, the most informative, the most entertaining bedtime reading that's come my way in a very long time. ” ―Peter Green, Emeritus professor of classics and the former fiction critic of the London Daily Telegraph

“Those enamored with the history, society, and culture of Victorian England and the expatriate community will relish this engrossing biography.” ―Publishers Weekly

About the Author
In addition to The Calligraphy Shop, a book of poems, Ben Downing has published essays, articles, and reviews in The Paris Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He is the coeditor of Parnassus.

Most helpful customer reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Queen Bee of Tuscany is a delight
By Barbara Blouin
I just finished Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross. The book is a delight. Downing is a very good writer--fluid, colorful style and often very witty. I had a lot of laughs. Janet Ross is one of a kind: tough, creative, fearless, and always looking for adventure. She started riding to the hounds when in her early teens in rural England, and when in Egypt with her foreign-service husband Henry, she raced across the desert with Egyptian notables. For a time she was a correspondent for the London Times. When Janet and Henry left Egypt in 1868 they went to Tuscany. They had little money, but they managed to buy a rundown mini-castle and convert is to a delightful place. The property came with grapes and olive trees, which were cultivated by the tenant farmers. Never one to be daunted by challenges, Janet pitched in with the contadini (tenant farmers) and stomped on the grapes at harvest time, picked olives, and was always willing to get her hands dirty. Gobs of people -- famous and otherwise -- visited her property, Poggio Gherardo, on Sunday. They included many mostly English notables, like Dickens, as well as an American, Mark Twain. Janet found a house next to hers for Twain and his wife, and they became good friends. In many ways Janet was more man than woman: dauntless, highly energetic, type A. Also creative, sociable. People called her "Aunt Janet." She survived the First World War and died (I don't remember the exact date) not long after WWI. Times were hard, and there was not nearly enough food, but even very late in her life she roused herself to help others, who were close to starvation. Another important feature of this book is a social history of Italy during those years at a time when it was becoming a republic.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Well Written But Not Much New
By Nemoman
Janet Ross was a remarkable person who dominated the English colony centered on Florence in the latter half of the nineteenth cenury. She was born into a family of successful authors including her mother Lady Lucie Duff Gordon Letters From Egypt, and maternal grandmother Sarah Austin. From her early childhood in london she was surrounded by England's literary and social elite, including Kinglake, Dickens, and, Thackery. She was an autodidact with a keen and inquisitive mind. At an early age she married an older banker (Henry Ross) and moved with him to Alexandria. While there she continued to meet and correspond with prominent literary and cultural figures including De Lessups who took her on a tour of Suez Canal during its construction. While in Egypt she developed as a competent, albeit not gifted, writer, become the defacto if not actual Eypt correspondent for the London Times.

When the Egyptian banking crisis ended Henry's banking career in 1862, they moved to Florence. Initially they leased space in a Villa outside of Florence, where she became a competent manager of the Villa's poderes or farms. Later, they purchased Poggio Gherardo, a thirteenth century fortified villa in Settignano. There, she also managed her estate's farms while continuing to write historical books and articles for periodicals. She also wrote a cookbook (cited as an important influence by Elizabeth David LEAVES FROM OUR TUSCAN KITCHEN. She developed a passion for Tuscan folksongs and would sing them while accompanying herself on guitar.

On Sundays she conducted a salon of sorts with visits from noted writers, artists and cultural leaders. She located nearby villas for Bernard Berenson and Mark Twain.

I wrote the bulk of the Wikipedia article on Ross and was hoping this book would help me flesh it out more. Unfortunately, although well written, the book does not add much to the previous biography by Sarah Benjamin - A Castle in Tuscany: The Fascinating Life of Janet Ross - A Woman Ahead of Her Time. It does, however, contain much prefatory matter on the time period preceding Ross, placing in context her life in Florence. Some of that material gets tedious as being pretty much a listing of names.

If you are interested in Janet Ross, I highly recommend books by her niece Lina Waterfield (Castle In Italy An Autobiography) and Kinta Beevor (A Tuscan Childhood) both of whom lived with Janet at various times.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Poorly written book about a potentially fascinating subject
By Book Reader
This light-weight book is written in an irritatingly vernacular style bordering on slang, in fact crossing the border frequently. Worse than that, it is an unparalleled compendium of hackneyed phrases, often ten or twelve per page. This is a pity, because the lives and times of the expatriates of Egypt and Florence at their peaks provide limitless material for an amusing and informative story. The main facts of Janet Ross's life are here but she doesn't really come to life. Some reviewers have complained about an excess of background to the times, but I found this aspect of the book to be its best feature, despite it being ill-informed in places. For example, "In a Tuscan Garden" was written by Georgina S. Grahame, not John Lane - he was the publisher. A great many names are dropped in the Florentine section but that's probably inevitable considering that, aside from her books, entertaining the residents of and visitors to Florence was Janet Ross's main claim to fame over the course of 50 years. In fact, this book is more a history of the Anglo-Florentines hung on the frame of Janet Ross's life - and none the worse for that. There is a huge literature on the Anglo-Florentines including several spectacularly entertaining memoirs. Perhaps the main value of this book is that its bibliography will give readers an entry into that literature.

See all 23 customer reviews...

Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing PDF
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing EPub
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Doc
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing iBooks
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing rtf
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Mobipocket
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Kindle

~ Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Doc

~ Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Doc

~ Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Doc

~ Download Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross, by Ben Downing Doc

** Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen

Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen

Sometimes, reading Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen is extremely uninteresting as well as it will certainly take long period of time beginning with obtaining the book and start checking out. However, in contemporary age, you could take the creating modern technology by using the web. By internet, you can see this web page as well as begin to look for guide Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen that is required. Wondering this Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen is the one that you need, you can choose downloading and install. Have you comprehended the best ways to get it?

Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen

Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen

Some people may be chuckling when considering you reading Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen in your leisure. Some might be admired of you. And some could want resemble you who have reading leisure activity. What regarding your own feel? Have you felt right? Checking out Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen is a demand and a leisure activity at once. This condition is the on that will certainly make you feel that you have to review. If you understand are looking for guide entitled Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen as the choice of reading, you can locate right here.

Reading Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen is a very valuable passion and doing that can be undertaken whenever. It indicates that reading a book will not limit your task, will not require the moment to invest over, and will not invest much cash. It is an extremely inexpensive and also reachable thing to buy Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen However, with that said quite low-cost thing, you can get something brand-new, Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen something that you never ever do and get in your life.

A brand-new experience could be gotten by reading a book Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen Even that is this Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen or other book compilations. Our company offer this publication because you can find much more things to motivate your ability and also understanding that will make you better in your life. It will be likewise valuable for individuals around you. We recommend this soft file of the book right here. To know how to get this publication Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen, find out more below.

You can find the web link that we offer in site to download and install Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen By acquiring the budget-friendly rate and also get finished downloading, you have actually completed to the initial stage to get this Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen It will certainly be absolutely nothing when having purchased this publication as well as not do anything. Read it and reveal it! Invest your few time to just review some sheets of web page of this publication Beyond America's Grasp: A Century Of Failed Diplomacy In The Middle East, By Stephen P. Cohen to review. It is soft documents as well as easy to review wherever you are. Enjoy your brand-new practice.

AN INCISIVE “WHITE PAPER” ON THE UNITED STATES’S STRUGGLE TO FRAME A COHERENT MIDDLE EAST POLICY

In this book, the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen traces U.S. policy in the region back to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, when the Great Powers failed to take crucial steps to secure peace there. He sees in that early diplomatic failure a pattern shaping the conflicts since then—and America’s role in them.

A century ago, there emerged two dominant views regarding the uses of America’s newfound power. Woodrow Wilson urged America to promote national freedom and self-determination through the League of Nations—in stark contrast to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, who had advocated a vigorous foreign policy based on national self-interest.

Cohen argues that this running conflict has hobbled American dealings in the Middle East ever since. In concise, pointed chapters, he shows how different Middle East countries have struggled to define themselves in the face of America’s stated idealism and its actual realpolitik. This conflict came to a head in the confused, clumsy Middle East policy of George W. Bush—but Cohen suggests the ways a greater awareness of our history in the region might enable our present leaders to act more sensibly.

• Sales Rank: #856044 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-27
• Released on: 2009-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.00" w x 6.38" l, 1.16 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In what should become required reading for those interested in the Middle East, Cohen, director of the Institute of Middle East Peace and Development, provides a richly detailed history of diplomacy in the region and its implications for current relations. The book begins with Woodrow Wilson's idealistic initiatives, which germinated into a confused legacy [that] continues to be at the heart of the problem between the United States and the Middle East. Cohen takes a tour of major players and key events, including Egypt and its nationalist movement, Iran under British imperialism, the roots of a Saudi-U.S. alliance and the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cohen provides broad suggestions for contemporary diplomacy, generally emphasizing the importance of avoiding a one-size-fits-all policy. He discusses policies in the region of both Bush administrations, and remains timely in presaging the new administration's diplomatic message. When Cohen concludes, To overcome despair over these relationships, which is now so common, requires the elaboration in our imagination of a best-case scenario, he sounds prescient, and the rigorously researched history he provides make his words ring true. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"In what should become required reading for those interested in the Middle East, Cohen, director of the Institute of Middle East Peace and Development, provides a richly detailed history of diplomacy in the region and its implications for current relations. The book begins with Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic initiatives, which germinated into a 'confused legacy [that] continues to be at the heart of the problem between the United States and the Middle East.' Cohen takes a tour of major players and key events, including Egypt and its nationalist movement, Iran under British imperialism, the roots of a Saudi-U.S. alliance and the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cohen provides broad suggestions for contemporary diplomacy, generally emphasizing the importance of avoiding a 'one-size-fits-all' policy. He discusses policies in the region of both Bush administrations, and remains timely in presaging the new administration’s diplomatic message. When Cohen concludes, 'To overcome despair over these relationships, which is now so common, requires the elaboration in our imagination of a best-case scenario,' he sounds prescient, and the rigorously researched history he provides make his words ring true." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “A big-picture overview of the long-teetering relationship between America and the Arab nations . . . Cohen makes a magnificent case for the ‘emotional impact’ of Arab defeat in the face of Israeli force, while at the same time scolding those nations for persistence in ‘self-definition by negation of the other.’ Both hectoring and wise, this historical blueprint makes a powerful argument for building mutual respect in the region.” —Kirkus Reviews "A brilliant social psychologist and political analyst who has devoted his entire life to counseling Middle Eastern leaders on how to promote peace, Cohen's Beyond America's Grasp is a model of alternative thinking, a gift of rare wisdom, the fruit of four decades of welding knowledge and experience."--Yaron Ezrahi, author of RUBBER BULLETS: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel

About the Author
STEPHEN P. COHEN, the president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, has lectured at Yale and elsewhere. For over forty years, he has made 150 trips to the region, and attended the Madrid peace conference and other high-stakes meetings. He lives in New Jersey.

Most helpful customer reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
very accessible - a valuable, intriguing perspective
By Naturale
This is a refreshing and very readable book which gives a unique perspective on the Middle East. It clearly explains the impact on the region by the Western Powers and the impact of European colonialism and U.S. naivete. Also, Cohen takes each Arab country individually to show its own needs and influences, and we can begin to stop seeing the Middle East as simply one anti-American Islamist bloc. Is peace possible, not only between Israel and its neighbors but between the Arab countries and the U.S.? You need not reach the same conclusions as Cohen but his lucid details give an understanding that we in the West are in great need of. This is a valuable book and very pertinent.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Vanguar for US and ME relations education/understanding
By Luis
This is a great book to help those who limit their knowledge of the ME within US news sources. Everyone that wants to work in any way with people from some of these countries it will be very beneficial for your interaction. This book was excellent except from my limited perspective in the complex reality of the Israel/ Palestinian relationship it seemed a fraction favoring Israel. Conclusion is that books like this should be part of the education of this society.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Go behind the headlines
By Thomas Mitchell
With over 40 years of experience in the Middle East, Prof. Stephen Cohen is well equipped to give us the basic relevant history and culture in the Middle Eastern countries most relevant to American policy: Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Occasionally he brings in personal anecdotes but most of the information comes from the extensive bibliography found in the back of the book. Cohen offers no magic formulas or solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for rebuilding Iraq or for anything else for that matter. But for those without a background in Middle Eastern studies this is a good place to go for relevant information to flush out the headlines from World War I forward.

See all 8 customer reviews...

Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen PDF
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen EPub
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Doc
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen iBooks
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen rtf
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Mobipocket
Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Kindle

** Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Doc

** Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Doc

** Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Doc

** Ebook Download Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Stephen P. Cohen Doc

@ Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall

Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall

It is not secret when attaching the creating skills to reading. Reading Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall will certainly make you get even more resources and also resources. It is a way that could enhance just how you overlook as well as comprehend the life. By reading this Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall, you could greater than exactly what you obtain from various other book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall This is a popular book that is published from popular author. Seen form the author, it can be relied on that this publication Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall will certainly provide numerous motivations, regarding the life and also encounter and also everything within.

Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall

Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall

This is it the book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall to be best seller lately. We give you the most effective deal by getting the stunning book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall in this website. This Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall will certainly not only be the sort of book that is hard to find. In this website, all sorts of books are given. You could search title by title, writer by author, as well as publisher by author to discover the very best book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall that you can check out now.

But right here, we will show you incredible point to be able constantly read guide Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall anywhere as well as whenever you take location and also time. Guide Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall by only could aid you to understand having the book to check out every time. It won't obligate you to always bring the thick publication any place you go. You can just maintain them on the gadget or on soft file in your computer system to consistently review the space during that time.

Yeah, hanging out to read the e-book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall by on the internet could likewise offer you positive session. It will certainly ease to communicate in whatever problem. In this manner could be a lot more appealing to do as well as much easier to check out. Now, to obtain this Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall, you could download and install in the web link that we offer. It will certainly help you to obtain easy method to download guide Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall.

The e-books Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall, from easy to complex one will certainly be a really useful operates that you can take to alter your life. It will not provide you unfavorable declaration unless you don't get the meaning. This is certainly to do in checking out an e-book to overcome the meaning. Commonly, this book qualified Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall is checked out due to the fact that you really similar to this sort of e-book. So, you can obtain much easier to comprehend the impression and definition. When even more to always remember is by reading this e-book Flaubert: A Life, By Geoffrey Wall, you can satisfy hat your inquisitiveness beginning by finishing this reading publication.

The life and times of the great French novelist

A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert's provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a friend to Turgenev and was praised by the emperor, and the flamboyant excitements of his travels throughout the Mediterranean, on which he kept company with courtesans, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons.

Flaubert's contradictory experiences nurtured his peerless novels and stories, and Wall's dynamic interpretation of them gives us a new understanding of his sometimes pitiable, always unforgettable characters: an Egyptian hermit tormented by voluptuous visions, a melancholy doctor's wife eating arsenic to escape debt and despair, an old country woman who worships a stuffed parrot.

Wall's is the first full-fledged modern biography of this immeasurably talented and influential artist. Flaubert brilliantly re-creates the life and times of a writer who wrote to within an inch of his life and whose importance will never diminish.

• Sales Rank: #3275951 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.31" h x 6.44" w x 9.36" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) has a reputation as an ivory-towered, art-for-art's-sake writer, but there was another Flaubert, one Wall inclines toward in this briskly readable and welcome new biography. This Flaubert visible in his letters to his friend and publisher Maxime Du Camp, his difficult lover Louise Colet and his peer (and rival) George Sand was mercurial, passionate, vivacious, even Rabelaisian. Wall (who translated Madame Bovary and other works for Penguin Classics), like Flaubert himself, downplays the Realist writer for the Romantic who appreciated Victor Hugo (and de Sade). At the outset of his career, Flaubert was enjoying himself in Paris, neglecting his legal studies and writing his first novel, which would become A Sentimental Education. His first nervous attack, which occurred while visiting his family in provincial Rouen and which Wall diagnoses as epilepsy, not only cut off Flaubert's legal career and curtailed his love of travel, but it partly accounted for his sedentary reclusiveness. Though Flaubert quarantined himself for years at his family home to write, Wall gives full attention to the enterprising episodes in which the writer broke free of his self-imposed routine: his extensive travels in Egypt and his later socializing in Paris's Second Empire salons. While the novelist famously detested the bourgeoisie, politics and modernity, Wall argues that his father's eminently bourgeois success as a doctor shadowed his younger son's work habits and even his aesthetic, and that the events of the Revolution in 1848 and the Commune were barely checked on the margins of Flaubert's life and art. Wall's first book, this was short-listed for England's prestigious Whitbread Award last year. 16 pages of b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Wall has translated many of Flaubert's famed novels, but this is his first whirl at writing a book himself. Surprisingly little has appeared on Flaubert, so this is a welcome treat.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* His previous work in translating Madame Bovary into contemporary English has well prepared Wall to write a compelling biography of its author, Gustave Flaubert, one that probes deeply into the mystery of how taut fiction emerges from a tangled life. To be sure, Wall spares us none of the tangles. We see how the consummate craftsman in prose relished the sordid ugliness of the slaughterhouse, how the devotee of high culture succumbed to the bestial charms of de Sade, how the friend of progressive icons (Sand and Turgenev) raged against the common rabble of humanity, and how the relentless enemy of the bourgeoisie invoked the conventions of middle-class respectability to bully a hapless niece. But none of these contradictions disqualified Flaubert from producing supernal art--perhaps because he viewed the artist as a special creature (a monster, he sometimes remarked) who transcends the natural world he observes. Readers marvel, for example, at how Flaubert imaginatively transforms his frustrated and fractured love for Louise Colet into the seamless artistry of his greatest novel. Similarly, we wonder at how Flaubert makes his intense financial and medical trials serve as the crucible in which to forge his final dark mythologies (La Legende de Saint Julien l'hospitalier and Herodias). Acute as a guide to both the life and the literature, Wall has put all students of Flaubert in his debt. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A lovely piece of work
By Christopher Bram
Flaubert was a difficult man: arrogant, anal, irascible, a lonely bear of a fellow with a special gift for making enemies. Yet Geoffrey Wall manages to make him human and sympathetic. This is a first-rate biography, quick, smart, dramatic and often very funny. The MADAME BOVARY years might be handled better by Francis Steegmuller in his excellent double bio of the author and his masterpiece, but Wall's account of Flaubert's later career cannot be improved on. Giving special life to those chapters is his account of Flaubert's friendship with the immensely likable George Sand. If she can connect with this prickly man, why can't the rest of us? Their exchange of letters is one of the great literary dialogues and Wall tells this story beautifully.
I began this book disliking the man despite my love of his novels. I finished it feeling fond of the man, identifying with his faults, and wanting reread everything.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Biographer not up to the job
By A Customer
This is a disappointing biography of Flaubert. It discusses neither Flaubert's intellectual development nor his books in any depth. The author makes much of the silliest and must vulgar aspects of Flaubert's personality (as if he felt a special affinity for these topics) while skirting any serious aesthetic or literary issues. Flaubert was certainly a peculiar, irritating man, but Wall, like most celebrity biographers of our day, stresses these aspects to try to squeeze some cheap laughs and prurient snickers from his subject matter. Flaubert's strange love affair with Louise Colet is narrated so sophomorically that it's practically unreadable. The book ends abruptly, summarizing Flaubert's last few years in a few paragraphs, as if the biographer couldn't stand it anymore himself. The best thing about the book is the sprinkling of excerpts from Flaubert's letters. The worst thing is the biographer's low-brow, childish, psychobabbling voice trying to make sense of a literary genius he had no business trying to write a life of. It's as if Seinfeld tried to write a book about Homer.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Best Recent Biography
By reading man
One of the other reviewers of this biography wrote:

"This is a disappointing biography of Flaubert. It discusses neither Flaubert's intellectual development nor his books in any depth. The author makes much of the silliest and must vulgar aspects of Flaubert's personality (as if he felt a special affinity for these topics) while skirting any serious aesthetic or literary issues. Flaubert was certainly a peculiar, irritating man, but Wall, like most celebrity biographers of our day, stresses these aspects to try to squeeze some cheap laughs and prurient snickers from his subject matter. Flaubert's strange love affair with Louise Colet is narrated so sophomorically that it's practically unreadable. The book ends abruptly, summarizing Flaubert's last few years in a few paragraphs, as if the biographer couldn't stand it anymore himself. The best thing about the book is the sprinkling of excerpts from Flaubert's letters. The worst thing is the biographer's low-brow, childish, psychobabbling voice trying to make sense of a literary genius he had no business trying to write a life of. It's as if Seinfeld tried to write a book about Homer."

A better simile would be: it's as if this reviewer read an excellent biography then trashed it because it's neither literary criticism nor a "deep" psychological study.

Is the reviewer aware that Sartre wrote a massive uncompleted study of Flaubert that would satisfy his dubious wish for "highbrow" (as opposed to Wall's "low-brow") psychobabble. Not that Sartre is a reliable guide to Flaubert, you understand: he's really an obsessed leftist who believes his warped understanding of Freud and Marx is the skeleton key to his victims, most notably Genet, whom he reduced to a bloodless abstraction in his soi-disant "introduction" to that writer's collected works. (His book on Baudelaire at least has the benefit of brevity, if not clarity.)

I see the biographer's task as giving an account of the events of his subject's life, and even if that includes the books he wrote as the main events, then he can hardly be expected to write detachable essays in depth about them. I challenge this reviewer to explain why the brief accounts Wall gives of Flaubert's novels is inadequate to the job he undertook--namely, to write a biography of moderate length, rather than a gargantuan meditation on his subject a la Sartre.

As for making much of the most vulgar aspects of Flaubert's character ... It would be very hard to write an accurate biography about a man who adored DeSade's writings, who described sadistic characters and scenes with relish in SALAMMBO, and who, judging from his correspondence, was obsessed with anality, the cruder aspects of sexuality, and every form of feculence. Flaubert was vulgar and his biography had better make that clear unless he wants to deny reality.

If Wall tries to get "cheap laughs" at any point in this biography, he comes a cropper. Of course, he does nothing of the sort, and to call his account of Flaubert's dubious relationship with Louise Colet "sophomoric" is to misunderstand that Flaubert's contempt for Colet, whose naivete was pathetic, duplicates the kinds of relationships many sophomores have. You can't make a profound romantic reality out of a trivial encounter that was basically about erogenous zones.

I do agree that Wall doesn't do justice to Flaubert's later years, and his dislike of BOUVARD ET PECUCHET apparently explains his neglect of the final masterpiece.

However, Wall's book is arguably the best recent biography of Flaubert, much better than Enid Starkie's wordy volumes or Lottman's badly written account or Brown's or Bart's. Ignore the negative review I've quoted and read Wall if you're interested in Flaubert

See all 3 customer reviews...

Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall PDF
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall EPub
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Doc
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall iBooks
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall rtf
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Mobipocket
Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Kindle

@ Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Doc

@ Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Doc

@ Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Doc

@ Free PDF Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall Doc

> Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre

Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre

Don't bother if you don't have adequate time to visit guide store as well as search for the favourite book to review. Nowadays, the on-line book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre is pertaining to give convenience of reviewing practice. You could not should go outside to look guide The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre Searching as well as downloading and install the book entitle The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre in this post will certainly offer you much better option. Yeah, online book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre is a sort of electronic e-book that you can obtain in the link download offered.

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre

Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre When writing can alter your life, when creating can enhance you by offering much money, why do not you try it? Are you still really baffled of where understanding? Do you still have no concept with just what you are visiting create? Now, you will certainly require reading The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre An excellent writer is an excellent visitor at once. You could specify how you compose depending upon exactly what publications to read. This The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre can aid you to solve the issue. It can be among the best sources to establish your writing skill.

This The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre is extremely appropriate for you as novice viewers. The users will constantly start their reading habit with the preferred motif. They may not consider the writer and author that develop the book. This is why, this book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre is truly appropriate to check out. However, the concept that is given up this book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre will show you several points. You could start to enjoy additionally reviewing till the end of guide The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre.

Additionally, we will certainly share you guide The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre in soft data types. It will not disrupt you making heavy of you bag. You require just computer system tool or gadget. The link that we provide in this site is offered to click then download this The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre You recognize, having soft file of a book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre to be in your device can make alleviate the users. So by doing this, be a good reader now!

Just connect to the internet to acquire this book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre This is why we mean you to use and use the established technology. Checking out book does not imply to bring the published The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre Created innovation has permitted you to read just the soft documents of the book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre It is very same. You may not have to go as well as obtain traditionally in browsing guide The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre You may not have sufficient time to invest, may you? This is why we offer you the most effective way to obtain the book The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story Of Love And Betrayal In World War One, By Ben Macintyre currently!

"I have a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade." Alan Seeger, 1916

In the first days of World War I four soldiers, left behind as the British army retreated through northern France under the first German onslaught, found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the Western Front, in a tiny village called Villeret. Just a few miles from the Somme, the village would be permanently inundated with German troops for the next four years, yet the villagers conspired to feed, clothe and protect the fugitives under the very noses of the invaders, absorbing the Englishmen into their homes and lives until they could pass for Picardy peasants.

The leader of the band, Robert Digby, was a striking young man who fell in love with Claire Dessenne, the prettiest maid in the village. In November 1915, with the guns clearly audible from the battlefront, Claire gave birth to Digby's child, the jealous whispering began, and the conspiracy that had protected the soldiers for half the war started to unravel.

Never before told, The Englishman's Daughter is a harrowing tale of love, duplicity and their tragic consequences, which haunt the people of Villeret eight decades after the Great War.

• Sales Rank: #802906 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.02" h x 6.20" w x 9.34" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 254 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Innumerable soldiers were stranded behind enemy lines in World War I some injured, some lost, some sole survivors of decimated regiments. Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime) has uncovered the story of a small band of English soldiers who, in 1914, were found and sheltered by the peasants of Villeret, a small French village near the Somme River. When the German occupiers became more intrusive in local life, billeting their troops in private homes and confiscating supplies, the French took a more collective approach to hiding the Brits sharing their food and housing among a network of families. One soldier was hidden in an armoire, another dressed as a girl; somehow, most did their best and eventually passed themselves off as locals. Private Robert Digby, the hero of this tale, blended in so successfully "It's almost like he was running for mayor," said one villager that he fell in love with the local belle, Claire Dessenne. At first, hiding the British was a unifying act of resistance, but by 1916, after years of hunger and occupation, solidarity broke. The four remaining British soldiers including Digby, now the father of young H‚lŠne Dessenne were rounded up and executed. Who turned them in? Claire's spurned rival? A spy turned informer? While Macintyre is satisfyingly thorough in his attempt to solve this long-buried mystery, he is even better at recreating the texture of day-to-day life in rural, occupied France. As readers grope with understanding our present war, they may find this more remote one oddly instructive. Weapons may change, but it's the people some treacherous, some brave, but most of them in between who count. B&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Ed Victor. (Jan.)Forecast: This title has the potential to break out of the war genre; fans of Michael Ondaatje and Jayne Ann Phillips should enjoy this tale of love and its consequences.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"War forges a few heroes and villains, but often it thrusts ordinary, frail people into a moral no-man's-land, forcing upon them choices or compromises they could never have anticipated." So it was for the townspeople of Villeret, France, who chose to hide a group of British soldiers caught behind enemy lines during World War I. It's a magnificent story and a stirring reminder that in times of war, bravery and self-sacrifice are not limited to the battlefield. Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime) focuses on a variety of gripping details: the occupying Germans' powerful fears of treachery, which led them to forbid all manner of activity, from hanging out laundry to barking dogs; the love affair between a young French girl and a British soldier; and, most of all, the courage and self-sacrifice of the townspeople, who risked their lives on a daily basis to hide these young soldiers. The book has some surprising twists that include such pure examples of love, betrayal, honor, and sacrifice that it is easy to forget that the story is absolutely true. Recommended for all libraries. Amy Strong, South Portland, ME
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"The Englishman's Daughter, though based on literal history, is as true as art." -- Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"A picaresque and, as the title suggests, romantic tale." -- Richard Eder, The New York Times

"A poignant love story set against the backdrop of war, tragedy, treachery . . . [that] turns into a page-turning mystery." -- Lyn MacDonald, The Times [London]

"Everything comes alive . . . the village feuds, the village characters . . . the hunger of the winter of 1914." -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Reads like a novel while succeeding as a sterling piece of investigative journalism." -- Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald

"[A] lovely, affecting book . . . Macintyre has pieced together a remarkably thorough account that has the ring of truth." -- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"[The] flickering survival of the not-too-distant past inside the present is often this fine writer's largest subject." -- Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review

Most helpful customer reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
good but not great
By Richard Kurtz
I enjoyed this book but was somewhat disappointed. I recognize how difficult it must be to write a non-fiction book about events that took place 80+ years ago..but somehow this book left me somewhat unsatisfied...it's as if McIntyre may have been better off writing it as a novel and taking more poetic license to make the story and the relatiosnhip between Robert and Claire and Robert and his fellow soldier-fugitives more dynamic and dramatic....I also felt that there was quite a bit of "filler" -- somewaht extraneous material of a general nature....but I liked it ..just didn't love it...

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Oppression, Heroism, Betrayal
By Rob Hardy
In 1997, Ben Macintyre, as Paris correspondent for _The Times_ of London, was called to a little village in Picardy. He was reluctant; the story was only that of a dedication of a plaque commemorating the execution by the Germans in World War I of four British soldiers who for two years had been hidden within the village of Villeret. He endured "God Save the Queen" excruciatingly played by the band from the local mental health institution, a decrepit honor guard, and some parochial proclamations of self-importance. One old, old lady in a wheelchair cornered the British representative to tell him how seven British soldiers had been protected by the village, and three had eventually escaped to Britain, and four had been shot. "That was in 1916," she explained. "I was six months old... Those seven British soldiers were our soldiers. One of them was my father."
Thus began Macintyre's research into a tragic romance, which he reports in _The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). It is a sad and almost forgotten episode from the first terrifying days of The Great War, and though he has had to rely on stories filtered through the generations, faulty memories and incomplete records, Macintyre has been able to bring out a fine story of ordinary people within the village. They are not very great heroes and not very great villains, just rustics trying to live through an intolerable situation. Private Robert Digby, along with seven other soldiers, was hidden by the villagers in a conscientious show of resistance. During the two years hiding, fell in love with the prettiest girl in the village, who bore him a daughter. Although this is a tragic love story, its strength is the picture of stressful and disastrous life under German occupation under the paranoid commandant, Major Evers. Eventually, the soldiers were betrayed and shot; Macintyre speculates who the traitor was: it could have been a suitor spurned by Claire, or a village woman interested in Digby, or a German sympathizer, or maybe just someone who wanted more food.

Macintyre's attempts to find who betrayed Digby, and indeed the slight but touching love story that is the reason for the book, take second place to his description of the grinding brutality of occupation and the response of different villagers to the pressure. Their novel moral burdens were shouldered or shirked as this independent and willful region, which had always preserved some idiosyncratic separation from the rest of France, was overcome by a war imposed by gigantic outside forces. The moral ambiguity of the story has been impressed on the descendants of the villagers, who even on the day to celebrate the commemorative plaque for the lost Englishmen eight decades later were reluctant to tell family stories. There is a fitting symbol within the book: Robert Dessenne, a cousin of Claire's and named for Digby, years after the war "was plowing in the fields when he struck an unexploded shell, and was blown to pieces."

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Chercher la femme
By Amazon Customer
The woman being searched for could be either THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER herself - an old French woman named Helene, whose father - Pvt. Robert Digby, is one of the central characters of this true story. Digby was an English soldier serving in France in 1914 during WWI. Or the author could be looking for the identity of the woman in the French song known by all the people of Villeret. A woman "so jealous and wicked" as one verse says, that she betrayed Digby and three other allied soldiers to the Germans. All four men were promptly executed. Three others managed to escape to Britain.
The villagers had initial success in hiding these seven soldiers, first in the nearby forest then in outlying buildings. The author - Ben Macintyre - clearly shows that the villagers had contrasting emotions. Honor and pride in hosting and looking after their guests, yet also trepidation and fear from recognition of the great risk that they were taking. As time passed it was decided to cease hiding the men and to try and incorporate them into village life. Macintyre creates an almost palpable sense of danger when writing that the villagers "set about the courageous but daunting task of turning these English and Irish soldiers into northern French peasants." Danger only grew as time stretched to two years. The year 1916 saw an increase in the German presence and the harsh rules of occupation enforced by the German commandant Major Karl Evers made the situation very trying indeed.
Poignancy enters by way of the ultimately doomed romance between Digby and Claire Dessenne, a beautiful young villager. Helene was the result but the cost was great. The relationship put a strain on the inherent kindness of the populace, the war was taking its toll, and the eagerness to continue hosting the soldiers began to wane. The outcome was the arrival on the morning of May 16th of a group of Germans at the sleeping quarters of Digby and three others. Their roundup and execution by month end in the neighboring village of Le Catelet provides the sad denouement of the romantic story but the end for Villeret came a year later when the Germans destroyed every building in the village as they withdrew.
We began with a quest and Macintyre ends the same way. The woman who betrayed the Englishmen may have been Claire's mother but there is reason to suspect others, most prominently Villeret's acting mayor, the postman, and the baker. Perhaps in keeping with the sadness of the story it is appropriate that in the final outcome we never know who.

See all 15 customer reviews...

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre PDF
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre EPub
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Doc
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre iBooks
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre rtf
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Mobipocket
The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Kindle

> Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Doc

> Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Doc

> Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Doc

> Download The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre Doc

# Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman

Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman

This is a few of the benefits to take when being the member and get guide Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman here. Still ask what's various of the various other website? We offer the hundreds titles that are produced by advised authors as well as publishers, all over the world. The connect to get and download Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman is also very easy. You could not discover the complex website that order to do even more. So, the way for you to get this Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman will be so simple, won't you?

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman

Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman

When you are rushed of task due date as well as have no concept to obtain motivation, Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman book is one of your options to take. Reserve Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman will give you the appropriate source as well as point to obtain inspirations. It is not only about the jobs for politic company, management, economics, and also various other. Some ordered jobs to make some fiction works also require inspirations to overcome the job. As exactly what you need, this Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman will possibly be your selection.

In some cases, checking out Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman is really uninteresting as well as it will take very long time beginning with obtaining guide and begin reading. Nevertheless, in modern era, you can take the creating modern technology by making use of the internet. By internet, you could visit this web page and begin to search for the book Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman that is needed. Wondering this Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman is the one that you need, you could go with downloading. Have you understood how to get it?

After downloading the soft file of this Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman, you could begin to review it. Yeah, this is so enjoyable while someone ought to check out by taking their huge publications; you are in your new way by just manage your gadget. Or perhaps you are operating in the workplace; you could still utilize the computer to check out Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman fully. Naturally, it will certainly not obligate you to take lots of web pages. Merely page by page relying on the time that you have to review Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman

After understanding this very simple method to check out and also get this Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman, why do not you inform to others about through this? You could inform others to visit this web site and go for searching them favourite books Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman As known, below are lots of lists that offer several kinds of publications to gather. Merely prepare few time and net connections to obtain guides. You can truly enjoy the life by checking out Longitudes And Attitudes: Exploring The World After September 11, By Thomas L. Friedman in a really simple way.

America's leading observer of the international scene on the minute-by-minute events of September 11th--before, during and after

As the Foreign Affairs columnist for the The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman is in a unique position to interpret the world for American readers. Twice a week, Friedman's celebrated commentary provides the most trenchant, pithy,and illuminating perspective in journalism.

Longitudes and Attitudes contains the columns Friedman has published about the most momentous news story of our time, as well as a diary of his experiences and reactions during this period of crisis. As the author writes, the book is "not meant to be a comprehensive study of September 11 and all the factors that went into it. Rather, my hope is that it will constitute a 'word album' that captures and preserves the raw, unpolished, emotional and analytical responses that illustrate how I, and others, felt as we tried to grapple with September and its aftermath, as they were unfolding."

Readers have repeatedly said that Friedman has expressed the essence of their own feelings, helping them not only by explaining who "they" are, but also by reassuring us about who "we" are. More than any other journalist writing, Friedman gives voice to America's awakening sense of its role in a changed world.

• Sales Rank: #335228 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-11
• Released on: 2002-09-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.28" w x 6.31" l, 1.50 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 383 pages

Features

• Pulitzer Prize Winning author Thomas Friedman

From Publishers Weekly
"History just took a right turn into a blind alley," comments the New York Times columnist in his latest book, "and something very dear has just been taken away from us." Tackling this observation from many different angles, this lucid book, consisting of Friedman's exceptionally frank and convincing columns and an insightful post-September 11 diary, prods at the questions surrounding that day and offers an invaluable reporter's perspective on the world from outside U.S. borders. The columns, which are the bulk of the book, represent a comprehensive album of the past two years ranging from the usefulness of building a missile shield to analyzing the structure of Arab societies yet they rarely stray from the central theme of promoting thoughtful and measured consideration of the U.S.' role in the world. However, the previously unpublished diary offers the most insight to the state of the world after September 11. Stranded in Israel during the attacks, Friedman ended up traveling throughout the Middle East, discovering how the terrorist attacks affected the region and uncovering many of the roots of anti-American sentiment, which he aptly describes alongside his reflections on watching his daughter's multicultural middle-school chorus sing "God Bless America." Unapologetically pro-American, Friedman's deliberation on what changed on September 11 outside of the U.S. ultimately centers on the strength of American society and our place in the world.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, Friedman gathers pieces for what he calls a "word album" of recent events.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This is a repackaging of Friedman's New York Times columns from September 2001 through June 2002, with a lengthy postscript describing Friedman's travels and interviews throughout this period. The one article in this batch likely to draw the most attention is his February 17, 2002, column in which the heir to the Saudi Arabian throne proposed a land-for-peace resolution, premised on Israel's 1967 borders. Whatever its merits--and it predictably foundered in the real world's storm of Islamic terrorists and certain governments vowing the utter destruction of Israel and Jews--Friedman learned significant things in conversation with the Saudi ruler, educated Saudis, and others in the Muslim world. He recounts their doubts that the September 11 terrorists were Saudi grown, their proclivity for bizarre conspiracy-thinking (anti-Semitic, of course) to explain or even justify the atrocity, and numberless complaints about America. With these disquieting attitudes discussed from the lectern, Friedman's 16-city promotional tour will undoubtedly be an animated and heated one. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Send it to your friends abroad!!
By A Customer
That's exactly what I'm doing. This book does a great job of trying to explain the position of the US in the world since 9/11. This is my first encounter with Mr Friedman's work and I was not disappointed. The book does a great job of addressing the fact that the US seems to have become a target of hate in today's world. It is amazing how accurately he pinpoints the sentiments shared by non americans regarding our country. An eye opener.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Great Understanding
By A Customer
...every page delivers words and thoughts that make you think. While we may not always agree with everything the author says, he at least has the courage to open a serious dialogue about the effects of bigotry, theocracies, and flawed policies. I have lived and worked in the North Africa/Middle East region for more than 20 years and recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this subject. Well done Mr. Friedman!

113 of 131 people found the following review helpful.
Likely to stand as the great work on post-9/11
By Robert Moore
This is a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winning columns that Friedman wrote for the New York Times reflecting both on the factors that went into the events of September 11 and the world that it created. Like all of his work, these essays are marked by phenomenal insight and enormous intelligence. Most of these are available on Friedman's own website, but they are definitely worth owning in a bound volume. Over the years, I have found myself going back to his FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM over and over to understand the situation in the Middle East, and many will find the same kind of insight and understanding in this volume.
The way that the essays in this book differ from his other work in FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM and THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE is the intensely personal tone of many of the essays. Friedman often writes not from an objective point of view, but of how he is feeling, what he is thinking as he reflects on the fallen Towers, and of his own very specific reactions. In this way, these essays contain strong elements of memoir. A hundred years from now, they will be read as one very intelligent and perceptive journalist's reactions to one of the most traumatic disasters in American history. They are valuable as much for emotional reflections as for his objective analyses. The genius of these essays derives from the fact that he in no way attempts to minimize the tragedy and horror of 9/11, while in no way ignoring his own grief and perplexity or, and this is the tough part, losing his remarkable perspective as a journalist or resorting to trite generalizations to explain and analyze the greater global situation.
For fans of Friedman's columns and previous books, this will be an immensely satisfying book. For those unfamiliar with his other work, they will find here a work of great insight and emotional honesty on perhaps the great horror in American history since Vietnam and perhaps Pearl Harbor. I recommend this book in the strongest possible terms.

See all 108 customer reviews...

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman PDF
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman EPub
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Doc
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman iBooks
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman rtf
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Mobipocket
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Kindle

# Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Doc

# Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Doc

# Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Doc

# Free Ebook Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, by Thomas L. Friedman Doc