Books
DECLINE AND FALL: The Struggle for Power at a Great American Magazine
The greatest corporate disaster in American history” – that was one verdict on the decline and fall of the Curtis Publishing Company. It had once been an American institution, rich and proud, and its leading magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, was an integral part of America’s image of itself. Today, the Post is long dead and the Curtis’ empire lies in ruins. Published in 1970.
Buy Now
BEFORE THE DELUGE: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920’s
A fascinating portrait of the turbulent political, social, and cultural life of the city of Berlin in the 1920s. Published in 1972.
Buy Now
CLOVER: The tragic love story of Clover and Henry Adams and their brilliant life in America’s Gilded Age
On a bleak December morning in 1885, Clover Adams, the wife of the famed historian Henry Adams, went upstairs and swallowed poison, ending her life and thirteen years of what had seemed to everyone an idyllic marriage. Henry commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to cast a statue for Clover’s grave, and then, strangely, seemed to turn his back on the tragedy. He did not even mention his marriage to Clover in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Published in 1979
Buy Now
THE END OF THE WORLD: A History
What will happen at the end of the world? Otto Friedrich, in this remarkable, original book, looks at times in the world’s history when for large numbers of people the world did literally come to an end. The forms of apocalypse were varied – natural disasters, military defeat, religious fanaticism – and so were the responses. Friedrich describes the sack of Rome, when civilization itself seemed about to vanish; the Albigensian crusade, when a culture was destroyed in the name of God and a relentless inquisition; the Black Death, when plague carried off one in every three people, and an indifference to good and evil that seemed to defy the very idea of God; the rise of the Anabaptists, who thought the end would be a deliverance; the Lisbon earthquake, a disaster that shattered the foundations of the Enlightenment and any comforting notions of a reasonable world; the Russian Revolution, when the end of the old order gave birth to the modern police state; and Auschwitz, an end of such horrible magnitude that even now it denies a moral universe. Published in 1982.
Buy Now
