Focusing on just two climactic years, 1913 – 1914, Frederic Morton recreates Vienna in all its splendor during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The vibrant social, intellectual, and cultural life of Vienna is examined within the context of the seething nationalism of the Balkans, the Machiavellian intrigue among the political rulers of the European nations and Russia, and the human frailties of the seemingly larger-than-life national leaders, which assure that the twilight of the empire will eventually be overtaken by darkness. Morton’s seriousness of purpose and his scholarship are undeniable, yet his primary contribution here, it seems to me, is his ability to make historical personages come to life, to make the reader feel that they were real, breathing humans with both virtues and frailties.
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Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, leaders of a Belarussian Jewish family in the early 1940’s, found life impossible under the German occupation, but they also realized that it would not get any better if they co-operated with the authorities in any way. Leaving their home under cover of night, they daringly escaped into the forest behind their mill, where they intended to live out the war, if they could. Although initially their escape to the forest was purely an attempt to save their own family, the eldest brother, Tuvia Bielski, also wanted to save as many people from the ghetto as possible. Soon other refugees found their way to the forest encampment, and as the community grew larger, he required its members to go back into the ghetto to rescue others: “Those who refuse to go into the ghetto [to rescue other Jews] will be the first to go [from this community]. If they do not do it, they do not have any place here with us.” When the Germans finally retreated from Belarus in the summer of 1944, almost twelve hundred Jewish survivors of the Holocaust shocked the world by materializing from the forest where they had lived in hiding during the German occupation.
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Concentrating on just ten months of Viennese history between July, 1888, and May, 1889, Morton dissects the life of Vienna vertically, revealing its brilliance and its contrasts–its magnificence but ineffable sadness, its political gamesmanship but resistance to social change, its “correctness” of behavior but its anti-Semitism, and its patronage of the arts and sciences but its refusal to acknowledge true originality. Focusing on Crown Prince Rudolf as romantic hero, liberal thinker, and sensitive social reformer, Morton selects details which show Rudolf’s resentment of his figurehead position, his lack of power to effect change, his fears for the future of the monarchy, and his famous suicide at Mayerling.
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Feeling utterly betrayed by their leaders, twenty-six women from all over Bosnia meet with Swanee Hunt, former US Ambassador to Austria and Chair of Women Waging Peace, a global policy initiative. In their own words, they describe the war which ravaged their country and reduced it to rubble. As they make clear from the outset, this war was not a result of age-old ethnic antagonisms in the Balkans, where city after city had been peacefully multi-ethnic and where most families had loyalties to more than one group. It was the direct result, they believe, of the nationalism fomented by unscrupulous politicians, especially Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, as they seized power and wealth in the vacuum which existed following the death of Marshall Tito. The twenty-six speakers are Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, atheists (former Communists), and Jews, all bright, articulate women who are, and have been, working to heal their society.
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Whether she is WALKING WITH THE GREAT APES, which features the work of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas; canoeing the Sundarbans for man-eating tigers in SPELL OF THE TIGER; or, in this case, exploring Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos seeking the golden moon bear, Sy Montgomery single-mindedly seeks out rare animals, refusing to limit her searches to “safe” areas. Facing land-mines in Cambodia, warring tribes on the Thai border with Myanmar (Burma), poachers in Laos, and a poverty-stricken Laotian society in which people eat virtually all insect and animal life, Montgomery attempts to track down a golden bear with Mickey-Mouse-type ears and a black mane, thought to be a variety of moon bear, and unlike any other bear known to science, possibly “the scientific finding of a lifetime.”
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