Richard Stern – författare

Sound waves propagate through galactic space, through two-dimensional solids, through biological systems, through normal and dense stars, and through everything that surrounds us; the earth, the sea, and the air. We use sound to locate objects, to identify objects, to understand processes going on in nature, to communicate, and to entertain. The elastic properties of materials determine the velocity of sound in them and tell us about their response to stresses something which is very important when we are trying to construct, manufacture, or create something with any material. The Handbook of Elastic Properties of Materials will provide these characteristics for almost everything whose elastic properties has ever been measured or deduced in a concise and approachable manner.Leading experts will explain the significance of the elastic properties as they relate to intrinsic microscopic behavior, to manufacturing, to construction, or to diagnosis. They will discuss the propagation of sound in newly discovered or created materials, and in common materials which are being investigated with a fresh outlook.The Handbook will provide the reader with the elastic properties of the common and mundane, the novel and unique, the immense and the microscopic, and the exhorbitantly dense and the ephemeral.. You will also find the measurement. And theoretical techniques that have been developed and invented in order to extract these properties from a reluctant nature and recalcitrant systems.Key Features* Solids, liquids and gases covered in one handbook* Articles by experts describing insights developed over long and Illustrious careers* Properties of esoteric substances, such as normal and dense stars, superfluid helium three, fullerness, two dimensional solids, extraterrestial substances, gems and planetary atmospheres* Properties of common materials such as food, wood used for musical instruments, paper, cement, and cork* Modern dynamic elastic properties measurement techniques

In midcentury America, the golden age of television, a man named Golk is wreaking havoc with the medium. Through a devastating series of exposures—"You're on Camera"—Golk manipulates the high and mighty, the lowdown and dirty, and the outrageous weird; all are within the compass of Richard Stern in this early novel, a comedy with as many inspired maneuvers as its rambunctious protagonist has for taking the measure of a profligate world. "Golk is a rich and marvelously detailed novel by a man with a cultivated intelligence; it is also the first really good book I have read about television."—Norman Mailer "An original: sharp, funny, intelligent, rare. . . . Working in a clean, oblique style reminiscent of Nathanael West, Mr. Stern has written in Golk a first-rate comic novel, a piece of fiction that is at once about and loaded with that kind of recognition that junkies call the flash."—Joan Didion, National Review "Golk is fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without weariness. Best of all Golk is pure—that is to say necessary. Without hokum."—Saul Bellow "Golk (like Golk himself) is a wonderous conception. Its world responds to personification, not analysis, and personify it Mr. Stern has done. A book in a thousand."—Hugh Kenner "What I like about Mr. Stern's fantasy is that it has been conceived and written with so much gaiety. Far from a political melodrama, it reminds me of a René Clair movie, and even the surrealist touches needed to bring out the power and pretense of the television industry are funny rather than symbolically grim."—Alfred Kazin, Reporter "A mighty good book, altogether alive, full of beans and none of them spilled."—Flannery O'Connor

Cy Riemer—fifty-ish, divorced, and father of four—surveys the dispersal of his family with a mixture of anxiety, humor, sadness, and pride. In this wry, moving, and wise novel, Richard Stern offers his masterful portrait of Cy as the quintessential caring yet controlling parent, a relentless seeker of self-knowledge whose search is intensified through conflicts with his brilliant, ne'er-do-well son Jack. The "manipulation of a smart, sane, self-justifying narrator . . . is not the least of Stern's achievements in this delicate fabrication of tough prose and tender adjustment of sentiment."—Geoffrey Wolff, Los Angeles Times "Richard Stern's novels are robustly intelligent, very funny, and beguilingly humane. He knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."—Philip Roth "A delectable rhetorical display. . . . "—The New Yorker "Anyone who has read Richard Stern's previous novels won't need to be told he is an unusually crisp and intelligent writer, with a sharp edge to his wit; and in A Father's Words he runs true to form. Many of the book's pleasures are incidental: jokes, intellectual cadenzas, agile turns of phrase . . . The author's powers of farcical invention climax in a brilliant, bitter episode where . . . the younger man proclaims his final failure . . . Mr. Stern has written an excellent novel."—John Gross, New York Times "Richard Stern is American letters' unsung comic writer about serious matters . . . [A Father's Words] produced in this reviewer an apostolic desire to convince a wider audience to try Stern, especially the vintage Stern."—Doris Grumbach, Chicago Tribune

"What Is What Was", Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany", is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and non-fiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher", appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praise as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W.C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer. The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write).There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, "What Is What Was" is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders - and about writing American prose".

A group of Americans in Venice encounter an Ezra Pound-like sculptor.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly in recent years and now provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are already used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. To date, however, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case. The important matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly in recent years and now provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are already used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. To date, however, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case. The important matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.

Unlocking Commercial Financing for Clean Energy in East Asia was written for government decision makers in middle and high-income countries, members of international financing communities, and practitioners. In East Asia, all middle-income countries have national targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy, and some even have targets for carbon reduction. However, a major hurdle to achieving a sustainable energy path is mobilising the required financing. Policy makers must determine how to unlock commercial financing to scale up clean energy investments. This title builds on recent experience in applying public financing instruments and attempts to address the following issues: when and under what circumstances to use public financing instruments, which instrument to select, and how to design and implement them most effectively. First and foremost, effective and conducive policies are essential to catalysing commercial investment in clean energy. Once the right policy regime has been put in place, public financing mechanisms designed to mitigate risks and close financing gaps have proven to play a major catalytic role in kick-starting substantial investments in clean energy. Public financing mechanisms for energy efficiency are particularly important to mitigating financiers' risk perceptions, to aggregating small deals, and to enhancing the interest and capacity of domestic banks. Public financing for renewable energy can provide long-term loan tenure to match the long payback period, mitigate technology risks, and increase access to financing for small and medium enterprises. The selection of public financing instruments should be tailored to the market barriers, the targeted market segments, the regulatory environment, and the maturity of the financial market. Engaging domestic banks through credit lines and guarantees has had the greatest impact in unlocking private financing. Dedicated funds and mezzanine and equity funds can effectively increase access to financing for small and medium enterprises and clean energy start-ups. Finally, the impact of public financing instruments can be substantially increased if they are packaged with technical assistance.

“The first really good book I have read about television.” —Norman Mailer In midcentury America, one man is determined to take over the airwaves with a program as audacious as it is entertaining. Bald, bombastic, and irresistible, Golk is his name and You’re On Camera is his show. To “golk” someone is to trick her, on camera, into betraying her true nature. The more combative the personality, the better the joke, and to help trap his victims Golk enlists a team of misfits, including Herbert Hondorp, a scholarly layabout turned photogenic decoy, and Jeanine Hendricks, a twenty-three-old debutante with a bitter worldview. But Golk has bigger plans than just catching average Manhattanites unawares. As popular as You’re On Camera has become, he knows the show is capable of making a greater, more transformative impact. The question is, will Herbert and Hendricks go along with his revolutionary agenda? Or will they bow to the power of the network and the seduction of celebrity? Combining high drama with surreal hilarity and presenting a remarkably prescient view of the future of television, Golk ranks with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust as one of the finest novels ever written about the American entertainment industry.

Cultures and egos clash in this hilarious tale of two American men trying to start over again in Europe For Max Schreiber, World War II was an idyll. It is the return home to Connecticut that feels like entering a combat zone. Ridiculed by his wife and daughter, bored by his legal practice, Schreiber spends his evenings drinking and eating alone, hoping that when he goes to sleep he will dream of France and Micheline, the beautiful young woman who may have broken his heart but at least made him feel alive. When at last he works up the courage to end his stultifying marriage and set out on his own, Schreiber knows exactly where he wants to go: across the Atlantic. Theodore Baggish has spent years planning and saving for his escape from New England. When the time is finally right, he gleefully gets himself fired from his job as a dry goods clerk and sets sail for postwar Europe, the land of opportunity. Nothing will stand in the way of his success, and he will use anyone who can help him achieve his goals, whether they like it or not. Naive, amoral, and unrelentingly eager, Baggish may have been too young to storm the beaches of Normandy, but he is bound and determined to conquer the Continent all by himself. When Schreiber and Baggish meet at an awkward dinner party in the university town of Heidelberg, one them is on the way up, the other on the way down. Are their futures set in stone, or is there still time to change course? Stylish, witty, and profound, Europe is an insightful examination of the intersection of character and circumstance and a laugh-out-loud portrayal of the conflict between the Old World and the New.

In one of the world’s most beautiful cities, an aging sculptor serves as an inspiration and a warning to two aspiring artists Pursuing literary glory, Edward Gunther gives up his job as a copywriter, sells everything he owns, and moves with his wife and three children from Chicago to Venice. But success does not come as quickly or as painlessly as Edward had hoped. During his first month in Italy, he struggles to get his essays published, argues with his wife about the family finances, and embarks on an unsteady affair with Nina Callahan, an American poet who insists on keeping him at arm’s length. It seems that Edward’s dreams will never come true, but when he discovers that Nina has befriended Thaddeus Stitch, the famous sculptor, a ray of hope appears. If anyone has the spark of genius, it is Stitch, who counted Yeats and Rilke as his friends and is inarguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Perhaps some of the old man’s creative energy will rub off on Edward, to whom a note of encouragement from such a luminary would mean everything. But Stitch is bitter and distant, preoccupied with his own doubts. Ancient now, he feels his talent slipping from his grasp and recognizes that the world is ready to move on without him. He knows that his masterpiece, a collection of figures and abstractions on an island in the Venetian Lagoon, will eventually disappear beneath the rising waters of the Adriatic. Over the course of a foggy winter, these three lonely souls try to come to terms with the direction of their lives and the meaning of their work. Written shortly after Richard Stern met Ezra Pound and widely recognized as a remarkable portrait of that inimitable literary lion, Stitch is an incisive and sympathetic novel about the joys and disappointments of a life devoted to art.

“A beautifully written novel that should be read by everyone who cares about the human condition.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer Harvard physiologist Robert Merriwether has four whip-smart children, an attractive and intelligent wife, and a successful, stimulating career. True, he and Sarah have not slept together in years, and when he decides to stay behind in Cambridge for the summer while the rest of the family vacations in Maine, his newfound freedom is deeply unsettling. But that does not mean that Merriwether wants to change his life or feels unloved. To a man of science, desire is nothing more than a biological reaction. And Merriwether’s personal philosophy is that once you’re in your forties, real love is nothing but lust and nostalgia. Then Cynthia Ryder walks into his life. Twenty years old, she is beautiful, intelligent, witty, and kind. And, to Merriwether’s great surprise, she wants to be with him. Initially, he evades her advances, sure that hers is just a passing fancy. But as he gets to know her better, Merriwether realizes that Cynthia is more mature than he first suspected and that the joy he feels when they are together has been missing from his life for a long, long time. When the summer ends and their need for each other does not fade, Merriwether realizes that he is being given a chance at true love. The question is, will he be brave enough to take it? Considered by many critics to be Richard Stern’s finest novel, Other Men’s Daughters is a tender, honest, witty, and life-affirming portrait of a love as transcendent as it is unlikely.

A high-flying journalist comes to ground in this brilliant and bittersweet novel about coming to terms with the traumas of life Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world “harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains,” he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife, Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the bestseller lists. A new assignment, however, threatens to bring an end to Wursup’s recent string of successes. Asked to write an article on dying—still “undiscovered country,” according to his editor—he becomes unsettled by the seemingly random course of his life, the nature of his work, and the mortality that surrounds him. A troubled playwright he once profiled commits suicide. His elderly father, a retired meter reader who writes poetry about the last years of famous old men, seems to be on the verge of something drastic. Cicia, a young woman dying of cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, is gorgeous, vibrant, and doomed, and Wursup just might be falling in love with her. A charming and richly intelligent story about the disasters, major and minor, that are bound to happen to us all, Natural Shocks showcases the fine craftsmanship and depth of feeling that have established Richard Stern as one of America’s most admired authors.

A tale of the battles between a father and son by an author whose novels are “robustly intelligent, very funny, and beguilingly humane” (Philip Roth). Cy Riemer is the patriarch of a successful and loving Chicago family. But not all is copacetic in Cy’s world. The scientific newsletter he publishes is foundering financially, his ex-wife still relies on him for money and intimacy, and he can never seem to find the time or the wherewithal to relax. Much of Cy’s stress is caused by the trouble he has with his brilliant and duplicitous son, Jack. With a mixture of humor, grief, and astonishment, Cy becomes our tour guide to the Riemer family’s museum of triumphs and tragedies. A comic and clear-eyed portrait of the quintessential worried father and the son who lives to torture him, A Father’s Words is packed with Richard Stern’s trademark wit, compassion, and insight.