Author: Rachael Weiss Publisher: Allen & Unwin ISBN: 1741159229 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
Armed with a romantic soul and a pressing need to escape her overbearing family, Rachael Weiss heads for Prague with vague plans to write a great novel and perhaps, just perhaps, fall madly in love with an exotic Czech man with high cheekbones. They make it seem so easy, those other women who write of uprooting themselves from everything they know, crossing the world and forming effortless friendships with strangers?despite not understanding a word they say?while reinventing themselves in beautiful European cities. So it's not surprising that Rachael is completely unprepared for the reali.
Author: Rachael Weiss Publisher: Atlantic Books ISBN: 1925576175 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
When Rachael Weiss left a good job, Thelma the cat and a normal life in Sydney for the romantic dream of being a writer in Prague she intended to stay forever. She lasted just three years, exasperated by the eccentricities of her ancestral city and its mind-boggling bureaucracy and customs. In this surprising and generous memoir full of warmth and unstoppable sociability, Rachael attempts to write her great novel, buy an apartment (any apartment!), dodge unscrupulous employers, and perhaps find love. She gets lost in the woods with a Kyrgyzstani software engineer who wants to eat humans, finds herself leading services at the Spanish synagogue with no real idea of what she is doing and spends long nights drinking beer with a colourful cast of crazy, warm and slightly mad locals and expats. Rich in absurdities and gentle humour, The Thing About Prague... is rife with insight, culture clashes, friendships and above all charm.
Author: Umberto Eco Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0547577613 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
The Prague Cemetery is the #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? “Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale... Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” —The New York Times
Author: Peter Demetz Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 1429930357 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.
Author: Madeleine Albright Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062030361 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 474
Book Description
“A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy.” -- Los Angeles Times Drawn from her own memory, her parents’ written reflections, and interviews with contemporaries, the former US Secretary of State and New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Albright's tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright’s life was shaken by some of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted genocide of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. In Prague Winter, Albright reflects on her discovery of her family’s Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland’s tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is simultaneously a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history. It serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past, as seen through the eyes of one of the international community’s most respected and fascinating figures in history. Albright and her family’s experiences provide an intensely human lens through which to view the most political and tumultuous years in modern history.
Author: Rachael Weiss Publisher: Allen & Unwin ISBN: 1760111023 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
This is the story of a freewheeling Aussie girl who gives up her life in Sydney to return to Prague, her ancestral home, intending to live there for the rest of her life. In fact, she lasted there for three years before visa restrictions and disillusionment caused her to leave the country. Even though she is at times exasperated by the petty bureaucracy and customs of a country that values beer and potatoes above everything else, and even though she is frustrated by her attempts to master a very difficult language (only spoken by 10 million people), her efforts to engage both socially and romantically with the locals are wonderfully funny. Social embarrassment and mortification rub shoulders with the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that inspired Kafka in former times. 'The Thing About Prague 'is a surprising and generous memoir full of warmth and Rachael's unstoppable sociability...
Author: Miriam Darvas Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing ISBN: 9780967370149 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Farewell to Prague is a memoir set against the turbulent events of the Nazi era in Germany and World War II England. It is the story of a girl who, at the age of six, witnesses a murder being committed by German Storm Troopers. From that moment, the happy life she has known disintegrates. Her family escapes to Prague, where they create a new life. Six years later, the Germans march into Prague. Now she has to escape to England alone and on foot. She walks across the snow-covered Tatar Mountains. By train, fishing boat, and ship, she finally manages to get to England. She comes of age there during the bombing of London. When the war ends, she immediately returns to the Continent to discover the fate of her family. Farewell to Prague is a gripping true story that will fascinate and inspire readers of all ages.
Author: Polly Grace Publisher: Page Publishing Inc ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
Experience a sixty-eight-year journey through the eyes of the author From the horrors of WWII to the hills of Oregon From astrophysics to watercolors From presidents and celebrities to barstool buddies From riches to rags and back again From Sax Fifth Avenue to the local grocery store From gourmet dining to "meat and 'tatoes" From Pennsylvania to Oregon, envision the journey
Author: Andrew Beattie Publisher: Interlink Publishing ISBN: 1623710561 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.
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Author: Rachael Weiss
Author: Rachael Weiss
Author: Rachael Weiss
Author: Umberto Eco
Author: Peter Demetz
Author: Madeleine Albright
Author: Rachael Weiss
Author: Miriam Darvas
Author: Polly Grace
Author: Andrew Beattie