europe memoir

Atgen PA, Schiffer, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 144 pages illustrated in color and b&w. In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer. Clean copy.

Softcover. Burlington IA, Craftsman Press , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 190 pages, b&w illustrations. An infantryman's memoir of World War II in Europe's waning months. INSCRIBED BY BIED on half-title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 496 pages. SIGNED BY THEROUX on title page. In 1975 a young and ambitious writer named Paul Theroux made his literary mark by taking the 28,000-mile intercontinental journey via rail from London to Tokyo and back home again. Thirty years later, an older and wiser Theroux decided to retrace his steps. The result is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, a fascinating account of the places you vaguely knew existed, yet definitely should know something about. Get on board Theroux's fast-moving travelogue, which features some of the most astute commentary on our distorted notions of time, space, and each other in the age of jet speed, broadband connections, and cultural extinction. A railway journey through Eastern Europe, India, and Asia. Clean copy

Hardcover. Beach Lloyd Publishers, 2nd Ed., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. pictorial boards, 142 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on the title page. I had all kinds of courage and guts; I don t know where that came from, says Fernande Keufgens Davis ( Freddie ) of the risks that she took as a teenager in the Belgian Resistance of World War II. After the shock of finding her formerly occupied village annexed as part of Germany, Davis was drafted to work in a German munitions factory. Determined not to aid the enemy, she jumped from the train and went underground. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hanover NH, Smith and Kraus, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 561 pages, b&w illustrations. 12 year old Bertel, living in Hindenburg, Germany in 1938, was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany for Poland. Disguising herself as a young Polish woman, this is the story of Bertel's survival. INSCRIBED TWICE BY LAUER on the front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 535 pages. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket has edgewear.

Hardcover. Hartford, CT, American Publishing Company, 1st Edition, 1870, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 651 pages plus publisher's ads. Hardcover. Front and back hinges cracked, binding tight otherwise. Frontispieces with tissue guard. Tanning to edges. Pages clean with just a touch of tanning. Spine straight. Cover boards bound in black cloth, gilt title on spine and design on front cover board. Borders and decoration blind-stamped to front and back cover boards. Some agewear to boards: fraying/chipping at top and bottom of spine and corners, rubbing. "Being some account of the steamship Quaker City's pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of countries, nations, incidents and adventures, as they appeared to the author." Perfect for any collector's bookshelf.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 287 pages, 442 b&w illustrations. The famous photojournalist presents, among other events, the abdication of Edward VIII; the Anschluss; the Warsaw ghetto, before and after its destruction; Tito's guerrilla war against the Nazis; and Isr'l's battle for independence. He recorded the fall of Hungary to the Communists; he was with Churchill at Teheran; and with Khrushchev at Belgrade. There are also exotic parties given by Cecil Beaton and Lady Juliet Duff. Portraits of the last glories of the English aristocracy and the old French Bourgeoisie; the industrialists and artists who made Italy's miraculous postwar recovery possible. In 60,000 words of text he captures the extraordinary adventures and bizarre characters that together made up the author's life. The combination of words and pictures provides a rich, powerful portrait of a fascinating career. Missing dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N Abrams, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages. B&w photos throughout. Jean Howard was a small part Hollywood actress in the late 30s/early 40s whose marriage to super agent Charles Feldman gave her an entry into the top circles of Hollywood away from the studios. She carried her camera with her everywhere and thus we get hundreds of photographs of Hollywood royalty at play right up until the Sixties both at home and mixing with high society in Europe. Although not especially gifted as a photographer her access to the stars was unprecedented and her candid snaps are fascinating for students of Tinseltown at play. Thus we get the likes of Tyrone Power playing croquet with Howard Hawks and Daryl Zanuck and Jennifer Jones leading a conga line of party guests fully clothed into Joseph Cotten's swimming pool. The photographs in this coffee table sized book are accompanied by short but informative comments identifying the participants and giving snippets of fascinating gossip. Recommended for fans of Hollywood's studio era.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 406 pages, Hardcover with dust jacket. B&w illustrations. Clean, tight copy. How Le Corbusier's first trip to the United States shaped his critique of the country and affected both his work and the diffusion of his ideas. Le Corbusier's first trip to the United States in 1935 is generally considered a failure because it produced no commissions. The experience nevertheless had a profound effect on him, both personally and professionally. Sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Le Corbusier promoted his ideas through a lecture tour, exhibition, and press conferences, as well as in meetings with industrialists, housing reformers, New Deal technocrats, and editors. His lectures were watershed events that advanced the cause of European modernism. Yet he returned to France empty-handed and published a bittersweet account, Quand les Cathedrales etaient blanches: Voyage au Pays des Timid Personnes (When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People), which faulted America for lacking the courage to adopt his ideas.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st transl. thus, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 199 pages. This classic of German literature--often hailed as the inception of European modernist prose--follows the mental breakdown of an 18th-century schizophrenic playwright, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Published after Buchner's death, Lenz provides a taut case study of three weeks in the life of schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the "inside" of insanity. An early experiment in docufiction, Buchner's textual montage draws on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, the Alsatian pastor who briefly took care of Lenz in 1778, while also refracting Goethe's memoir of his troubled friendship with the playwright. English versions of both these historical source texts here accompany Lenz for the first time in this bilingual presentation. Based on the best recent edition of the text, this fresh translation will allow readers to discover why Heiner Muller pronounced Lenz the inaugural example of "21st-century prose." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 3rd Ed., 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, 447 pages. Memoir of life on wartime Europe's frontline by a trailblazing female reporter. Virginia Cowles was just twenty-seven years old when she decided to transform herself from a society columnist into a foreign press correspondent. Looking for Trouble is the story of this evolution, as Cowles reports from both sides of the Spanish Civil War, London on the first day of the Blitz, Nazi-run Munich, and Finlands bitter, bloody resistance to the Russian invasion. Along the way, Cowles also meets Adolf Hitler (an inconspicuous little man), Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Martha Gellhorn, and Ernest Hemingway. Her reportage blends sharp political analysis with a gossip columnists chatty approachability and a novelists empathy. Cowles understood in 1937 long before even the average politician that Fascism in Europe was a threat to democracy everywhere. Her insights on extremism are as piercing and relevant today as they were eighty years ago. Clean, bright copy, no dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martins Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 145 pages. From the front dust jacket flap "Louise Dahl-Wolfe, one of the most celebrated photographers of the thirties, forties and fifties, was a uniquely American artist whose work had enormous ramifications for Horst, Avedon, Penn, and other great photographers who followed her. Working in the heydey of Harper's Bazaar with editor-in-chief Carmel Snow and renowned fashion editor Diana Vreeland, she came to fashion photography at a time when formal, sometimes stilted, European elegance was the norm and infused it with her fresh new vision - informal, intimate, and undeniably American". Preface by Frances McFadden.

Softcover. Simsbury CT, Mandel Vilar Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 221 pages plus 16 pages of photos. This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions--the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others. Advance Reader's Copy. Clean.

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. Sussex, Denham House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 57 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners stamp on front endpaper. Clean, unmarked text. Light wear.

Hardcover. London, Art/Books, reprint, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, yellow cloth with black decoration, 186 pages. A beautiful facsimile of the earliest English translation of Gauguin's frank and entertaining memoir, written just before he died, in which he reveals his most inner thoughts on art, life and love Unappreciated in his own lifetime, Paul Gauguin is now recognized as one of the giants of French post-Impressionism and a pioneer of early modernism. A rebel in both art and life, he rejected his bourgeois upbringing and comfortable stockbroker's job to devote his life to painting. Eventually, dismayed by the 'hypocrisy of civilization' and in search of a primitive idyll, he left his wife and children behind in Paris and took up residence in the South Seas, first in Tahiti and, later, in the Marquesas Islands. He would never return to Europe. In the final months of his life, he wrote this witty and revealing autobiographical memoir with the request that it be published upon his death. It first appeared in the original French in 1918, and was translated into English three years later. As his son Emile wrote in the preface, 'These journals are an illuminating self-portrait of a unique personality. They bring sharply into focus for me his goodness, his humor, his insurgent spirit, his clarity of vision, his inordinate hatred of hypocrisy and sham.' Wide-ranging and elliptical, these candid reflections reveal Gauguin's inner thoughts about many subjects, including frank views on his fellow artists back in Paris, his turbulent relationship with Van Gogh, and the charms of Polynesian women, while providing glimpses into his often far-from-idyllic life in the islands. This beautiful facsimile reproduces the first American translation of the journals, a rare limited edition privately published in New York in 1921 for a select group of subscribers. With full-page sketches by the artist, these entertaining and enlightening musings give us a unique insight into Gauguin the man and the artist. Clean copy.

Softcover. Buffalo NY, White Pine Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 181 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the grave of his grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of her family. This moving collection reflects the joys and the difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind. Clean 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. 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.

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, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 408 pages, index. Black and white frontis photo portrait of author. "Moffat served for a protracted period and with notable distinction in the key position of what was then termed Chief of the Division of European affairs; he accompanied me as my chief assistant when FDR sent me to Europe as his personal representative in the spring of 1940; and I was in the closest touch with him during the time he served as American Minister to Canada, a service so tragically terminated by his untimely death in 1943. I know of no man who came up through the ranks of the Foreign Service with whose work I am personally familiar who impressed me as having in his latter years greater knowledge, a wiser and more balanced judgement, or a greater devotion to the highest interests of this country." - Sumner Welles.

Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 105 pages. Translated by Helen Weaver. Writings by Artaud about his experience with the Tarahumara Indians in 1936, their rituals and ceremonies, and his efforts to find alternatives to what he felt was an increasingly limited European view of the mind and consciousness. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Ecco, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 461 pages, b&w illustrations. In this remarkable memoir, the award-winning author shares the ways in which his relationship with his father, combined with his unique childhood, molded him into the scientist, and man, he is today. From Gerd's days as a soldier in Europe to the family's daring escape from the Red Army in 1945 to the rustic Maine farm they came to call home, Heinrich relates it all in his trademark style, making science accessible and awe-inspiring. Remainder line to bottom edge otherwise clean.