I am an economics professor at Victoria University of Wellington. As a previous Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury and Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, I have had quite a bit of experience watching economists’ ideas succeed and fail in the real world. I have written a number of books about policy economists and their lives in peace and wartime. (And a couple of novels too!)
This is a heavier read taking us through a group history of the Austrian School of Economics from the coffee houses of Imperial Vienna to the modern-day Libertarians. Economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter originated ideas that have had a big impact on economics and politics, and have been much debated ever since.
A group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party
The Austrian School of Economics-a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right-is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter built the School's international reputation with their work on business cycles and monetary theory. Their focus on individualism-and deep antipathy toward socialism-ultimately won them a devoted audience among the upper echelons of business…
I've been a working journalist for 50 years, and as a child of TV, especially in the 1960s, I grew up with some of the most memorable TV themes ever written. I started writing about TV in the 1980s, and since moving to Los Angeles in 1986, have used every opportunity to meet and interview all of my favorite composers of movie and TV music. The result is this book, which looks at the history of TV themes and, in a larger sense, music written for TV generally. Every genre of TV, from crime to sitcoms, westerns to adventure, has had fun, often compelling, and truly memorable music, and I've tried to celebrate it here.
Maybe the last of the great Viennese-born classical composers, Korngold enjoyed enormous success in Europe in the 1920s.
Invited to Hollywood in 1934, he began writing film music for the swashbucklers, costume dramas, and historical pageants of Warner Bros., often starring the likes of Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Claude Rains: Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Kings Row, and others.
Korngold thought of movies as "operas without singing" and wrote lavish, richly orchestrated scores filled with memorable melodies. Fleeing the Nazi tyranny in 1938, he became one of the greatest composers in the Golden Age of movies.
Carroll spent decades researching his life, it's a thorough and compelling read, and it saddens me that the book is now long out of print.
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
This is a novel that is tender and sad, and it relates in a language that is simple and poetic to the atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire during its final days. The novel takes place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Every line of the book can be savored, with every sentence laden with nostalgia for a world that seems like another, kinder planet. It is the world that pre-dated one of my other recommendations, The Strudlhof Steps, in its presentation of people with a sense of purpose, duty, and loyalty, even if not blessed with an abundance of acumen.
These were well-intentioned people trying to hold an empire together of disparate people and cultures. The empire represented an ideal world of Habsburg paternalism to Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. It is difficult to conclude the book without tears. No cinematic version has done it justice—nothing captures the…
'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands
Roth's masterpiece: an epic, moving account of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, told through the fortunes of one family.
Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March…
In 2020, I published a book about a topic long thought boring: street addresses. But it isn’t, as I found out, boring at all; instead, the rise of street addresses is an immensely important story of identity, race, wealth, and power. I’m not a geographer myself—I’m a lawyer by training—but I am deeply interested in reading fascinating stories about overlooked technologies. The books I've chosen here are just a few that meet this brief.
I thought this book would be a dry, academic chore—it really is all about house numbers, for goodness’ sake—but the Enlightenment story of the rise of house numbers is, in its own way, a brilliant story of the making of modern government.
The author is an Austrian academic, but the book doesn’t read like other academic books—the fact that he found a sometimes thrilling story on this topic felt like a miracle the first time I read it.
House numbers are small things that appear quietly on the walls, gates and porches of our homes and places of work. They seem to have come from nowhere and are now taken for granted in everyday life. But house numbers have their own history - one that is retrieved, assembled and presented here, for the first time, in vivid images from around the world.House numbers started their lives in a grey area between the military, the tax authorities and early police forces. Anton Tantner's engaging, intriguingly quirky book is a chronicle of the house number, from its introduction in European…
A touching and sympathetic
biography of one of Europe’s greatest twentieth-century writers, best known as
the author of The Radetzky March, and
an essential introduction to his other novels (too little read in English).
We
follow Roth as he flits between Europe’s cultural centres, his melancholy mood
tracking the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. With Pim as our guide, it
is impossible not to sense the fragile state of more contemporary political
unions, as Roth’s plight in a way becomes our own.
The first English language biography of the great European writer Joseph Roth, exploring his genius and his tragic life story, lived in the shadow of war.
The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of…
I read this
book as part of the research I did for my WIP, a WW2 novel. Hitler does not
play a significant role in my novel, but it is impossible to study the modern
history of Europe without wondering what turned a talented young Austrian
artist into the most hated man of the 20th
Century.
The
Secret Journals of Adolf Hitler, Volume 1: The Anointed is
Part One of a two-part biography. Presented as a
personal journal, this well
researched expertly written revelation follows
the formative years of Hitler’s life. This exploration seeks to help the
reader understand the desperate journey that turned an ordinary
child into a charismatic madman, who after more
than seven decades, still remains one of the greatest enigmas of all time.
An insightful must- read for any 20th
Century History Junkie.
What happenings and environments wrought the most hated manin history? How does a child become a young man who evolved into a self-proclaimed messiah? Why did this oneman become a psychotic who was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 million people?
This book follows the first, formative years of Adolf Hitler's life. Presented as a personal journal, this is a fact-supported re-telling of a desperate existence, as viewed by Hitler, and tracks the points of pain that forged his beliefs. From a childhood of abuse and cheating death to an agonizing…
I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (Austria), interested in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. I am fascinated by the work of classical philosophers—foremost, Immanuel Kant and David Hume. A particularly interesting question for me concerns how political and legal systems shape people's identity and self-understanding. One focus of my research is on the distorted legal framework of National Socialist Germany. I wrote, together with Professor J. David Velleman (New York University), Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge. In German: "Weil ich nun mal ein Gerechtigkeitsfanatiker bin." Der Fall des SS-Richters Konrad Morgen.
How could so many Nazi perpetrators escape to South America? Most relied on the help of a bishop of the Catholic Church in the Vatican, Alois Hudal.
Sands describes the structure of this support system (the so-called ratline) through the story of former SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Gustav Wächter, the governor of Galicia (1942–1944), who was responsible for the deportation of nearly 500,000 Jews to the Nazi death camps.
Wächter's post-war escape to Argentina actually ended in Rome, where he died of an infection in July 1949. Sands offers a riveting analysis of how this man found his way into the Nazi party, rose to a position that implicated him in mass murder, and how, with the support of his wife, he managed to hide in the Austrian mountains for years after the war. Sands also reflects on how difficult it is for the next generation to face up to the…
A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street.
"Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author
Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon…
Since 1979 the life of soil and plants, and how they link to our own lives and health, has fascinated me. In the 1980s I was a maverick because as an organic market gardener, my work was mostly seen as irrelevant to society, producing food that was expensive and for only a few people. That changed from 1988 when the BBC filmed my garden, and green consciousness developed. Since then I have gone from being zero to hero and especially with regard to soil because since 1982 I've been gardening with the no dig method. My experience allows me to direct you towards these gems, which I'm sure you will find useful and enjoyable.
I love how Maye thought deeply about nature and this had originally led her to the pioneers of biodynamic gardening in 1920s Austria. Then she became disillusioned with what she felt was too strict of adherence to every word of Rudolf Steiner’s writing. Like me, she wanted to try new approaches. After moving back to the UK in the 1930s, she developed her own methods of organic gardening which centred on making top quality compost, using herbal stimulants which she worked out herself.
She was a true scientist and helped me to understand not to trust “accepted views” which can become authoritarian. Plus I learnt about making great compost, in particular the roof she used to keep rain off her heaps.
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.
The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.
THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.
This book left a deep emotional impact on me. Many times, it reduced me to tears so be sure to have a box of tissues handy as you read it.
Lily Graham’s heart-breaking, descriptive passages of life in Auschwitz and the fact that anyone, let alone a child born into that horror, could survive, were beyond remarkable.
Graham shows us strong characters like Eva, Sofie, and Helga, who by helping one another and coming together, managed to get through the worst things that could ever happen to a human being. This is a story that should be read by all generations to ensure that such horrendous things can never ever happen again.
For readers of Lilac Girls and The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a heartbreaking story of survival, where life or death relies on the smallest chance and happiness can be found in the darkest times.
It is 1942 and Eva Adami has boarded a train to Auschwitz. Barely able to breathe due to the press of bodies and exhausted from standing up for two days, she can think only of her longed-for reunion with her husband Michal, who was sent there six months earlier.
But when Eva arrives at Auschwitz, there is no sign of Michal and the stark reality of the…
