New Releases by Stanley Weintraub

Dramatic hour-by-hour chronicle of the whirlwind events sweeping the world on the calendar day that may be the most momentous of the twentieth century.

By mid-1917, with the world war going badly on all fronts, and casualties burgeoning, Prime Minister David Lloyd George met with General Edmund Allenby, fresh from France. Lloyd George wanted “Jerusalem for Christmas” as a holiday “present” for the increasingly disillusioned British people. Its seizure would also eliminate the Ottomans, who had inflicted the dismaying disaster at the Dardanelles, as a factor in the war. As Allenby departed, the PM handed him George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land, remarking that it was a better guide to reaching Jerusalem than anything “in the pigeon holes of the War Office”. Having been raised on the Bible, Allenby, as this narrative illustrates, did indeed exploit it. He would also have unanticipated expertise from an unknown and unmilitary officer, T. E. Lawrence, who turned his Arabian “sideshow” into campaigns distracting the Turks and their German military leadership. The desert war would be hard-fought, but, that December, after centuries in Muslim hands and with its sacred sites intact, Jerusalem fell.

When the wartime 1944 presidential election campaign geared up late that spring, Franklin D. Roosevelt had already occupied the White House years longer than any other president. Sensing likely weakness, the Republicans mounted an energetic and expensive campaign, hitting hard at FDR's liberal domestic policies and the war's ongoing cost. Despite gravely deteriorating health, FDR and his feisty running mate, the unexpected Harry Truman, campaigned vigorously against young governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and old-line Ohio governor John Bricker. Roosevelt's charm and wit, as well as the military successes in Europe and the Pacific, contributed to his sweeping electoral victory. But the hard-fought campaign would soon take its toll on America's only four-term president. Preeminent historian and biographer Stanley Weintraub recaptures FDR's striking "last campaign" and the year's momentous events, from the rainy city streets where Roosevelt, his legs paralyzed by polio since 1922, rode in an open car, to the battlefronts where the commander-in-chief's forces were closing in on Hitler and Hirohito. The tale is unforgettable.

A preeminent historian's compelling history of perhaps the most remarkable holiday season in 20th-century history--December, 1941.

Little seems to have changed since Queen Victoria''s day in the instant magnetism of British royalty across the Atlantic Ocean; yet for the first generations liberated by revolution, the British Isles and its sovereigns seemed as remote as the moon. In the young nation, Americans who were little interested in the sons and daughters of their last king, George III, developed a love-hate relationship with Victoria, his granddaughter, that lasted for all her sixty-four years on the throne, ending only with her death in the first weeks of the twentieth century. Victoria''s long reign encompassed much of the time in which the young United States was growing up. The responses of Americans toward Victoria reveal not only what they thought of her (and her husband) as a person and a monarch, but reflect their own ambitions, confidence, smugness, insecurities-and sense of loss. Parting from England brought a surge of pride, but it also carried with it an unanticipated price. American encounters with Queen Victoria as person and as symbol evoke the costs of relinquishing a history, a tradition, a ceremonial texture. The brash, bewildered and beguiled Americans in these pages, from lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh, Barnum''s midget "Tom Thumb" and sharpshooter Annie Oakley, to literary lions like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James evince not only another dimension of the remote woman who might have been their queen, but what Americans were like, and what they thought they were like, in her time.

One of America's greatest Christmas stories and also one of its very first -- from the period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution -- was a creation of none other than George Washington. The story isn't just about Washington coming home for Christmas for the first time since the war began, but about the character of our most important Founding Father and about the precedent he set for democratic leadership. It is the story of a loving husband, a beloved military leader, and above all, a humble and great man. In late November 1783 when Washington finally received formal notice of the signing of a peace treaty with England he had little more than a month to accept the transfer of power from British troops in New York; to bid farewell to his troops; and to resign his commission to Congress if he hoped to make it to Mount Vernon for Christmas. He could have remained in charge of the army and become a virtual king to the Americans who loved him. Control of the newly forming government was his to take -- yet he chose to resign. It was that decision, coupled with his later decision to step down from the presidency after two terms, that rendered him "the greatest character of the age" (according to none other than King George III). Washington's homeward journey is one of the most moving and inspiring stories from his great and eventful life. When he bade farewell to his troops at Fraunces Tavern in New York City there were no dry eyes. When he reached Congress and gave a retirement speech, it cemented his greatness more fully than had his victory over the British. When he made it to Mount Vernon, finally, on Christmas Eve, it could not have been a happier homecoming. General Washington's Christmas Farewell is a deeply moving Christmas story as well as a great American story.

It was truly a white Christmas in the forests of the Ardennes in 1944, but that was cold comfort to the Allied soldiers trying to stop the Nazis from retaking Belgium in one of the most decisive battles of World War II. While a German loudspeaker taunted, "How would you like to die for Christmas?" the Allied forces dug in, despite freezing conditions. In a medieval chapel, General George S. Patton, who needed fair weather for airborne troop support to arrive, uttered what would become a famous prayer: "Sir...You have just got to make up Your mind whose side You''re on." His soldiers wouldn''t be home for the holidays, but as the skies cleared, they went on to win a battle and a war. In the tradition of his Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, acclaimed author Stanley Weintraub explores the irony and poignancy of waging war during a season dedicated to peace on Earth. Book jacket.

This moving story of horror taking a holiday (People) vividly recounts one of history's most powerful Christmas stories. Using the stories of the men who were there, Weintraub illuminates this extraordinary moment in time.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was the most notorious and misunderstood American artist of his time, and also the most influential. He is one of the most recognized names in painting because of his celebrated -- and endlessly satirized -- "Whistler's Mother". Born in Mass., he wound up living most of his life in Russia, France, and England. His sense of belligerent alienation erupted in ways that were endlessly fascinating. His insatiable urge to take his grievances to court; his feuds and vendettas with Ruskin, Wilde, and Beardsley; his acid wit and libelous invective; his ability to set fashions in art, dress, even lifestyle; his love affairs and relentless social climbing -- his was a flamboyant life told "with clarity, judgment, and liveliness."

Presents letters written between children and U.S. presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon.

Demonstrating the influence of scholar-teacher Stanley Weintraub on his students, Shaw and Other Matters reflects the scope of that influence in its concern with a variety of literary figures - from Shaw to Joe Orton - and of topics such as war memoirs and golem/robots. The variety is there, as well, in the approaches to the subjects: Rodelle Weintraub's dream analysis of Arms and the Man; Julie Sparks's comparison of Shaw with Bellamy, Morris, and Bulwer-Lytton as world "betterers"; Michael Pharand's evaluation of Shaw's changing views of Napoleon; Kinley Roby's tracing of Shaw's exchanges of views on playwriting with Arnold Bennett; and Kay Li's archetypal exploration of characters in Heartbreak House.

Offering a biography of Albert, this work examines how the Prince Consort was plucked from obscurity from a tiny German principality to sire the succession in the most powerful empire in the world. It examines his marriage, his popularity and the effect he made on Britain.

Through the life of Disraeli we see Victorian England -- her class system, social intrigues and prejudices, which allowed him to rise to prime minister.

Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

This is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of works by and about Bernard Shaw. No book has appeared before that has surveyed all of the research and writing that the life and work of Bernard Shaw have evoked. The greatest dramaturgist in English after Shakespeare, Shaw was one of the dominant public figures of his time, a long lifetime (1856-1950) that began in the mid-Victorian period and extended into the Atomic Age. Inevitably, someone who straddled his age so visibly and so memorably, and whose works retain a continuing fascination, has been the subject of thousands of articles and hundreds of books, from criticism of individual works to multivolume biographies, editions, and studies. Stanley Weintraub has distilled his forty years of experience of Shaw studies to bring them into useful focus and sort out the significant writings from the burgeoning mass of publications. This book is an essential tool for both scholars and general readers interested in the multifarious world of Shaw. Readers will not only find out what has been done, but what still remains to be accomplished in Shaw studies; what Shaw''s influence has been on other writers; even where Shaw has appeared as a character in other writers'' poetry, fiction, and drama.

Biography of Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

Biografie over de Ierse schrijver (1856-1950)

"William Golding has written some of the most exciting fiction of the postwar period. This resourceful study of his novels examines them from the perspective of an original thesis: that each represents a response to a specific book by an earlier writer, transformed by Golding''s artistry into a wholly new work bearing his unmistakable imprint. By exploring the origins of Golding''s novels, the authors redefine the total creative process and clearly show the particular force and relevance of each work. Any serious reader of fiction will be interested in this original exposition of the Golding canon from Lord of the Flies, Golding''s reaction to a Victorian boys'' book, to The Spire, his Ibsenite novel"--Back cover.