Poet Karen Gershon opens A Tempered Wind, the sequel to volume 1 of her autobiography A Lesser Child, in 1943. It begins tragically with the death of Karen’s sister Anne in England, where they had escaped from Nazi Germany with their third sister Lise via the Kindertransport mission. A Tempered Wind proceeds to chart the difficult period from 1939 to 1943 as Karen adapts to a new culture and undertakes the complicated passage from adolescence to adulthood in the British Isles.
Now orphans—their parents were murdered by the Nazis—the sisters are separated, and Karen is left haunted by feelings of abandonment by her sister as well as her parents who sent her away from them. Such feelings, along with her struggle with her imperiled Jewish identity, make their way into Karen’s writing, which includes stories, essays, and poems. In writing, she starts to find a home in language. Charting the creative growth of an astonishing Jewish author, A Tempered Wind concludes with Karen making her own urgent way as a writer with a mission to tell the world her archetypal German Jewish story.
An award-winning actor on screen and stage (The Defiant Ones, The African Queen, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof), an activist for civil rights and progressive causes worldwide, and a singer whose voice has won him great applause, Theodore Bikel here tells his own compelling life story. Born in Austria, raised in Palestine, educated in England, and with a stellar career in the United States and around the world, Bikel offers a personal history parallel to momentous events of the twentieth century. In an eloquent, fiercely committed voice, he writes of the Third Reich, the birth of the State of Israel, the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, and the tumultuous 1960s in America. In a new postscript to this paperback edition, he looks at recent events in the Middle East and takes both sides to task for their excesses.
Tarry relates her life against the background of a changing American society
In pursuit of her dream of becoming a writer, Tarry moved to New York, where she worked for black newspapers and became acquainted with some of the prominent black artists and writers of the day, particularly Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson. Her devotion to the church found expression in social work activities, first in Harlem, then in Chicago, and, during World War II, in Anniston, Alabama, where she directed a USO for black soldiers stationed at Fort McClellan. Tarry wrote several books for young readers, including biographies of James Weldon Johnson and Pierre Toussaint. She continued her social work career after the war and now lives in New York.
Allen embraced the drum set, rather than African handheld drums, early in his career, when drum kits were relatively rare in Africa. His story conveys a love of his craft along with the specifics of his practice. It also provides invaluable firsthand accounts of the explosive creativity in postcolonial African music, and the personal and artistic dynamics in Fela's Koola Lobitos and Africa 70, two of the greatest bands to ever play African music.
Examining autobiographical texts by Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Oscar Zeta Acosta (The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People), Amiri Baraka (The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones), and Richard Rodriguez (Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown), Walker questions the often rosy views and simplistic binary conceptions of religious conversion. Her reading of these texts takes into account the conflict and serial changes the authors experience in a society that marginalizes them, the manner in which religious conversion offers ethnic Americans “salvation” through cultural assimilation or cultural nationalism, and what conversion, anticonversion, and deconversion narratives tell us about the problematic effects of religion that often go unremarked because of a code of “special respect” and political correctness.
A noted scholar considers here a broad range of English autobiographical writing since 1800. Jerome Hamilton Buckley discusses not only autobiographies proper but also novels and poems animated by the subjective impulse. Drawing from time to time on American and Continental European writers, he focuses on British autobiographers, especially those, like Wordsworth, concerned with a larger psychological or spiritual dimension to their personal experience. With economy and grace, he examines the work of Darwin, Ruskin, Mill, Newman, C. S. Lewis, Bertrand Russell, and Edwin Muir. He discusses also the roleplaying and self-creation of Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Adams. Variations in the autobiographical novel are described, with special attention to Dickens, George Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce. Buckley concludes by exploring the differences between the principal Victorian poets and the confessional poets of today in their attitudes toward subjectivity.
Buckley reaffirms traditional notions—that the self exists and persists through its vicissitudes, that autobiography, for the most part, reflects or represents a pre-existing self rather than creating it, and that the self is rooted in history and in the objective social and physical world. No other book has attempted to place autobiography in a similar perspective, and none combines analysis of specific autobiographies with a regard for the function of subjectivity and a concern for its cultural consequences.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press