Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 22

Moynihan, Brian. Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2015 (542pp.$30) Stalin despised Leningrad that, as St. Petersburg, had been the locus of the October coup d’etat conducted…

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In the summer of 1924 I was in Obergeogenthal near Brux. On Friday, 20 June, I repeat Friday, 20 June, I received a letter from a friend in Prague, the painter Erich Hirt. He wrote, ‘I have just learnt from the editorial staff of the…

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Perhaps thinking of a sparkling June day in the green English countryside (puffy white clouds above, temperatures in the low 70s, a light southwesterly breeze, neither annoying insects nor humidity, the sound of birdsong), Henry James chose “summer afternoon” as the most beautiful words in…

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Dyer, Geoff. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, Pantheon, New York, 2012 (232pp. $24) For 20 years or so English writer Geoff Dyer has landed his reader smack in the middle of an archly idiosyncratic search for post-postmodern literary meaning….

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As I learned form my father, for fourteen years, that is to say for nearly half the average length of a generation, Franz Kafka sat behind his smoothly polished desk in the smoke-fumed air of the factory at No. 7 on the Poric. He entered…

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Frankel, Glenn. The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Bloomsbury, New York, 2013 (405pp. $28) The Parker clan were Baptist revivalists, part-time rustlers and small-scale con men who pulled up stakes in the Appalachians and headed for Texas, a Mexican backwater where a lack…

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rebellion (re-bel’yen), n. 1. an act or state of armed open resistance to authority, government, etc. 2. a defiance of or opposition to any control. 3. a rebelling. SYN.—revolt stresses a casting off of allegiance or refusal to submit to established authority (the revolt of…

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Coleman, Jon T. Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation, Hill and Wang, New York, 2011 (252pp.$28) In 1823 Hugh Glass, journeyman hunter and trapper, signed up to serve the American Fur Company as a hunter…

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–“As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.” (From “A Sport and a Pastime” by James Salter). Yes, a child is asked the most difficult thing right away. For some, poverty…

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Graybill, Andrew R. The Red and The White: A Family Saga of The American West, Liveright Corporation (W.W. Norton), New York, 2013 (338pp.$28.95) Malcolm Clarke ranched on Prickly Pear Creek, south of Helena, where he ran cattle and lived with his wife, a Piegan Blackfoot…

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