Stanley Weintraub – författare

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest are accompanied by Wilde's prison memoirs, poems, and selected correspondence.

How could Bernard Shaw have found anything to admire in Queen Victoria? Or in the passionate evangelical “General” William Booth of the Salvation Army? What possible connections could there be between Shaw, the passionate socialist, and the Tory Winston Churchill, who seemed to represent everything Shaw should have rejected and despised? In Shaw’s People, noted Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub explores the relationships between Shaw and twelve of his contemporaries, including Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, H. L. Mencken, James Joyce, and Winston Churchill. Weintraub chose these individuals as lenses through which to look at Shaw but also for the ways in which their lives are illuminated through their often paradoxical relationships with Shaw.While Shaw never met Queen Victoria, his sovereign during the first forty-five years of his life, the degree of her influence is apparent in Shaw’s reference to himself, in his ninth decade, as “an old Victorian.” Weintraub explores those in the literary world who interacted with Shaw, such as H. L. Mencken, one of Shaw’s earliest American fans, who turned against his hero at the peak of his translatlantic reputation, and James Joyce, who was loath to confess his respect for his fellow Irishman. He investigates the curious mutual admiration between Shaw and W. B. Yeats and Shaw’s championing of Oscar Wilde despite the vast difference in their lifestyles. Weintraub’s skillful investigation of each of these twelve relationships illuminates a different facet of Shaw, from his pre-dramatist years in London through the close of his long life.

He was the most notorious and misunderstood American artist of his time, and also the most influential. To this day James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) is one of the most recognized names in painting because of his celebrated (and endlessly satirized) Whistler's Mother, one of the treasures of the Louvre. He was, to say the least, a character. Born in Massachusetts, he claimed to be a Southerner and wound up living most of his life abroad,in Russia, France, and England (though he could not tolerate more than brief periods in France and thoroughly disliked the English). Whistler's sense of belligerent alienation erupted in ways that were endlessly fascinating to both Europeans and Americans: his insatiable urge to take his grievances to court (including literary and artistic grievances) his feuds and vendettas with such worthies as 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 here "with clarity, judgment, and liveliness" (Leon Edel).

In Young Mr. Roosevelt Stanley Weintraub evokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political and wartime beginnings. An unpromising patrician playboy appointed assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913, Roosevelt learned quickly and rose to national visibility in World War I. Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920, he lost the election but not his ambitions. While his stature was rising, his testy marriage to his cousin Eleanor was fraying amid scandal quietly covered up. Ever indomitable, even polio a year later would not suppress his inevitable ascent.Against the backdrop of a reluctant America's entry into a world war and FDR's hawkish build-up of a modern navy, Washington's gossip-ridden society, and the nation's surging economy, Weintraub summons up the early influences on the young and enterprising nephew of his predecessor, Uncle Ted."

Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock- in some cases overseas, elation- was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody's mind. United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to save Luzon. In Japan, the Pearl Harbor strike force returned to Hiroshima Bay and toasted its sweeping success. Across the Atlantic, much of Europe was frozen in grim Nazi occupation. Just three days before Christmas, Churchill surprised Roosevelt with an unprecedented trip to Washington, where they jointly lit the White House Christmas tree. As the two Allied leaders met to map out a winning wartime strategy, the most remarkable Christmas of the century played out across the globe. Pearl Harbor Christmas is a deeply moving and inspiring story about what it was like to live through a holiday season few would ever forget.

In the tradition of his Silent Night and Pearl Harbor Christmas , historian Stanley Weintraub presents another gripping narrative of a wartime Christmas season- the epic story of the 1950 holiday season in Korea, when American troops faced extreme cold, a determined enemy, and long odds. A Military Book Club main selection

Just a few of the words of presidential wisdom found in Dear Young Friend:“I rejoice that you have learnt to write,…for as this is done with a goosequill, you know the value of a goose.” –Thomas Jefferson, to his granddaughter, Cornelia Randolph“As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a bit of silly affection if were to begin now?” –Abraham Lincoln to Grace Bedell“If we are successful [in the election], it will not be handsome behavior for any of my family to exhibit exultation or talk boastingly, or be in vain about it.” –Rutherford B. Hayes, to his son “Ruddy”“The other sixty cents are for my other six grandchildren. They are not born yet.” –Theodore Roosevelt, to Marjorie Sterrett, who was collecting dimes to fund a battleship“The John Birchers are just Ku Klux without the nightshirts.” –Harry Truman to David S. McCracken“If you really believe, you will see them. My [Irish] ‘little people’ are very small, wear tall black stovepipe hats, green

People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognisable characters in his plays. He turned Beatrice Webb into a witchlike virago in The Millionairess, Winston Churchill into an aspiring, blowhard politician in John Bull's Other Island, and Lawrence of Arabia into the eccentric army private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek in Too True to Be Good. However, as eminent Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub reveals in this exquisite collection, Shaw's relationships to real or imagined personalities could be both curiously unexpected and deliciously complex.Featuring figures as varied as Julius Caesar, Zulu king Cetewayo, Noel Coward, Edward Elgar, and Benjamin Disraeli, this volume brilliantly demonstrates how Shaw put something of himself into all of his ""people."" The result is a book that is consistently revealing, intriguing, and entertaining.

SILENT NIGHT brings to life one of the most unlikely and touching events in the annals of war. In the early months of WWI, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides left their trenches, laid down their arms, and joined in a spontaneous celebration with their new friends, the enemy. For a brief, blissful time, remembered since in song and story, a world war stopped. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible. Germans placed candle-lit Christmas trees on trench parapets and warring soldiers sang carols. In the spirit of the season they ventured out beyond their barbed wire to meet in No Man's Land, where they buried the dead in moving ceremonies, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and joyously played football, often with improvised balls. The truce spread as men defied orders and fired harmlessly into the air. But, reluctantly, they were forced to re-start history's most bloody war. SILENT NIGHT vividly recovers a dreamlike event, one of the most extraordinary of Christmas stories.

Long Day's Journey Into War recaptures the whirlwind events sweeping the globe on the calendar day that may be the most momentous of the twentieth century. In this riveting re-creation, the vast, worldwide scope of the major turning point of World War II comes to unforgettable life.In Washington, D.C., the U.S. and Japanese governments move toward irreversible confrontation. In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito strains to hear, amid the crackling radio static, the first reports of war. Landings in Malaya and Thailand at midnight are timed to coincide across the thousands of miles of ocean with carrier-plane and suicide-sub attacks at daylight on Hawaii.In Russia, in the subzero snows, the German onslaught crests against the furious counterattacks of a Red Army rising from its ruins. In North Africa, in the torrid sands about besieged Tobruk, Rommel's Afrika Korps discovers its limits. In Nazi-occupied Europe, in a bleak Polish forest, Hitler's "final solution" is given its first grisly trial run.In the kaleidoscope of Stanley Weintraub's narrative, events reveal themselves in dramatic hour-by-hour simultaneous time as scenes shift from frontlines to home fronts. Meticulously researched, startling in its revelations and in its juxtaposition of events, Long Day's Journey Into War is gripping, riveting history. (6 X 9, 752 pages, b&w photos, maps)