Here Is Genius

Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938 (author); Suzanne Stutman (editor). THE GOOD CHILD'S RIVER. [A Previously Unpublished Novel]. Edited And With An Introduction By Suzanne Stutman. Chapel Hill, North Carolina and London, UK: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991
4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall 0-8078-2002-4 First edition (with printing number line on copyright page beginning with "1"). Small 4to (5 7/8" x 9 5/8"). xiv, [ii], 292 pages. Burgundy-colored cloth-covered boards, silver lettering and ruling on spine (hardcover binding). Beige endpapers. Frontispiece portrait of Thomas Wolfe. With twenty-four pages of black & white illustrations (reproducing pages from Wolfe's manuscript). Bibliography. Dust jacket art by Bernard Blatch. Book weighs 1 lb., 5 oz.<p>"Admirers of Thomas Wolfe will be delighted to discover this previously unpublished novel, one that has all the hallmarks of Wolfe's best work. For the last eight years of his life, Wolfe worked periodically on a series of chapters that were part of a huge work-in-progress. They centered on a character named Esther Jack and on her eccentric circle of family and friends: her father, accomplished Shakespearean actor Joseph Frankau; his unconventional frirends, including two theater-loving Catholic priests; Esther's beloved Aunt Nana, exotic, sensuous, and doomed; and turn-of-the-century New York City, itself a character in these writings. The work was loosely based on the early life of New York stage and costume designer Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was engaged in a tempestuous love affair for eleven years....Some sections of this work were heavily edited and published after Wolfe's death. Here for the first time is THE GOOD CHILD'S RIVER, as Wolfe wrote it, along with some fragments, contained in two appendixes, that Wolfe may have intended to include in the finished work"- From dust jacket.<p>"The fragments of this intriguing unfinished novel, assembled by Stutman after ""years of detective work,'' shed light on Wolfe's (1900-1938) creative methods while recording his intense love for theater designer Aline Bernstein, who appears as Esther Jack in the posthumous The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again . Fascinated by her Jewish heritage--as he was by ethnicity generally--Wolfe wished to absorb Bernstein's life as part of the ""river'' of time's flow and to reinvent it, while the mature, wealthy Bernstein strove as his Scheherazade to prolong their affair, sending sheafs of notes that finally taxed his patience. The strain is evident here, since Wolfe digresses from the Esther passages, but his storytelling genius, vital and chaotic, emerges in this welter of vignettes, however hastily they are lashed together. Highlights are accounts of New York at the turn of the century; the imagining of Bernstein's father's life (fictionalized as Joe Barrett, he is depicted as a Connecticut Yankee of ""mountain blood'' like Wolfe, an actor who joins a circus); and the portrait of a Victorian aunt who scribbled 60 sentimental novels but scandalized readers by penning a sexual escapade. Her plea for writing frankly on ""the sensual woman'' bares the author's own liberated views. Reading these lyrical, effusive pages is to take an invigorating plunge in the swarming sea of Wolfe's imagination. Publication is set for Wolfe's birthday, October 3."- From "Publishers Weekly" review.<p>This book, a collection of chapters and fragments of an incomplete novel, was written during the last years of Wolfe's life. The central character, Esther Jack, is based on the life of Wolfe's lover, Aline Bernstein, a Jewish costume and set designer for the New York stage. Wolfe expands his focus to include stories about her family and friends, fictionalizing her family as he did his own in Look Homeward, Angel . Stutman is to be commended for her restrained and unobtrusive editing, which even leaves Wolfe's idiosyncratic punctuation intact. This publication is significant not only as proof of Wolfe's ability to venture beyond autobiography, but also as negation of the charge that he was overly dependent on his editors. This unpolished manuscript shines with brilliance, evidence of a master craftsman."- From "Library Journal" review by Joanne Snapp, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.<p>"Fragmented, newly uncovered novel by Wolfe, found in his ledgers and written at the summit of his descriptive powers. Four-fifths of this cumulative but largely plotless re- creation of turn-of-the-century New York has never before seen print, though bits and pieces were excerpted in From Death to Morning, Of Time and the River, and The Web and the Rock. Wolfe wrote this huge ode in his early 30's, while swimming blindly through a cyclic novel he called The October Fair, whose first installment saw light as Of Time and the River, minus this ungainly section that has nothing to do with Eugene Gant or George Webber. He was aided by his mistress, stage designer Aline Bernstein, who wrote voluminous notes for him about her childhood, youth and early womanhood, from which the author fashioned the young Jewess Esther Jack, whose mind is the center of The Good Child's River. Bernstein later used some of the same material for her two books about herself and Wolfe, The Journey Down and An Actor's Daughter. The novel is a meditation, in Wolfe's boldest style, on time as a dark, rich river bearing the mind of Esther Jack and is a sheaf of fabulous set-pieces, exhilarating rhapsodies, family portraits of eccentrics. Yes, there are clinkers about the Jews, things Esther would never say or think, and some of his women are sticks, but all is forgiven in the sheer magic of Wolfe unbound, as in Esther/Wolfe riding through Central Park at first-light: ""...suddenly I heard each sound the birdsong made: like a flight of shot, the sharp fast scraps of sound arose. With chittering bicker, fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birdcries came. Smooth drops and nuggets of bright gold they were. Now sang the birdtree filled with lutings in bright air....'' Wolfe's framework--of figures aflood in rivering night--is clearly borrowed from Whitman's great night-poem ""The Sleepers'' but is no insult to the original. An often stunningly disciplined first draft--by a genius."- From "Kirkus Reviews" review. H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series..

First Edition, Hard Cover With Dust Jacket, Fine Book/In Fine Dust Jacket

[SW: LITERATURE * FICTION * NOVEL * AMERICAN FICTION * FICTIONAL WORKS * AUTHORS * THOMAS WOLFE * NORTH CAROLINA * SOUTHERN LITERATURE,]

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Goodwin, Doris Kearns. TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. [Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library Series]. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006
Tall 8vo - over 9" - 9 3/4" 0-7432-7075-4 First Simon & Schuster paperback edition (reprint of the 2005 hardcover edition). Tall 8vo (6 1/8" x 9 1/4"). xix, [i], 916, [1] pages. Black and gold glossy pictorial wrappers, black, white, and gold lettering on spine and front wrapper (paperbound). Maps and diagrams. With 76 black & white illustrations. Endnotes. Index. Book weighs 2 lbs., 13 oz.<p>CONDITION (Please Note "Highlighting"): Yellow "highlighting" on fifteen pages of the introduction and first chapter (your bookseller is always amazed that those who "highlight" books seldom seem to make it past the first chapter), else Very Good, clean book.<p>"This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history."<p>"Goodwin's writing is always sharp and clear, and she uses quotes to great effect. The book's originality lies in the focus on relationships among the men Lincoln chose for his cabinet and highest offices: three were his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, and each considered himself the only worthy candidate. One is left with a concrete picture of Lincoln's political genius - derived from a character without malice or jealousy - which shaped the history of our nation. One is also left with the painful sense of how our history might have differed had Lincoln lived to guide the Reconstruction."- From "Publishers Weekly" review.<p>"*Starred Review* Lincoln redux. Nevertheless, popular historian Goodwin offers fresh ground by which to judge the almost overdone sixteenth president. She is fascinated by the "growth of Lincoln's political genius," which resulted in two rather startling situations having to do with his career. First, that despite "coming from nowhere," he won the 1860 Republican nomination, snatching it from the anticipating hands of three chief contenders, all of whom were not only well known but also known to be presidential material: William Seward, senator from New York; Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio; and Edwin Bates, distinguished politician from Missouri. Second, that once Lincoln achieved the nomination and won the election, he brought his rivals into his cabinet and built them into a remarkable team to lead the Union during the Civil War, none of whom overshadowed the prairie lawyer turned president. Goodwin finds meaningful comparisons and differences in not only the four men's careers but also their personal lives and character traits. She extends her purview to the women occupying important space next to them (the wives of Lincoln, Seward, and Bates and the daughter of the widower Chase). The knowledge gained here about these three significant figures who well attended Lincoln gain for the reader an even keener appreciation of the rare individual that he was."- From "Booklist" review by Brad Hooper.<p>"An elegant, incisive study....Goodwin has brilliantly described how Lincoln forged a team that preserved a nation and freed America from the curse of slavery."- James M. McPherson, The New York Times Book Review.<p>"Goodwin's narrative abilities...are on full display here, and she does an enthralling job of dramatizing...crucial moments in Lincoln's life....A portrait of Lincoln as a virtuosic politician and managerial genius."- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.<p>"Splendid, beautifully written....Goodwin has brilliantly woven scores of contemporary accounts...into a fluid narrative....This is the most richly detailed account of the Civil War presidency to appear in many years."- John Rhodehamel, Los Angeles Times.<p>"Endlessly absorbing....[A] lovingly rendered and masterfully fashioned book."- Jay Winik, The Wall Street Journal..

Reprint Edition, Soft Cover,

[SW: HISTORY * BIOGRAPHY * CIVIL WAR * PRESIDENTS * POLITICS * ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1809-1865,]

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Manchester, William. The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968. Boston U. S. A.: Little, Brown & Co., 1968.
Marfree, acidfree BCE bound in black embossed satin w/ gilt titles on spine, shiny black illus DJ is chipped at spinetips & slightly about flap edge + a 1/2 inch closed tear, 69 photos; no names, not marked-in, underscored, clearance or discard. Mails from NYC usually within 12 hours. ; 942 pages; "Absolutely first-rate popular history with a grand sweep, May 17, 2004 \nBy Robert J Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) -\nThis has got to be one of the greatest history books that I have ever read, and I have read a lot of them. While the story is centered around the development of the Steel industry in the Ruhr Gebiet in Germany, it is also about German history - from its beginnings with the "forest mythology" of the Roman era - all the way up to the 1960s. Unusual for historians, Manchester also has a wonderful grasp of character, which the Krupp family supplied in many, many bizarre variations over several generations. The result is a read of the greatest quality. \nMost important, there is the empire of Krupp, as built up by Alfred. At 14, he inherited a steel company that had dwindled under his father's inept management to 5 employees. By sheer grit and a genius for profitable technical innovation, he built it into a vast conglomerate so powerful that it could literally make empires fall. In particular, the company specialised in the development of weapons, from breach-loading cannons to early prototypes for tanks. He even created a cannon (the Big Bertha for his wife) , braced along the side of an entire mountain, that could hurl projectiles deep into France from German soil. The details are fascinating, with graceful descriptions that translate their engineering details for laymen. \n\nAlfred controlled everything, from scribbling rules to govern the work force with a pencil nub to relationships with the various ministers of war throughout Europe. There are hilarious scenes where he dines once a year with Bismarck, a great personal friend, and their hysterical laughter at the latter's remark about Napoleon III of France ("Eigentlich ist er dumm") . His drive was so unrelenting that his many failures, such as an early insult to a crucially important aristocrat in the defense ministry (creating a problem for himself that lasted 30 years) , took an enormous personal toll - he spent days in bed, depressed and immobile after a failed sale, and his family was a horrible mess. \n\nA large part of the book is about his search for an heir who can run the family business. Here too, the characters are remarkable and often as hilarious or pathetic as their continuing genius for business. One of them was a notorious homosexual, who created an entire bacchanal in a Southern Italian castle for young boys, shooting fireworks for every climax, and when it was discovered - it was illegal in Germany - he committed suicide. You also witness the family energy dissipating until the last generation, when it became a public company with the appointment of Berthold Beitz. (Here there is some personal pique in the author, who writes that the last son, also gay, was "an indolent fool. ") \n\nThe tableau is so rich that it covers the many moral ambiguities of the times, such as supplying rival powers who would turn Krupp weapons on eachother, including enemies of Germany, and of course the Nazi period is examined. Through all of this, the Krupp do not come off well, even using slave labor by Hitler's victims. (The only criticism I have of the book is the excessive coverage of the Holocaust, which occupies several chapters of personal stories, indicting the last Krupp who was briefly imprisoned and then released to run the company in the 1950s. ) \n\nAs a business writer, it was a great pleasure to read such a rivetting business story. This book is the fullest of meals.. B000NU0C9Q.

Bookclub Edition, As New in Fair dust jacket.

[SW: 0316529400 Germany,]

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Walters, Dorothy M.. Here Is Genius. Glendora, CA: Royal Publishing, 1980.
8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 093434406X Unread copy. No markings in book. Rubbed DJ. Bump to bottom spine edge. Foreword by Norman Vincent Peale. Book is alive with genius -- the energy that collects, combines, amplifies and animates.. first person stories told by people who kept the Genius river flowing into their minds. Each chapter written by a genius. 400pp..

First Edition, Hard Cover, Near Fine/Very Good+.

[SW: Here Is Genius Positive Power People The Enlightenment Amplifiers Walters Dorothy SUCCESS SELF HELP PERSONAL GROWTH,]

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