Best Selling Books by Stanley Weintraub

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

A biography of the close friend of Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Osbert Sitwell, Oscar Wilde and others of the London literary scene during the early 20th century.

This book traces the progress and texture of the friendship between T.E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw.