Prague Winter

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.

The Other Dark Matter

Author: Lina Zeldovich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661557X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
The history of human waste. How I learned to love the excrement; The early history of human excreta; Treasure nigh soil as if it were gold!; The water closet dilemma and the sewage farm paradigm; Germs, fertilizer, and the poop police -- The present: a sludge revolution in progress. The great sewage time bomb and the redistribution of nutrients on the planet; Loowatt, a loo that turns waste into watts; The crap that cooks your dinner and container-based sanitation; HomeBiogas : your personal digester in a box; Made in New York; Lystek, the home of sewage smoothies; How DC water makes biosolids BLOOM; From biosolids to biofuels -- The future of medicine and other things; Poop : the best (and cheapest medicine; Looking where the sun doesn't shine; From the kindness of one's gut : an insider look into stool banks -- Afterword : breathing poetry into poop.

Reflections of Prague

Author: Ivan Margolius
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118387325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
Reflections of Prague is the story of how a Czech Jewish family become embroiled in the most tragic and tumultuous episodes of the twentieth century. Through their eyes we see the history of their beloved Prague, a unique European city, and the wider, political forces that tear their lives apart. Their moving story traces the major events, turmoil, oppression and triumphs of Europe through the last hundred years – from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the First World War; from the vibrant artistic and intellectual life of Prague in the times of Kafka, the Capek Brothers and Masaryk to years of hunger in a Polish ghetto and the concentration camps of Hitler; from the tyrannous rule of Stalin to the rekindled hopes of Dubcek and the subsequent Soviet occupation to liberation under Havel. Told from Ivan’s perspective, it is a poignant but uplifting tale that tells of life lived with purpose and conviction, in the face of personal suffering and sacrifice. ‘A remarkable book. This archetypical story of the twentieth century is intertwined with an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative of the history of the Czechs, of Prague, interspersed with samples of exquisite poetry by great contemporary poets. So the narrative flows like Eliot’s sweet Thames full of the debris of tragic lives, of horrors, of moments of beauty and testimonies of love – all against the backdrop of man’s inhumanity.’ Josef Škvorecký ‘A poignant and vivid mémoire of a child searching for traces of his father, lost in the murky ideologies of post war Central Europe. An engrossing book.’ Sir John Tusa

Prague in Danger

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.

Statistical Rethinking

Author: Richard McElreath
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1315362619
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan builds readers’ knowledge of and confidence in statistical modeling. Reflecting the need for even minor programming in today’s model-based statistics, the book pushes readers to perform step-by-step calculations that are usually automated. This unique computational approach ensures that readers understand enough of the details to make reasonable choices and interpretations in their own modeling work. The text presents generalized linear multilevel models from a Bayesian perspective, relying on a simple logical interpretation of Bayesian probability and maximum entropy. It covers from the basics of regression to multilevel models. The author also discusses measurement error, missing data, and Gaussian process models for spatial and network autocorrelation. By using complete R code examples throughout, this book provides a practical foundation for performing statistical inference. Designed for both PhD students and seasoned professionals in the natural and social sciences, it prepares them for more advanced or specialized statistical modeling. Web Resource The book is accompanied by an R package (rethinking) that is available on the author’s website and GitHub. The two core functions (map and map2stan) of this package allow a variety of statistical models to be constructed from standard model formulas.

A Prague Spring, Before & After

Author: Michael Salcman
Publisher: Evening Street Press
ISBN: 1937347338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
A work of great rage, sorrow, and love, Michael Salcman’s majestic A Prague Spring tells an almost unbearable story that needs to be told over and over and never forgotten. Beginning with coldly matter-of-fact poems of family members lost to and escaping the Shoah, Salcman documents how his parents survived and met, and how he got along in Brooklyn, the glorious borough of his childhood, baseball’s Dodgers, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, he doubles back to visit the country of his birth. And in a series of stunning poems, a prose piece, and a final poem to his cousin Magda, Salcman ties together past and present, and gives us one more glimpse into the soul of a survivor, two really, his older cousin, and himself. —Robert Cooperman, author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry A Prague Spring is a beautiful blend of the lyric imagination with historical and autobiographical facts. In this book, ignorance, cruelty, and murder lose. Art, and the truth, wins. —Thomas Lux, Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and author of God Particles A Prague Spring is a near-epic book of history poems, interweaving the story of Prague with the Holocaust, family deaths and survivals, a book that stuns the reader with the enormities and sorrows of Time. Salcman uses the compression of narrative, meditative and lyric poetry to “bring you looted treasures: History’s twisted snakes.” Here we find a Holocaust survivor who is “a stick leaning on a stick, / an insect on a branch” as well as the backwards-running Jewish clock of Prague (“What city tells time like Prague?”) counterpoised with Salcman’s Brooklyn: “sweet / borough of my youth, heart and lung / of life.” Kafka and Salcman's ancestors haunt the Czech capital where “a pile of dust once pushed a cart of salt and spices / on a medieval street.” The poems revisit totalitarian defenestrations, slaughters and repressions as they recount, wonder and pray, all the time knowing “the brain is a savage beast, it eats when and what / no other organ eats….” At once autobiography, history, testimonial and memorial, A Prague Spring is a revolutionary collection of important and necessary poems, confidently written and—especially with Salcman’s tonal skills—always absorbing; it is further deepened by how perfectly Lynn Silverman’s dark photographs of Prague capture that ancient city’s shadows and ghosts. —Dick Allen, Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010-2015) and author of This Shadowy Place, Present Vanishing, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected

Time's Magpie

Author: Myla Goldberg
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307422526
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Sometimes a city can be like a bird. Just as the magpie is an inveterate collector, hoarding beautiful eclectic bits to line its nest, so Prague retains fragments from bygone regimes and centuries past to create a city of juxtaposition that is alternately exquisite and bizarre. Prague’s personality is expressed as much by its obvious beauty as by its overlooked details. This unforgettable place is brought to life by acclaimed author Myla Goldberg, a former Prague expat, whose first novel, Bee Season, captivated so many with its unique voice and exhilarating prose. Myla Goldberg lived in Prague in 1993, just as the process of Westernization was getting under way, the city straddling a past it wished to shed and a future it was eager to embrace. In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe the integral ways in which Prague’s character had endured. In Time’s Magpie, Goldberg explores a city where centuries-old buildings have become receptacles for Western values and a generation defined by the Communist regime coexists with a generation for whom Communism is a rapidly fading memory. Wander through the narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets to places most tourists never see—to a neighborhood eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to an anachronistic amusement park that is home to a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and to the cabinets of curiosity in the Strahov Monastery, where hidden among deceptively modest displays of butterfly specimens and ladies’ fans are creatures that defy the laws of taxidermy. This imaginative, individualistic journey will show you the odd and unique corners of a city often seeking to erase what its very stones will not allow it to forget.

Prague in Black and Gold

Author: Peter Demetz
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429930640
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.

Prague Pictures

Author: John Banville
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408820714
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, 'devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art', who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, or even the depredations of the tourist boom after the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it, the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels, and paints a portrait of the Prague of today, revelling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, when he engaged in a spot of art smuggling, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.

The Prague Coup

Author: Jean-Luc Fromental
Publisher: Titan Comics
ISBN: 1785869647
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
Winter 1948. Vienna. Debriefed by London Films, former spy turned novelist Graham Greene works on the screenplay for his next feature film, assisted by the enigmatic Elizabeth Montagu. However, Greene’s visit soon proves to be just as mysterious as his best-selling thrillers, winding through Vienna’s shadowy underground before the author finds himself in the midst of an intricate plot to unseat the government of Czechoslovakia in an event that would be remembered as The Prague Coup. Jean-Luc Fromental seamlessly merges fact and fiction in a spy thriller worthy of its protagonist, Graham Greene, who finds himself caught in a web of intrigue, espionage, and murder while writing the screenplay that would become the 1949 classic ‘The Third Man’ starring Orson Welles. “This will hook you from its opening panels. Plenty of intrigue, a killer plot, and evocative visuals. What more could you want?” – LA Review of Books