biography europe

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st , 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. The story of Pierre Matisse, his father, Henri Matisse, his gallery in NY and the European artists he introduced to America. 415 pages. Color, black & white illust. Dj price clipped.

Hardcover. Saint Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum/Prestel-Verlag, 1st US, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 482 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. illustrated throughout with 297 plates in full color and black & white. Light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. San Diego, Harcourt Brace,, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 839 pages, contains two glossy black and white plates sections. This major work, the result of years of careful study and analysis, places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe. The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.

Hardcover. Schirmer Reference, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 271 pages. The last decade of Mozart's short but amazingly prolific career counts as one of the most remarkable periods--truly golden years--in the history of Western music. Richly illustrated with contemporary paintings and engravings and authoritatively written, this book provides a vivid account of the composer's life in the European music capital, Vienna, from 1781 to 1791. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Arthur L Humphreys, 2nd pr., 1900, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt staping. 261 pages including index. 261 pages. Written almost 80 years after the Emperor's death, the author attempts to bring together all the contemporary biographies and memoirs relating to the sojourn on St Helena. Mild foxing, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 326 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937) was the pre-eminent portrait artist working in Britain between 1907 and 1937. He painted nearly 3,000 portraits, including those of kings and queens, four American presidents and members of the European nobility. This title gives an account of both his life and his work. Laid in is a printout of email exchanges between the author and previous owner revealing some of his research methods. Previous owner's sticker on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages, illustrations. Philip II of Spain--ruler of the most extensive empire the world had ever known--has been viewed in a harsh and negative light since his death in 1598. Identified with repression, bigotry, and fanaticism by his enemies, he has been judged more by the political events of his reign than by his person. This book, published four hundred years after Philip's death, is the first full-scale biography of the king. Placing him within the social, cultural, religious, and regional context of his times, it presents a startling new picture of his character and reign. Drawing on Philip's unpublished correspondence and on many other archival sources, Henry Kamen reveals much about Philip the youth, the man, the husband, the father, the frequently troubled Christian, and the king. Kamen finds that Philip was a cosmopolitan prince whose extensive experience of northern Europe broadened his cultural imagination and tastes, whose staunchly conservative ideas were far from being illiberal and fanatical, whose religious attitudes led him to accept a practical coexistence with Protestants and Jews, and whose support for Las Casas and other defenders of the Indians in America helped determine government policy. Shedding completely new light on most aspects of Philip's private life and, in consequence, on his public actions, the book is the definitive portrayal of Philip II. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washinton DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Hine became famous for his photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island, child laborers and European war refugees, and for his later celebrations of industrial workers.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 287 pages. Pieter Bruegel (ca. 1525-1569), generally considered the greatest Flemish painter of the sixteenth century, was described in 1604 by his earliest biographer as a supremely comic artist, few of whose works failed to elicit laughter. Today, however, we approach Bruegel's art as anything but a laughing matter. His paintings and drawings are thought to conceal profound allegories best illuminated with scholarly erudition. In this delightfully engaging book, Walter S. Gibson takes a new look at Bruegel, arguing that the artist was no erudite philosopher, but a man very much in the world, and that a significant part of his art is best appreciated in the context of humor. In his illuminating examination of the witty and amusing elements in Bruegel's paintings, prints, and drawings in relation to the sixteenth century European culture of laughter, Gibson reminds us exactly why Bruegel was one of the most original artists of his time. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages, in a bright unclipped dust jacket, b&w illustrations. Pola Negri (1897-1987) rose from an impoverished childhood in Warsaw, Poland, to become one of early Hollywood's greatest stars. After tuberculosis ended her career as a ballerina in 1912, she turned to acting and worked under legendary directors Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch in Germany. Negri preceded Lubitsch to Hollywood, where she quickly became a fan favorite thanks to her beauty, talent, and diva personality. Known for her alluring sexuality and biting artistic edge, she starred in more than sixty films and defined the image of the cinematic femme fatale. Author Mariusz Kotowski brings the screen siren's story to English-speaking audiences for the first time in this fascinating biography. At the height of her fame, Negri often portrayed exotic and mysterious temptresses, headlining in such successes as The Spanish Dancer (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (1924), before returning to Europe in the 1930s. The devastating effects of World War II soon drove her back to the United States, where she starred in Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and pursued her vaudeville career before retiring from the entertainment industry. Kotowski also illuminates Negri's dramatic personal life, detailing her numerous love affairs-including her engagement to Charlie Chaplin and her romance with Rudolph Valentino-as well as her multiple marriages. This long-overdue biography not only paints a detailed portrait of one classic Hollywood's most intriguing stars and the film industry's original Jezebel, but also explores the link between Hollywood and European cinema during the interwar years.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and rubbed dust jacket, 548 pages. A biography of the famous CBS radio and television newsman Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965). Much of what Americans knew about the events in Europe during World War II were learned from Murrow's broadcasts. After the war, Murrow was a regular on prime-time television. B&w illustrations, index and bibliography. Spine faded. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 255 pages. Hardcover. Full color and black & white illustrations. Remainder marks on top edge at spine. Light wear. Clean, unmarked copy.

Toronto, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclippws dust jacket. Road Games is a passionate, engrossing and authoritative chronicle of the extraordinary 1992-93 NHL season, one that ended with an inquiry into whether or not the Ottawa Senators deliverately "tanked it" to secure their first overall draft pick of hockey's newest sensation, Alexandre Daigle. This was the season that Mario Lemieux's involvement in a sordid scandal was forgotten when he overcame cancer to win the scoring title; Doug Gilmour emerged as one of the game's finest players; and European stars Selanne, Bure, Mogilny and Fedorov rose to preeminence, while the North American hockey heroes-Gretzky, Lemieux, and Lindros-endured a season marked by injury, sickness, disturbing controversy and moving comeback. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 2nd Printing, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 448 pages. Illustrated with 16 pages of black & white photographs. Dust jacket with wear and darkening along top edge. Clean, tight copy.

NY, Crown, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The monumental life of Benjamin Rush, medical pioneer and one of our most provocative and unsung Founding Fathers. By the time he was thirty, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin's protege, and become John Adams's confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington's surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment. As the new republic coalesced, he became a visionary writer and reformer; a medical pioneer whose insights and reforms revolutionized the treatment of mental illness; an opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion, or gender; an adviser to, and often the physician of, America's first leaders; and "the American Hippocrates." Rush reveals his singular life and towering legacy, installing him in the pantheon of our wisest and boldest Founding Fathers.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press;, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Saul Steinberg (1914-99) described himself as a "writer who draws," thus inspiring curator Smith to characterize Steinberg's brilliantly satiric drawings as "illuminations," thus linking his work to illuminated manuscripts and, given Steinberg's love of literature, to a particular favorite, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations. Smith also explores Steinberg's mission to illuminate the overlooked and the absurd. In the biographical sections of his beautifully crafted critique, Smith affectingly recounts Steinberg's life as a Jew in anti-Semitic Romania and an architecture student in Fascist Milan whose distinctive cartoons served as his ticket out of Nazi Europe and onto the pages of the New Yorker. Both Smith and renowned poet Charles Simic associate Steinberg's fascination with documents with his harrowing refugee experiences, while Simic, a fellow immigrant from the Balkans and a friend of Steinberg's, offers striking insights into the artist's comic sensibility. Both commentators reflect on the great change in Steinberg's work after 1960, as his images turned hallucinatory and nightmarish, his protest against tyranny more intense. As instantly recognizable as Steinberg's kinetic, punning, and slyly skewering art is, there hasn't been a comprehensive Steinberg book in years, making this outstanding volume invaluable in its reclamation of Steinberg's agile, philosophic, and category-defying art.

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages, Color photos by Ara Guller. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Sleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book. In his greatest works, he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. John L Caulon, 1st, 1880, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 87 pages, brown cloth covers with gilt lettering on front. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Washington, Prestel, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 288 pages. Softcover. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. This book pays tribute to the mature work of Stuart Davis, a distinctly American artist who adapted European modernism to reflect the sights, sounds, and rhythms of popular culture. Beginning in 1921, a series of creative breakthroughs led Davis away from figurative painting and toward a more abstract expression of the world he inhabited. Drawing upon his admiration for Cezanne, Leger, Picasso, and Seurat, Davis developed a style that would evolve over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. His visionary responses to modern life and culture both high and low remain relevant more than 50 years after his death. Focusing on the images and motifs that became hallmarks of his career, this book features approximately 100 works-from his paintings of tobacco packages of the early 1920s, the abstract Egg Beater series, and the WPA murals of the 1930s, to the majestic works of his last two decades. The authors take a critical approach to the development of Davis's art and theory, paying special attention to the impact his earlier work had upon his later masterpieces. They also discuss Davis's unique ability to assimilate the lessons of Cubism as well as the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz-his great musical passion. Informed by previously unpublished primary documents, the detailed chronology is, in effect, the first Davis biography. Together, these elements create a vital portrait of an artist whose works hum with intelligence and energy.

Softcover. Bloomington IN, iUniverse, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 155 pages including epilogue. This is the story of Checiny, the author's hometown in southern Poland, and of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the 20th Century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. 411 pages; index; 24 illustrations, including color frontispiece of Abigail and John; from the Introduction: " 'The Book of Abigail and John' is a Bicentennial updating of Charles Francis Adams' contribution ('Familiar Letters') to the nation's Centennial. It contains what the present editors consider the best letters of John and Abigail Adams, written from their courtship beginning late in 1762 to their reunion in Europe in August 1784.To these letters have been added a number of letters to "third parties" and selected diary and autobiographical passages that reveal the two as man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Crosby Nichols and Co., 2nd Ed., 1853, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, embossed and textured dark green cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Title page in red and black states "From the Second English Edition". 322 pages. A book that delves into the personal and religious life of Charles V, one of the most powerful monarchs in European history. The book explores Charles V's decision to abdicate his throne and retire to a monastery, where he lived out the remainder of his life in seclusion and contemplation. Stirling provides a detailed account of Charles V's daily routine, his spiritual practices, and his interactions with the monks and other inhabitants of the monastery. The book also sheds light on the political and cultural context of Charles V's reign, including his conflicts with the Protestant Reformation and his relationships with other European leaders. Endpapers with residue, owner'e stamp on blank prelim page. A solid but edgeworn copy.

Hardcover. NY, WW Norton, 1wst, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A landmark collection, spanning ninety years of U.S. history, of the never-before-published diaries of George F. Kennan, America's most famous diplomat. Through it all, Kennan kept a diary. Spanning a staggering eighty-eight years and totaling over 8,000 pages, his journals brim with keen political and moral insights, philosophical ruminations, poetry, and vivid descriptions. In these pages, we see Kennan rambling through 1920s Europe as a college student, despairing for capitalism in the midst of the Depression, agonizing over the dilemmas of sex and marriage, becoming enchanted and then horrified by Soviet Russia, and developing into America's foremost Soviet analyst. But it is the second half of this near-century-long record--the blossoming of Kennan the gifted author, wise counselor, and biting critic of the Vietnam and Iraq wars--that showcases this remarkable man at the height of his singular analytic and expressive powers, before giving way, heartbreakingly, to some of his most human moments, as his energy, memory, and finally his ability to write fade away.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John Matteson, an account of the "Susan Sontag" of nineteenth-century America.A brilliant writer and a fiery social critic, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was perhaps the most famous American woman of her generation. Outspoken and quick-witted, idealistic and adventurous, she became the leading female figure in the transcendentalist movement, wrote a celebrated column of literary and social commentary for Horace Greeley's newspaper, and served as the first foreign correspondent for an American newspaper. While living in Europe she fell in love with an Italian nobleman, with whom she became pregnant out of wedlock. In 1848 she joined the fight for Italian independence and, the following year, reported on the struggle while nursing the wounded within range of enemy cannons. Amid all these strivings and achievements, she authored the first great work of American feminism: Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Despite her brilliance, however, Fuller suffered from self-doubt and was plagued by ill health. John Matteson captures Fuller's longing to become ever better, reflected by the changing lives she led. 28 black-and-white illustrations. Smallbump to top corner otherwise like new.