Bolles, Richard Nelson:The 1995 What Color is Your Parachute?
- Livres de poche 1995, ISBN: 9780898156331
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Little Brown & Co.. Very Good. 6.26 x 2.01 x 9.57 inches. Hardcover. 2005. 512 pages. <br>Widely acclaimed as one of the world's greatest li ving writers, Vikram Seth -- aut… Plus…
Little Brown & Co.. Very Good. 6.26 x 2.01 x 9.57 inches. Hardcover. 2005. 512 pages. <br>Widely acclaimed as one of the world's greatest li ving writers, Vikram Seth -- author of the international bestsell er A Suitable Boy -- tells the heartrending true story of a frien dship, a marriage, and a century. Weaving together the strands of two extraordinary lives -- Shanti Behari Seth, an immigrant from India who came to Berlin to study in the 1930s, and Helga Gerda Caro, the young German Jewish woman he befriended and later marri ed -- Two Lives is both a history of a violent era seen through t he eyes of two survivors and an intimate, unforgettable portrait of a complex, abiding love. Editorial Reviews From Publishers W eekly Starred Review. In 1969, Seth, 17, came from Calcutta to Lo ndon to continue his education and to stay with his Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny. Their relationship became warm, and it is their stories (as well as his own) that Seth (A Suitable Boy) tells in this wide-ranging, unpredictable and moving account. Shanti was S eth's grandfather's brother, a dentist who studied in Berlin, lod ging with Frau Caro, whose daughter, Henny, was in love with some one else. He left for Britain in 1936 because he couldn't practic e in Germany, but in 1940, as war broke out, he enlisted, served throughout and lost his right arm in combat, a calamity for a den tist. Meanwhile, Henny, a German Jew, arrived in Britain weeks be fore war was declared, leaving her beloved mother and sister behi nd to death camp murder. Vicky interviewed his great-uncle at len gth, and part two of his narrative focuses on Shanti. Part three, Henny's story, even more unusual, is based on a trove of remarka ble letters she received and wrote (she often kept carbons), many to friends in Germany during the war. Part four examines their m arriage (they didn't marry until seven years after the war), and part five details a family mystery about Shanti's will and Seth's complex but beautifully lucid summation of his research into the se lives. This lovely book, memoir as well as biography, examines great and fearful events seen through extraordinary lives. In cl ear and elegant writing, Seth explores the macrocosm through the microcosm, resulting in a most unusual, worthwhile book. 3 8-page b&w photo inserts. Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a div ision of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refe rs to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From School Library Journal Adult/High School-At 17, the Indian-born author left his homeland to study at Oxford. He lived with his au nt and uncle, a middle-class English couple in every way except o ne-his Uncle Shanti was Indian and his Aunt Henny was a German Je w. Through interviews with his uncle and a trunk of correspondenc e from his aunt, he is able to tell their story. Readers learn th at Shanti, a dentist, lost an arm, and that Henny lost all of her family during World War II. They learn the details of these loss es and about the couples romance. Shantis story is told first and is in some ways very similar to the narrators. Hennys story take s up the majority of the book and consists largely of corresponde nce from before the war until several years after. Hers is mostly a Holocaust story that tells as much about the culture of the ti me as the woman herself. Finally, they marry, more out of conveni ence than love, but they stay contentedly together for more than 30 years. The final chapter, a discussion of their estate, seems somewhat rushed and tacked on after the slowly paced narrative th at came before. Photographs are scattered throughout. The book is lengthy, but each fact shared is an important building block in telling the tale of this couple in the context of their era. A ri chly rewarding story.-Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library , MD Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed E lsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From The New Yorker Equally at home producing a novel in sonnets or a cornucopian fa mily saga, Seth has few equals as a literary technician. Here he turns to the story of Shanti and Henny, a great-uncle and great-a unt with whom he lived for a time in England. Shanti, an Indian d entist who did some training in Germany, lost an arm while servin g in a British Army dental unit during the Second World War. His wife was a German Jew who fled to England in 1939, and whose moth er and sister perished in concentration camps. The book is less d azzling than its predecessors, but this seems deliberate, as if S eth had adopted the mantle of dutiful family archivist a little t oo successfully. Nonetheless, his quiet tone has cumulative power as it leads us back in time from suburban calm to the death cham bers of Birkenau. Copyright ® 2006 The New Yorker --This text re fers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Fr om Bookmarks Magazine I want [Shanti and Henny] complexly remembe red, Seth writes. I want to mark them true. Seth meets this goal. Two Lives, a biography and record of pre- and postwar life, is a t heart a story about two individuals that fate and urgency?more than romantic love, perhaps?thrust together. Relying on interview s and HennyÂ's gut-wrenching letters from the 1940s and 1950s, Se th reinterprets GermanyÂ's war years and depicts ShantiÂ's strugg le to establish a dental practice and the coupleÂ's deep friendsh ip. Throughout the book, he casts a sharp, clear eye on historica l rumblings, offering a welcome Anglo-Indian perspective on the H olocaust. Seth could have pared down his details, better scrutini zed his relativesÂ' relationship, or been more (or less) objectiv e about their lives. But in the end, Shanti and Henny are two you Â'll want to meet. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist *Starred Review* Seth is the author o f the hugely popular novel A Suitable Boy (1993), and with the sa me attention to atmospheric detail and nuance of character he bro ught to that book, he now offers a deeply engaging dual biography of his great-uncle and great-aunt. At age 17, Seth journeyed fro m his native Calcutta to London to prepare for study at Oxford, a nd while in the British capital, he became acquainted with his tw o relatives--his uncle, an Indian like himself and a dentist, and his aunt, a German-born Jew--both of whom lived in London, thoug h they had found their way there through much different paths. Af ter writing A Suitable Boy, Seth decided to approach Two Lives no t so much as a personal remembrance as a researched life history of the couple. So, as if one of their stories weren't rich enough , we get two--three, really, since the process of Seth's learning about his uncle's and aunt's lives and revivifying them as a dua l narrative adds up to a third storyline. These two individuals, from widely divergent religious and cultural backgrounds, bring t ogether on a larger plane two important national stories of the t wentieth century: India during the years of division between and discord among Hindus and Muslims, and Germany under the anti-Semi tic Nazi regime. As well as offering an insightful exploration of those broad themes, this beautiful book delivers a passionate an swer to a more personal but timeless question of human relations: How do two people ever manage to end up together? Brad Hooper Co pyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Thi s text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this t itle. Review [A] thoughtful, evocative, moving book . . . [Seth] is an amazingly gifted, accomplished, resourceful and charming w riter. (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World) A great lo ve story, involving two remarkable people. (New York Times) Seth turns biography into powerful literature, distilling the univers al human emotions of passion, grief and the will to survive. (Den ver Post) Full of affection and tenderness . . . An unfailingly respectful memoirist. (Anita Desai, New York Review of Books) A subtle portrait of the complexities of a long companionship . . . A wonderful book. (The Economist) I cannot remember ever being quite so moved by a memoir... [Seth's] achievement has exceeded a ll possible expectations. (Simon Winchester) Irresistible... Ano ther triumph for one the most versatile and engaging of all conte mporary writers... An immensely moving narrative. (Kirkus Reviews (starred)) Eloquent and elegiacal . . . An intricate study of t he way lives and worlds can intertwine. (Los Angeles Book Review) Sensitive and compassionate... Fulfills the obligation Primo Le vi once defined for writers on the Holocaust: it is unadorned and clear. (Pankaj Mishra, New York Times Book Review) Seth has few equals as a literary techinician. (The New Yorker) Something ex traordinary... A thoughtful, engrossing narrative... This remarka ble book offers rich rewards. (Entertainment Weekly) Engaging ne w memoir... Even as you enjoy one [story], you discover another w ithin. (Christian Science Monitor) [A] beautiful, loving, clear- eyed book... Translucent, telling prose. (Seattle Times) Wonderf ul . . . A truly heroic tale which demonstrates just how much can sometimes be achieved against monstrous odds. (Washington Times) --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Vikram Seth has written acclaimed books in several genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven Lake; animal fab les, Beastly Tales; epic fiction, A Suitable Boy. His most recent novel, An Equal Music, was published in 1999. He lives in Englan d and India. --This text refers to the paperback edition. From T he Washington Post Born and reared in India, schooled in England and the United States, resident at various times of all three of those countries as well as China, Vikram Seth is a genuinely inte rnational man, the personification and embodiment of globalism. H e is also an amazingly gifted, accomplished, resourceful and char ming writer. Published first as a poet and travel writer, he asto nished and delighted readers with his first novel, The Golden Gat e (1986), inspired by Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and written, as tha t classic is, in rhyming verse. His second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993), is a massive, panoramic portrait of India. His third (whi ch I have not read), An Equal Music (1999), is about classical mu sic, in which he has a deep interest. Now, in Two Lives, Seth t urns for the first time to a combination of biography and memoir. The two people in the title are his uncle and aunt, Shanti and H enny, to whom his parents sent him in 1969, when he was 17 years old and about to begin his British schooling at Tonbridge. He was a boarder there but often visited Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny i n their house in London at 18 Queens Road, Hendon. Both were then 60 years old, and he knew them only slightly. In time, though, t hey were to become two of the most important people in his life. It was in 1994, five years after his aunt's death and four year s before his uncle's, that Seth began to think about making them the subjects of a book. His parents were visiting England, and in the course of a drive to the opera at Plymouth his mother said, You don't know what exactly to write about next. Why don't you wr ite about him? At first Seth was not eager to write about someone so close, but the more he thought about it, the more appealing t he prospect became. He started interviewing Shanti Uncle, who at 86 was eager to talk about the past. He assumed that Aunty Henny would be only a secondary figure because he could not interview h er and there seemed to be no significant documentary trail. Then, a year later, his father discovered a trunk stowed away in the a ttic at 18 Queens Road; it turned out to contain a trove of lette rs dealing with her life during and after World War II. This perm itted him to write a book that really is what its title promises: Two Lives. Acquiring these papers greatly expanded the reach o f Seth's story, for Henny was both German and Jewish. She and Sha nti met sometime in 1933. He was studying dentistry in Berlin and looking for a place to live. He found a room with Ella Caro, who lived in a very large flat with her two daughters, Henny and Lol a, and her son, Heinz. A widower in need of money, she had decide d to rent out the guest room: Shanti discovered more than a year later that when Mrs. Caro phoned her younger daughter Henny with the news that they had a lodger, her first reaction had been: 'Ni mm den Schwarzen nicht' [Don't take the black man]. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to last five and a half deca des. The two eventually became very friendly, and Shanti was wel comed as a de facto member of the Caro family, but a decade and a half passed before they married. Great and often terrible events intervened. Upon completing (with distinction) his dental studie s, Shanti returned to London -- Seth does not understand precisel y why he decided not to practice in India -- in 1937, where his G erman degrees were not recognized, so he had to start all over ag ain. Finally he qualified and in 1938 was offered a position as a n assistant to a Parsi dentist, who refused to give him a partner ship until February 1940, when Shanti volunteered for the Army, a t which point it was too late. By then Henny was also in Englan d. In 1939 she had found sponsorship in England and was able to g et a job with the family of a noted scholar, doing housework and caring for his children: She came with a trunk containing a few c lothes, a few books and a few mementoes of the three decades of h er life in Germany. Less than five weeks later, war was declared. Ella and Lola, who had been unable to emigrate, remained trapped within the borders of their own hostile country. Shanti met her at the train station and took her to her new residence, but soon he was off to Africa and then to Italy, where, in the calamitous battle at Monte Cassino, he lost his right arm below the elbow wh en a shell exploded nearby. The two corresponded irregularly th rough the war. Shanti's letters grew ever more loving and beseech ing, while hers, though hardly chilly, did not return his passion . She had dated a young man named Hans in Berlin and may have hel d out hopes for him, but after the war she learned that he had go ne over to the Nazis. Since she knew by then th, Little Brown & Co., 2005, 2.75, NY, Ten Speed 1995. Very Good/Unknown. Octavo, softcover, near fine. Glossy blue pictorial wraps. 480 pp., A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters & Career-Changers, timeless in its concepts. You will find by reading this what you should really be doing with your life and also get ideas on how to really be happy at work and how to get from here to there., NY, Ten Speed 1995, 3<
