The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

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Author :
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1324090766
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery written by Adam Gopnik and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny.” —Oliver Burkeman, The Atlantic Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn—and master—a new skill? For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work—the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up—of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection—as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who—in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written—helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life—and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.

A Hazard Of New Fortunes

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Author :
Publisher : Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3849657493
Total Pages : 515 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (496 download)

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Book Synopsis A Hazard Of New Fortunes by : William Dean Howells

Download or read book A Hazard Of New Fortunes written by William Dean Howells and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2020 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.

Paris to the Moon

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Author :
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1588361381
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (883 download)

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Book Synopsis Paris to the Moon by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book Paris to the Moon written by Adam Gopnik and published by Random House. This book was released on 2001-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive. So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis." As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."

A Thousand Small Sanities

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Author :
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541699351
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (416 download)

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Book Synopsis A Thousand Small Sanities by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book A Thousand Small Sanities written by Adam Gopnik and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author. Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history -- and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

Angels and Ages

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307271218
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Angels and Ages by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book Angels and Ages written by Adam Gopnik and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times.

At the Strangers' Gate

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101947500
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis At the Strangers' Gate by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book At the Strangers' Gate written by Adam Gopnik and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, first arrived in 1980, New York City was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a place where both life’s consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers’ Gate is a vivid portrait of this time, told through the story of one couple’s journey—from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Through a series of comic mini-anthropologies that capture the fashion, publishing, and art worlds of the era, Adam Gopnik transports us from his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side to a SoHo loft, from his time as a graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the galleries of MoMA. Filled with tender and humorous reminiscences—including affectionate reflections on Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others—At the Strangers’ Gate is an ode to New York striving.

The Romantic '90s

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781258056797
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (567 download)

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Book Synopsis The Romantic '90s by : Richard Le Gallienne

Download or read book The Romantic '90s written by Richard Le Gallienne and published by . This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With A Caricature By Max Beerbohm And Facsimiles Of Letters From Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Max, Hubert Crackanthorpe And Numerous Others.

The Mastery of Self

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Author :
Publisher : Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN 13 : 1938289536
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (382 download)

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Book Synopsis The Mastery of Self by : Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr.

Download or read book The Mastery of Self written by Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr. and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Toltecs believed that life as we perceive it is a dream. We each live in our own personal dream, and all of our dreams come together to make the Dream of the Planet. Problems arise when we forget that the dream is just a dream and fall victim to believing that we have no control over it. "The Mastery of Self" takes the Toltec philosophy of the Dream of the Planet and the personal dream and explains how a person can: Wake upLiberate themselves from illusory beliefs and storiesLive with authenticity Once released, we can live as our true, authentic, loving self, not only in solitude and meditation, but in any place--at the grocery store, stuck in traffic, etc.--and in any situation or scenario that confronts us. The Ruiz family has an enormous following, and this new book from don Miguel, Jr. will be greeted with enthusiasm by fans around the world. This new book from don Miguel, Jr. will be greeted with enthusiasm by fans around the world.

Mastery

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101601027
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Mastery by : Robert Greene

Download or read book Mastery written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature, a vital work revealing that the secret to mastery is already within you. Each one of us has within us the potential to be a Master. Learn the secrets of the field you have chosen, submit to a rigorous apprenticeship, absorb the hidden knowledge possessed by those with years of experience, surge past competitors to surpass them in brilliance, and explode established patterns from within. Study the behaviors of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci and the nine contemporary Masters interviewed for this book. The bestseller author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene has spent a lifetime studying the laws of power. Now, he shares the secret path to greatness. With this seminal text as a guide, readers will learn how to unlock the passion within and become masters.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393079848
Total Pages : 441 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) by : Stephen Greenblatt

Download or read book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 Edition]

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Author :
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0306822164
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 Edition] by : Dave Van Ronk

Download or read book The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 Edition] written by Dave Van Ronk and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint. Originally published in paperback: 2006.

The Table Comes First

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Publisher : Knopf Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307399036
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis The Table Comes First by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book The Table Comes First written by Adam Gopnik and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transplanted Canadian, New Yorker writer and author of Paris to the Moon, Gopnik is publishing this major new work of narrative non-fiction alongside his 2011 Massey Lecture. An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?" Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it--all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society. Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

Sales Mastery

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0470900199
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Sales Mastery by : Chuck Bauer

Download or read book Sales Mastery written by Chuck Bauer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguish yourself as a "Sales Master" and win big in business today! Your personal and professional distinctions are THE precursor to closing the deal. Why? Because most salespeople are not distinctive-all they do is follow one another. Sales Mastery gives you Chuck Bauer's unique personal experience as a highly successful salesman turned sales coach. You'll connect with his methodology, proven by salespeople in every industry, to distinguish yourself, build your sales skills, and win deals again and again. Each chapter focuses on one important quality of salesmanship enabling you to actualize your potential as a prosperous seller Includes tips for mastering sales presentations, phone pitches, customer objections, and closing strategies Learn how to market yourself shamelessly, close sales according to your clients' dominant personality styles, and make prospects chase you Author is a nationally recognized sales trainer and coach Sales Mastery gives you the toolset to break away from the pack to be the sales leader you always wanted to be... and reap the bigger commission checks that result!

Inner Mastery, Outer Impact

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Author :
Publisher : Hachette Go
ISBN 13 : 0306827883
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Inner Mastery, Outer Impact by : Hitendra Wadhwa

Download or read book Inner Mastery, Outer Impact written by Hitendra Wadhwa and published by Hachette Go. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on his highly popular Columbia Business School course “Personal Leadership & Success”, Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa shares key principles for how to pursue success by letting your true self shine through in everything you do. In our pursuit of success, we often struggle to balance the world’s demands with our own dreams. Some of us pursue Outer Success, wanting to be liked and loved, supported and promoted. But in our quest for worldly glory, we may ignore the subtle stirring of our spirit, waking up one day to realize just how far we have drifted from our personal ideals. Others among us seek Inner Success, wanting the freedom to pursue our own calling. But in our quest to be true to ourselves, we may end up hurting, disappointing, or antagonizing others, straining relationships and being sidelined. It seems that our drives for Outer and Inner Success are destined to clash. But perhaps that’s only because we’ve been searching for success in the wrong places. We can pursue from the place where our greatest potential is held, our Inner Core, by activating Five Core Energies: Purpose, Wisdom, Growth, Love, and Self-Realization. Through extensive scientific research and masterful storytelling about exemplary figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela—and everyday heroes drawn from Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s class at Columbia Business School and client workshops at Mentora Institute—readers arrive at timeless principles of success in life and leadership. Empowered by your Five Core Energies, you discover how to create outer impact from a place of inner mastery. With a PhD in Management Science from MIT and a lifelong study of the world’s mystic traditions, Wadhwa brings a mathematician’s rigor and a truth-seeker’s spirit to some of today’s most vexing questions about authenticity, success, leadership, and human potential. This book shows how by activating your Inner Core and expressing it in everything you do, you create the conditions where Inner Success and Outer Success can flourish in mutual harmony.

Expert

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0241986141
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (419 download)

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Book Synopsis Expert by : Roger Kneebone

Download or read book Expert written by Roger Kneebone and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Roger Kneebone is a legend' Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters 'Fascinating and inspiring' Financial Times 'The pandemic has made the necessity of relying on experts evident to all . . . this is a rich exploration of lifelong learning' Guardian What could a lacemaker have in common with vascular surgeons? A Savile Row tailor with molecular scientists? A fighter pilot with jazz musicians? At first glance, very little. But Roger Kneebone is the expert on experts, having spent a lifetime finding the connections. In Expert, he combines his own experiences as a doctor with insights from extraordinary people and cutting-edge research to map out the path we're all following - from 'doing time' as an Apprentice, to developing your 'voice' and taking on responsibility as a Journeyman, to finally becoming a Master and passing on your skills. As Kneebone shows, although each outcome is different, the journey is always the same. Whether you're developing a new career, studying a language, learning a musical instrument or simply becoming the person you want to be, this ground-breaking book reveals the path to mastery.

The King in the Window

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Author :
Publisher : Miramax
ISBN 13 : 9780786838943
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (389 download)

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Book Synopsis The King in the Window by : Adam Gopnik

Download or read book The King in the Window written by Adam Gopnik and published by Miramax. This book was released on 2006-10-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven-year-old Oliver, an American boy residing in Paris, discovers, much to his astonishment, that phantoms live within the windowpanes and have selected Oliver to lead a war against the "soul-stealers" that inhabit mirrors.

Albert Camus

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Author :
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307804763
Total Pages : 705 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Albert Camus by : Olivier Todd

Download or read book Albert Camus written by Olivier Todd and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-09-07 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers, here is the enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of the Nobel Prize winning author. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts—between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus—his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask—debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of forty-six and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time.