Past Imperfect

Author: Julian Fellowes
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429929170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
From the creator of the Emmy Award-winning Downton Abbey... "Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while...." Nearly forty years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season. The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud's. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing—and it was, but not always quite as expected. Past Imperfect is Julian Fellowes at his best--a novel of secrets, status, and a world in upheaval.

Past Imperfect

Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520086500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of Tony Judt's newest book. He analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how post-war political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals. Judt's analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable "Existentialist" personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike. Judt treats the intellectual dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished history. French intellectuals have not fully come to terms with the gnawing sense of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of those years. The result, he suggests, is a legacy of bad faith and confusion that has damaged France's cultural standing, notably in newly liberated Eastern Europe, and which reflects the nation's larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past.

Past Imperfect

Author: Mark C. Carnes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805037609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Essays that consider how classic movies have reflected history include the writings of such noted historians as Paul Fussell, Antonia Fraser, and Gore Vidal.

Past Imperfect

Author: Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586485946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant. That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.

Past Imperfect

Author: Lawrence W. Towner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226810423
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
The essays and talks gathered in Past Imperfect cover a broad range of topics of continuing relevance to the humanities and to scholarship in general. Part I collects Towner's historical essays on the indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves of colonial New England that are standards of the "new social history." The pieces in Part II express his vision of the library as an institution for research and education; here he discusses the rationale for the creation of research centers, the Newberry's pioneering policies for conservation and preservation, and the ways in which collections were built. In Part III Towner writes revealingly of his co-workers and mentors. Part IV assembles his statements as "spokesman for the humanities," addressing questions of national priorities in funding, and of so-called elitist scholarship versus public programs.

Past Imperfect

Author: Joan Collins
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9780671473600
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
The beautiful and talented actress recounts her professional and personal life, from her childhood in England, through her three broken marriages and love affairs, to her daughter's accident and recovery

Past Imperfect

Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814743927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Swept up in the vortex of communism, French postwar intellectuals developed a blind spot to Stalinist tyranny. Albert Camus, who had been an authentic moral voice of the Resistance, pretended not to know about the crimes and terrors of the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre perverted logic to make an apologia for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir called for social change to be brought about in a single convulsion, or else not at all. Foolish French thinkers, suffering self-imposed moral anesthesia, defended the credibility of the show trials in Stalinized Eastern Europe. In a devastating study, Judt, a professor of European studies at New York University, argues that the belief system of postwar intellectuals, propped up by faith in communism, reflected fatal weaknesses in French culture such as the fragility of the liberal tradition and the penchant for grand theory. He also strips away the postwar myth that the small, fighting French Resistance was assisted by the mass of the nation.

Past Imperfect

Author: Robert Harlan Moser
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595263887
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
"If Moser had not lived the life he sets down in this memoir, he would have had a hard time inventing it. As fiction, it would seem too picaresque, too filled with wonderful adventure, harrowing moments, travel, romance, eccentric, intellectual challenges, and all the rewards and hardships of an extraordinary life in medicine. But Moser has lived it and his art as a writer keeps pace with his animated life as a doctor. The result is a book that takes a reader into the heart of medicine, and into the heart of this fascinating man This is a lofty book, by a man who has dared to climb to the heights of life, and now writes of what there is to see." Paul Trachtman Former Science Editor Smithsonian Magazine

Past Imperfect

Author: Linda Thayer
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 1449731015
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
Jules Mullins is, in all respects, a normal grounded twenty-something—with one exception. Since she was a small child, she’s dreamed about a group of people she’s never met—a violent bunch who speak barely discernable English, wear peculiar clothing, and completely ignore her. She learned early on not to discuss her dreams. Adults would pat her on the head and tell her she had “quite the imagination,” while other children just found her stories creepy. As the years passed, her dreams became more frequent and intense. Jules worried that she might be losing her sanity. Then she met Claire Wilder, a new age bookstore owner with an entirely different viewpoint: Jules wasn’t dreaming; she was remembering a life she lived almost 500 years ago. Claire is also an ‘old soul.’ The quest to discover their identities in centuries past leads them on a metaphysical mystery tour they never forget! Reviews on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Westbow Press about Past Imperfect: A real page turner, a very well written book - exciting, suspenseful, creative. Was a very GREAT READ. Well worth your time. Engaging - Imaginative! This story captivates you from the first - you care about the characters and miss them between readings. You want to go visit the sites they explore and walk with them through their past memories. I would and have recommended this book to others looking for a good supernatural adventure. Linda Thayer gives such a great descriptive narrative about sixteenth-century England. The characters in this book were people that lived ordinary lives in present-day America, but after taking a trip to England wonder if reincarnation does exist as they remember, through dreams, the parts they played in Henry VIII's court. The story places you right at the heart of it all as these characters ask themselves, "am I who I think I am?" It sure does make one think, and wonder if there was another "me" in another life. Truly Creative Writing - A Startling Story Within the first few pages, I forgot I was reading. This story of a repeating dream, of returning home to where you have never been, the intersection of personalities before words -- this is the fun of Past Imperfect. I was scared and delighted. Thayer's story is fresh, a historical and eerie thriller. I hope this book finds more readers. It would make a great movie!

Past Imperfect

Author: Pierre-Philippe Fraiture
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1800348401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
This book proposes to examine French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ethnology, museology, sociology, and (art) history. In this discussion, a specific focus is placed on temporality and the role ascribed by these different disciplines to African pasts, presents, and futures. It is argued here that the post-war context, characterized, inter alia, by the creation of UNESCO, the birth of Pr�sence Africaine and the prevalence of existentialism, bore witness to the development of new regimes of historicity and to the partial refutation of a progress-based modernity. This investigation is predicated on case studies from West and Central Africa (AOF, AEF and Belgian Congo) and, whilst adopting a postcolonial methodology, it explores African and French authors such as Georges Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chris Marker, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Claude L�vi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre and Placide Tempels. This study explores the intellectual legacy of the 'long nineteenth century' and the difficulty encountered by these authors to articulate their anti-colonial agenda away from the modern methodologies of the 'colonial library'. By focussing on issues of intellectual alienation, this book also demonstrates that the post-WW2 period foreshadowed twenty-first century debates on extroversion, racial inequalities, the decolonization of history, and cultural (mis)appropriation.