Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE
Ideal reading for anyone looking for adventure and romance in unusual settings. Lesley Blanch writes about four strong women in The Wilder Shores of Love. Turning East, away from 19th Century Europe and conventional living, they found emancipation through escape and adventure. Isabel Burton married the Arabist and explorer Richard Burton; they worked together on his translation of A Thousand and One Nights; Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty), had four husbands and numerous lovers, including Honoré de Balzac and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. She ended up living in the Syrian desert with a young Bedouin chieftain; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery was a French convent girl who was...
THE NINE TIGER MAN
When East meet West: in this witty satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the British India of the 1850’s, where representatives of Victoria’s England preside uneasily over the glittering remnants of the Moghul Empire. The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . Prim and proper Lady Florence and her down-to-earth maid, Rosie, first encounter a Maharajah's heir, the Rao Jagnabad, warrior and slayer of nine tigers, when he visits England on a diplomatic mission. Fierce and handsome in gold-embroidered brocades and magnificent jewels, his powerful masculinity is overwhelming and unforgettable. Fate decrees that, some years later, the two wome...
The End of a Dream
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR – Beautifully done. A marvellous subtle knack of catching atmosphere and landscape, an ear for the spoken word that evokes half Balzac, half Alain Fournier . . . I loved it. The End of a Dream is a lyrical evocation of a long-forgotten yet echoingly familiar world, and an engrossing portrayal of life in rural France predating the environmental degradation of today. Gael Elton Mayo lived in two regions of France which came to mean a great deal to her. In the Franche-Comté, she lived with her husband in the fortress-château of Frontenay which had been a stronghold against the French. She had to learn, quite literally, to live with its ghosts. In this land of vast dista...
Honeymoon in Hell
Honeymoon in Hell is a remarkable rediscovered World War Two novel about a young couple grappling with the challenges of escaping from Nazi-occupied France September 1939. Star-crossed newly-weds, Anthea and Igor, have enjoyed a lazy summer on the French Riviera with their fun-loving friends, but a disturbing undercurrent lies beneath their insouciance. She is just sweet seventeen, and he a worldly thirty. They return to Paris, a city once synonymous with love and art, now overshadowed by the spectre of war. June 1940. The couple flee from the Nazi occupiers and join the exodus heading south. Their baby son is born during the bombardment of Bordeaux, and she survives childbed fever. They ret...
The Mad Mosaic
SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER – An exhilarating autobiography. “On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes.” So begins Gael Elton Mayo’s nail-biting autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping into Free France with her baby son and stateless White Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing from Spain to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York, only to return to war-ravaged Europe. She writes of bohemian life in Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s...
Regency England Undressed
Lesley Blanch’s novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the reigning courtesan of Regency London, was first published in 1955 in New York, where she was then living with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. The Wilder Shores of Love, for which Blanch is chiefly remembered, had been published to acclaim the previous year. Harriette Wilson lived among and was an integral part of a wealthy society where privilege, arrogance and leisure flourished. The greatest courtesan of her age, her patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Her weapons of allure were beauty, style and wit. She held court in a box at ...
PIERRE LOTI
The definitive biography of the eccentric bisexual naval officer, traveller, amateur acrobat, and best-selling novelist who was given a state funeral in 1923, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. Pierre Loti (born Julien Viaud in 1850) was himself his own fictional creation and lived his picaresque fantasies instead of just imagining them. Everything he wrote, novels included, is partly autobiographical. He had a powerful influence on Marcel Proust and Henry James. Bohemian, exotic and fiercely romantic; adored and scorned by French society in equal measure, Loti spent his life escaping the constraints of bourgeois France — and in so doing redef...
David 'Chim' Seymour
"He used his camera like a doctor would use a stethoscope in order to diagnose the state of the heart. His own was vulnerable.", Cartier-Bresson wrote about David Seymour, who liked to be called Chim. Chim is best known as one of the cofounders of photojournalism’s famous cooperative Magnum Photos. Weaving Chim’s life and work, this book discovers this empathetic photographer who has been called "The First Human Rights Photographer". In 1947, Chim was one of the four cofounders of the Magnum Photos cooperative with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger. He also wrote Magnum’s 1955 bylaws, which are still in effect today. But he is the only one of those famous photographe...
How Socio-Cultural Codes Shaped Violent Mobilization and Pro-Insurgent Support in the Chechen Wars
This book argues that the existing scholarship on asymmetric conflict has so far failed to take into account the role of socio-cultural disparities among belligerents. In order to remedy this deficiency, this study conceptualizes socio-cultural asymmetry under the term of asymmetry of values. It proposes that socio-cultural values which are based upon the codes of retaliation, silence, and hospitality – values which are intrinsic to honor cultures, yet absent from modern institutionalized cultures – may significantly affect violent mobilization and pro-insurgent support in that they facilitate recruitment into and support for insurgent groups, while denying such support to incumbent forces. Utilizing Russia's counterinsurgency campaigns in the First and Second Chechnya Wars as an empirical case study, this study explains how asymmetry of values can have an effect on the dynamics of contemporary irregular wars.
Quella sporca donnina
Dodici donne che è giunto il tempo di rivalutare, e risarcire di secoli di moralismo patriarcale. Una scorribanda nella storia, un tour libertino e spumeggiante che ci mostra come una corrente sotterranea di ribellione abbia sempre attraversato i secoli, concentrandosi proprio nel punto ancora oggi più controverso di tutti: il sesso. Signore della notte, cocottes, lucciole, scarlet ladies, meretrici, filles de joie, cortigiane, escort. Ma anche poetesse, letterate, spadaccine, amanti, filosofe, self-made women. Dalla Gerico della Bibbia alle strade patinate di Hollywood, dall'antica Grecia alla Venezia rinascimentale, passando per la Parigi post-rivoluzionaria e la Berlino di Hitler, quest...
