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Motel Hotel
A photo essay of model/designer Todd Sanfield by photographer Kevin McDermott.
Elephant House, Or, the Home of Edward Gorey
Elephant House may be the most intimate portrait of Edward Gorey ever published. McDermott's reminiscences and descriptions of the house accompany his engaging photographs, and more than a dozen of Gorey's etchings and drawings of elephants-never before published-are paired with quotes from the artist. Through this portrait, Edward Gorey becomes even more the man we all wish we had had the chance to meet, an artist whose brilliant and hilarious art and words will continue to charm and delight us for generations to come.
They Imagine Texas
They Imagine Texas is the story of six lives, two deaths and Perros Salvajes County. On a vacant Sunday morning a 28-year-old teacher, Katherine Moliere, is out for a solitary run when she observes a man in a playground knock his son to the ground. Moliere, righteous in her way, intervenes. The man Moliere encounters is Tibor Rauscha, prominent in Texas politics and the wealthiest person in Perros Salvajes. When Moliere crosses his path Rauscha has recently divorced wife one and is engaged to wife two, Fanny DaCosta. None of them know it but Moliere’s encounter at the playground has set in motion a sequence in which little things blow up into big ones. When they cross paths again four year...
Stalin
Stalin's massive impact on Soviet history is often explained in terms of his inherent evil, personality defects and power lust. While not rejecting these notions, Kevin McDermott argues that Stalin's thoughts and actions are best contextualised in the inter-relationship between war and revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. The author presents the case for taking the Soviet dictator seriously as a Marxist revolutionary whose fundamental beliefs and modus operandi were forged in the cauldron of civil and international wars, ideologically driven class wars and revolutionary upheavals associated with the 'age of catastrophe', 1914-45. Only by so doing can the complex motivations for such cataclysmic events as the Great Terror be adequately addressed. Incorporating recently declassified materials from the former Soviet Party archives, this new appraisal of Stalin also provides a critical review of the latest western and Russian historiography. It is essential reading for anyone studying the debates on one of the leading figures of Soviet history.
Virgin Island
Model Todd Sanfield photographed by Kevin McDermott on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Island. Sand, skin, and surf.
Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945-89
Few Europeans in the twentieth century have been subject to the repeated buffetings by foreign powers, ideologically driven transformations and internal upheaval of the Czechs and the Slovaks. The period of Communist rule was complex, and those who gleefully overthrew the regime in 1989 were the very grandchildren of those who had voted for Communism with hope in the free elections of 1946. This concise account includes both political and social history, analysing half a century of Communism from at all strata of society. Kevin McDermott is equally intrigued by those in power and ordinary citizens, asking what motivates a young Czech worker-believer to join the Communist Party in the early 1950s, enrol in the People's Militia and remain in the party during the dark years of 'normalisation', yet end up welcoming the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Using Czech and Slovak archival sources and the most recent historiography, McDermott challenges the still dominant 'totalitarian' paradigm and argues that the forty year communist experience in Czechoslovakia cannot simply be dismissed as a Soviet-imposed aberration.
Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe
This wide-ranging collection of essays, newly available in paperback, is the first book in English to examine the impact of Stalinist terror on Eastern Europe in the years 1940 to 1956. Covering the Baltic states, Moldavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, the authors investigate terror both ‘from above’, in the form of elite purges and show trials, and ‘from below’ in the guise of large-scale arrests and deportations of ordinary people. Key questions addressed include the relative importance of Soviet influence versus ‘local’ factors; the persecution of particular groups, such as ‘kulaks’, church leaders, the middle-class intelligentsia and members of non-communist left-wing parties; cases where repression was more, or conversely less, intense than elsewhere; and the relevance of key events such as the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, the Rajk trial of 1949 and the Slánský trial of 1952.
The Comintern
This accessible text provides a comprehensive narrative and interpretative account of the entire history of the Communist International, 1919-1943. By incorporating the most recent Western and Soviet research the authors explain the legendary complexities of Comintern history and chart its degeneration from a revolutionary internationalist organisation into an obedient instrument of Soviet foreign policy. Key themes include: continuities and discontinuities between the Leninist and Stalinist phases, Bolshevisation versus national traditions, and the role of leading individuals in the Comintern apparatus. A selection of documents will elucidate these central themes.
The Time of the Corncrake
The Time of the Corncrake is about the author's life as he grew up from boy to man in the austere conditions that existed in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. Although it is a serious, informative, and sometimes sad account of growing up in a small Irish town, it is also full of humour. He tells in great detail of his schooldays, his teenage years, and his inevitable migration to England. He also writes from an Irish perspective, of his time in the Royal Air Force, and of his first year in his chosen career, the London Fire Brigade.
