The narrator of Ivan Klima's novel has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress -an essay on Kafka -and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and,
This is a remarkable historical and psychological examination of the enigma of Adolf Hitler--who he was, how he wielded power, and why he was destined to fail.Beginning with Hitler's early life, Sebastian Haffner probes the historical, political, and emot
This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rudiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and c
One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story
Albert Speer was an unemployed architect when Hitler came to power in 1933. Soon he was designing the Third Reich's most important buildings. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments Minister and he quadrupled production, an astonishing achievement that kep
"(Folsing) provides a nuanced, nonjudgmental personal portrait resting firmly on prodigious archival work. Albert Einstein allows us to see deeply into (his) inner world". -- Alan Lightman, The New York Review of BooksThe name of Albert Einstein has becom
In 1984, Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986) was the first Czech to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although Seifert lived through the many historic turns of his homeland, his was not a political poetry, except in its constant expression of love for his home
For twenty years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he's conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, 'The Sense of Hearing.' As the story begins, he's just blown the head off
