The Bible as It Was
How Do We Know Who We Are?: The Biography of the Self
Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions: An A-Z Guide to the World's Religions
Taking readers on an intriguing tour of the biographer's art, Ludwig offers not only a
wide-ranging and informative commentary on the topic, but also a highly original
theory of the self. Readers interested in biography and in the lives of others will come
away with a new sense of what it means to be a "person." 288 pp. 10,000 print.
From the Publisher
Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-one of our most esteemed biographers -
writers such as David McCullough (the biographer of Truman and Theodore
Roosevelt), Wallace Stegner (John Wesley Powell), Gloria Steinem (Marilyn Monroe),
Leon Edel (Henry James), Peter Gay (Freud), Diane Middlebrook (Anne Sexton), and
many others - and interweaving fascinating observations of his own practice, Ludwig
takes us through the labyrinthine hall of mirrors we term the self and shows us how
malleable, elusive, and paradoxical it can be. In chapters such as "The 'Real' Marilyn,"
"Psychoanalyzing Freud," "How Did Hitler Live With Himself?" and "What Madness
Reveals," we sit in as biographers talk not only about their work, but about their
subjects (Allan Bullock on Hitler and Stalin, for instance, or Arnold Rampersad on
Langston Hughes) and how their subjects saw themselves. Ludwig describes how
biographers must impose a narrative structure on their subjects' lives to create order
out of a mass of often contradictory views, baffling behavior, and inconsistent
self-representations, much in the same way that psychotherapists try to foster
self-awareness and understanding in their patients. In his concluding chapter, Ludwig
introduces a new concept - biographical freedom - which brilliantly reconciles free will
and determinism. We can, he asserts, become biographers of ourselves. Like the
biographer, we are constrained to consider all the available facts of our lives - the
personal experiences, cultural forces, and predetermined scripts that shape us - but we
remain free to interpret, emphasize, and fashion these givens into a cohesive and
meaningful narrative of our own choosing.
King James Version Holy Bible (Popular Award Black Leatherette)
Aspiring Writers
There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok
The Barnes & Noble Review
The 900-year history of the shtetl Eishyshok, documented by the Tower of Life at the
U.S. Holocaust Museum, is recounted.
From the Publisher
Two million visitors a year enter the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where
1,600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the
most moving exhibit in the museum - the Tower of Life. Eliach's nine-century saga of
Eastern European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any ever written. Her research took
her from family attics on six continents to state archives no scholar had seen since the
start of the Cold War. Her research on family life, for example, shows that the "world of
our fathers" was actually a world in which all the affairs of daily life were run by
mothers. Her profound understanding of medieval history illuminates her description of
early Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe and the only one where Jews lived on
equal terms with the rest of the population. Access to family letters and memorabilia and
interviews with shtetl survivors gave her startling insight into one of history's most
troubling questions: Why were the Jews so blind to the Nazi threat?
Synopsis
When asked to work on a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Yaffa Eliach decided
that the best way to remember the dead was to honor the lives they lived. So in 1979, she
set about a 17-year project to reconstruct the 900-year history of Eishyshok, a small
Jewish settlement in Poland where no Jews remain. There Once was a World chronicles
the centuries of Jewish life that so violently came to an end in World War II. A finalist
for this year's nonfiction National Book Award, There Once was a World is a richly
detailed history of changing life and enduring traditions in the small Polish shtetl.
Polyn: Jewish Life in the Old Country
In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the New York Yiddish
daily, the Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the "old country." Kacyzne's
assignment would become a ten-year journey across Poland - or "Poyln," as more than
three million Yiddish-speaking Jews called their home - from the crowded quarters of
Warsaw and Lublin to the remote towns of Husiatyn and Ostrog. His candid and
intimate views of teeming village square and rustic workshops, synagogues, and spinning
wheels give us a priveleged view of a world that is no more