Switzerland Books

Sweet Days of Discipline is narrated by a boarding school student who has attended several such schools, who has been defiant, who is a disinterested student, who becomes nearly obsessed with a new student - disciplined, independent, nihilistic. The tension in the narrative derives from emotional states rather than plot events - yet the tension builds as clearly as in a thriller. This is achieved by the author's excellent understanding of her narrator's point of view and the use of landscape, daily events and memories to express that view. Examples: the description of the landscape on the narrator's early morning walk; the destruction of letters from her mother; the memory of her roommate's dance dress but not her name ...

Not a perfect book but well worth the two or three hours it takes to read.

One of the all too rare examples of literature as art rather than entertainment, this book deserves to be much better known. Jeaggy is a master of style and has a purity and preciseness of language that makes this book an utter joy. A future classic.

It is a terrible thing that only two of Jaeggy's odd, spare, and brilliant works are presently available in English. This novella is striking in its stylistic genius and restrained but intense emotional world. I eagerly await the translation of more of Jaeggy's work.

I grew up in Switzerland and bought this book out of curiosity to see how others see the Swiss. I found the information in this booklet very concise and easy to read. For the most part the book is very acurate and up-to-date. It is also fun to read and gives lots of information on understanding the Swiss, their history, and their customs. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about the Swiss and their country.

it doesn't have much picture inside. But it is really a quick guide if you want to know Switzerland more. It included history, culture, value and also some kinds of usual greeting style. It's a nice pocket size book :)

I bought this book as a gift for a graduate student who was going to work in Switzerland for two years. However, I did look through it before giving it away, and I had done quite a bit of research on line before picking this particular item. The book seemed to me a very practical guide for someone taking up residence in Switzerland, and was not so much meant for the casual 2-week vacationer. The sections on cultural differences between the Swiss and other people were particularly interesting, and would head off some awkward moments for a new immigrant. The parts about rules for apartment living sound quite strict for someone from America, but, again, would prevent misunderstandings between Swiss and foreign tenants. There are also the more usual guidebook sections on recreation, such as hiking, skiing, eating in restaurants, etc. The student who received the book proclaimed it "great", and I think it will come in handy in the months ahead.

Given the tough (and not-so-commonplace) nature of the story - living and having a relationship with two individuals who are sero-positive (HIV-positive), I believe the story could not have been told in words alone as a memoir without getting melodramatic or overly-sentimental. But through the medium of a graphic novel, Frederik Peeters takes us on an interesting journey - through his own feelings and anxieties as life presents some interesting new questions of him through his relationship with Cati and her son.

Everything a good graphic novel should be. Creative drawing, a good story - full of anxiety, angst, dreams, surreal, love, pain: a tribute to life itself. One hopes things turn out well for Peeters and Cati.

also read the guardian article about "how to make a cartoon drama out of a crisis"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/23/culture.features

A really special book. It's a wonderful fit for the graphic novel genre, the line quality continuing the tone of the story -- shaky, nervous, undefined. This book is a rare work of art, with an original and painfully honest story. Simply beautiful.

This cookbook is very good; I am looking forward to trying several of the recipes. The information about the region the recipe comes from in additon to the history of the recipes themselves makes this book a keeper.

"Cuisines of the Alps" is a culinary journey filled with recipes and lore from France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

Kay Shaw Nelson shares her passion for food from the Alps in this book. She is a food writer and author of eighteen cookbooks.

Hippocrene Books is known for their cookbooks from exotic countries, such as, "Argentina Cooks!", "Icelandic Food and Cookery" and "Tastes of the Pyrenees". Here is yet another addition!

Nelson's introduction takes us on a mini-tour of the beautiful Alps! Her description of the region helps the reader envision such a lovely area with snow-capped mountain peaks, trees, people and homes. Her recipes are easy-to-follow and extremely tasty!

The chapters included in this book are: Appetizers; Soups; Eggs and Cheese Dishes; Fish; Meat, Poultry and Game; Vegetables and Salads; Pasta, Rice and Other Grains; Desserts; and Drinks and Wine. Some of the more delectable recipes are: goulash, linzer torte, Liechtenstein Corn-Bean Salad, walnut cake, Wine Cream, dumplings, Bavarian Beer Soup, and Fondue!

For people interested in a comprehensive cookbook on cookery in the Alps, Nelson really brings home the passion!

If you love the mountains, their glory, their beauty and deceit, then this is the one book you need to have. Not only does it read like a thriller at times, it also has some of the most fabulous mountain photographs one can imagine. And what better mountain than the fascinating Eiger is there? Well, maybe the Matterhorn... but it does not hold such climbing fascination as the treacherous wall of stunning Eiger. So if you plan a vacation in the Bernese Oberland or just want to play couch mountaineer, this is one hell of a book. Go for it!

The Eiger is a 3970 m mountain that looms above Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. Its north face has been quite literally a ca. 2000 meter-high 'vertical arena'. Although the mountain itself was first climbed in 1858 by Charles Barrington, Christian Almer, and Peter Bohren, the north face ('Nordwand' in German) was not conquered until 1938 (when Heinrich Harrer, Anderl Heckmair, Fritz Kasparek, and Wiggerl Vörg were finally successful). In the early 1930s, it was deemed one of the 'last remaining problems' of the Alps and was truly a 'vertical area', as onlookers (including reporters who made sure the rest of the world was also able to vicariously participate) were able to follow the progress of several tragic expeditions from the comfort of the patio of a hotel on an easily-accessible meadow far below. Part of the great difficulty of the climb is that the wall's north-facing aspect means that it remains snow- and ice-covered year round. The rotten rock and ice that coats the Nordwand makes things even more complicated and afternoon rock avalanches are common and treacherous. The weather is also extremely unpredictable and changeable, a condition that is caused in part by the fact that the wall is part of the northern boundary of the Alps.

The combination of extremely challenging climbing conditions with high visibility has led to a century of high drama centered about the Eiger's north face and this book does an excellent job of summarizing many aspects of this highly notorious and celebrated mountain. The book consists of an eclectic collection of short chapters by different authors about different aspects of the Eiger (and not just the north face). Each chapter is named after one of the distinctive points along the first successful route, but tells a different aspect of the story. Chapters include descriptions of the varied routes, the myriad tragedies and dramatic rescues, the debates about the morality of even attempting to climb the mountain, the controversial politics of the first successful climbers (one of whom, Heinrich Harrer, carried a Nazi flag with him), a summary of the Eiger's appearances in books and the movies, tales of people who skied and snowboarded down the mountain, and the uniquely Swiss engineering feat that is the railway tunnel bored through the mountain and on up to the Jungfrau Joch. There is also a section at the end providing information for visitors (including suggestions for alternative walks and climbs in the area for those who would rather wear sandals or are otherwise not quite ready for the north face itself) and an extensive bibliography.

My favorite feature of the book is the fantastic and abundant illustrations that range from dramatic contemporary photographs to historical photographs to artwork of various sorts, all of which serve to nicely complement the text. I should mention, however, that the quality of the printing appears to be a bit worse in the English edition than in the German-language original, which probably will detract a bit from the impact of the pictures.

I wanted this book to inspire me, not necessary be an historical reference book. It did what I wanted, and so this is a happy customer. It is an oversize book, and the photos are nothing short of stunning.

Magnificent photos of ethnic jewelry. On a par with The Splender of Ethnic Jewelry, but the text is not as detailed.

I was not familiar with Hodler's landscape paintings until I received this book. They are fantastic! It is well-worth the price. Some of the essays are very informative and interested; others are obtuse.

The Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler seems to enjoy some kind of a renaissance these days with major retrospective exhibitions (planned) in the Musée d"Orsay (Paris, 2007-08) and in the Kunstmuseum of the Swiss capital Berne (2008). This book accompanied a major show in the Zurich Kunsthaus in 2004. It excludes Hodler's portraits and (often monumental) symbolist allegories and focuses exclusively on his landscape paintings.

One reason why Hodler is interesting as a landscape artist is because he has explored the subject matter of mountains as no other painter before or after him has done (apart, perhaps, from his contemporary Giovanni Segantini). He painted about 250 landscapes, the majority of which featured mountains in some way. This book shows 70 of the most important paintings, the earliest of which dates from 1871. Most are examples of more mature work, starting around 1900.

The book is conceived in such a way that it invites us to retrace the emergence of Hodler's compositional principles in his landscape art. After an introductory section with some his early works, the book surveys how - in his treatment of trees and rocks - Hodler came to grapple with the tension between, on the one hand, his desire to creatively reduce natural scenes to their very essence and, on the other hand, nature's irreducible tectonic complexity. This tension becomes even more outspoken in his approach to the monumental subject of mountains. Hodler liked simple compositions based on obvious symmetries and geometric templates (pyramidal, striped, apsidial and ovaloid) and occasionally developed more complex forms as superimpositions of these basic schemes.

The straightforward compositional approach is backed up on his choice of vantage points which allowed him to focus on individual mountain peaks. And so it is no surprise to see the notion of "mountain portrait" evoked by one of the authors: "(Hodler) created images that no longer showed individual mountain peaks as part of a panorama but in close up view and in almost total reduction, transforming them into individual portraits." Furthermore, Hodler accentuated his motifs by eliminating irrelevant details, emphasising their linear structure. Hence the interesting tension between reduction and tectonic complexity. Hodler seemed to have said that "the viewer must be able to perceive the entire image at a glance": a thesis which deviates conspicuously from the principles held by Segantini who invited the viewer's gaze to drift across his panoramic tableaux.

In his essay "The Sketched Landscape", Paul Müller links Hodler's approach to the practice of alpine photography in those early days. Both the pioneers of mountain photography and Hodler chose very similar angles and sections. Müller refers to Danielle Nathanson who has photographed numerous motifs in the Bernese Oberland from the painter's likely vantage point: "She concludes that Holder not only adhered to the natural model, but that he also framed it the way it presents itself to the human field of vision - and to a camera lens with a regular focal length (approx. 50mm)."

However, the deeper logic between this correspondence is hardly explained. Apparently, the simple fact that both painters and photographers made use of the technological innovations of the day and chose their vantage points near the cable car stations suffices. That argumentation is weak and I personally think it is wrong to see Hodler's work as a painterly extension of the photographic logic en vogue those days. In fact, I think they may in some ways be very much at odds.

For a start, one should not forget that by the time Hodler developed his mature style, end of the 19th century, photography was around already for a long time. Photography was a technological innovation that, long before the days of globalisation, diffused astonishingly rapidly across the globe. By 1900, photography had been well entrenched for around 50 years. Just as television is a taken for granted fixture in our current media environment, so photography must have long lost its avant-garde lustre already by the time Holder got to work in earnest. Indeed, early examples of Alpine photography date already from the 1850s, not from the 1880s as is suggested in this book. In the late 19th century, Alpine photography had even been thoroughly commercialised: studio portraits were made in heroic poses against the background of a mountain decor and "Kaufbilder" (postal cards) with mountain scenes were all over the place.

Rather than to extend the photographic logic, Hodler may have been interested in "saving" the mountains from disappearing in this inflation of technically reproduced images. So, he paints iconic portraits of mountains, reducing them to their very essence (an essence which photography, infatuated by its ability to reveal tectonic complexity, often obscured) and investing them with a metaphorical rhetoric (cloud arabesques, mystic light) that is at odds with the documentary ethos of contemporaneous photography. Seen from this angle, Hodler's project consisted essentially in salvaging the notion of "the sublime" that had been drifting around the (visual) experience of the mountain world since Edmund Burke wrote his celebrated essay. This line of reasoning, by the way, seems to be more in line with the argument developed in this book by Oskar Bätschmann in his essay "Ferdinand Hodler - Organized Nature".

The book closes with a survey of Hodler's paintings of lakes, many of them dating of the later years in life, followed by a well documented catalogue of the exhibited works.

All in all this is an excellent volume. It shows a coherent, representative selection of Hodler's landscape works, complemented by short, thoughtful essays. The book is nicely produced with quality printing on a fine stock of paper.

The book, which was published on the occasion of the exhibition: "Ferdinand Hodler. Landscapes", is divided into four main sections: Prolog; Nature; Mountains; Lakes; which in turn are subdivided. Each section and division opens with a very brief introduction of a page or two or text which is followed by a series of full page colour plates. The book concludes with a short essay: Landscape as Consensus Formula; a fully illustrated (thumbnails predominately in colour) Catalogue of Exhibited Works; a Biography; Notes and a Bibliography. There are three further essays to be found in the book: the opening "Holder Landscapes"; "Ferdinand Holder - Organized Nature"; and "The Sketched Landscape".

Illustrations predominate in this fine publication: 120 in colour plus 30 black and white, the latter includes drawings and period photographs, the former repeats in the Catalogue section in the form of thumbnails. The essays, which are illustrated in black and white, are very informative. The plates are well presented, sensibly sized on the page, although the landscape format pictures do not fair quite so well on the portrait proportion page; the colours are rich and the images crisp and clean. There are several full page bleed illustrations showing a close-up of a selected painting which clearly reveal the brush work and texture of the paint surface. Altogether a very attractive publication.

Isabel Vincent masterfully relates, in an objective and balanced manner, the gripping story of the Hammersfeld family and their quest to recover property stolen by the nazis and their inheritance deposited in Swiss banks by their grandfather, a wealthy Austrian merchant. The story revolves around their fight for justice, aided by a young crusading lawyer, amidst a flurry of world events that brought attention to the revision of Switzerland's conduct during WWII , and a thorogh examination of the myths of Swiss neutrality and banking secrecy. Vincent's account is balanced and fair, and she is careful not to blame Switzerland for all the evils of the war, while at the same time, scrutinizes the scandalous conduct of the banks towards Holocaust surivors and account heirs over a period of 50 years following the end of the war. Vincent also gives an insightful account of the political mileage sought by politicians and organizations dealing with this issue. Vincent's book is the winner of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem prize, and has been widely acclaimed by the press in France, Germany, adn Switzerland itself, as a result of its carefully researched and balanced account of the events.

In this fascinating, well-researched and highly accessible book, journalist Isabel Vincent more than adequately covers the mind-boggling spectacle of the selfishness, inhumanity, and well-organized corruption of the European fellow travelers of the Nazis, who aided and abetted the progress of Germany's preparations for and later prosecution of the Second World War. Far from being the nonaligned neutral countries they claimed to be, Swiss, Portuguese, and other bankers and financers from supposedly neutral countries unscrupulously served the insidious purposes of the Third Reich by dealing with the ill-gotten goods extorted from displaced Jews, the gold bullion of the conquered countries, and the stolen art work looted from all of Europe. One finds it hard to comprehend the degree to which the Swiss in particular deliberately decided to collude with the Nazis in accepting gold in exchange for the hard currency the Germans needed to finance the war effort it began to prepare for in the 1930s.

Although the author's writing style is somewhat limited, and her approach to relating critical historical events seems a bit trivial and oversimplified, the story she tells distracts one from such minor drawbacks to the book. I also found myself wondering how much of an earnest research effort the author made, as she has a tendency to quote a few authors extensively, and attributes all the quotes from each of them to a single book, such as "Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich". She also tends to repeat herself unnecessarily, and uses one particular quote from one of the protagonists on the book cover, again in the narrative a few times, and then yet again in a newspaper clipping used as part of the photo section describing Holocaust survivor Renee Lang. Yet all this seems more the result of limited experience and poor editing than anything else. Again, given the riveting story she has to tell, using first person recollection, one finds a great deal of well organized information here regarding the cupidity and deviousness of the Swiss in giving dissembling and dishonest answers for decades about the stolen treasures and life savings of so many displaced and murdered Jews still stored in Swiss bank vaults. The sad story of how and why the Swiss were allowed to get away with one of the most profitable crimes of the century makes for sad but still fascinating reading.

This book is much like another more recent book, "Pack Of Thieves", by Richard Chesnoff (see my review) in its painstaking description of the varieties of humiliations, dispossessions, and barbarisms perpetrated against European Jews, gypsies and other non-Aryans by the Nazis during their twelve-year reign of terror. To Ms. Vincent's considerable credit, her story is personalized by the use of a single family to tell the tale; and this device helps to bring the unbelievably horrific nature of the persecution of the Jews into bold relief. This is a book that tells a cautionary and still topical true story well, and is one that reminds us that human beings are capable of almost anything, from the wonderful acts of personal courage she often describes and attributes to specific named individuals based both on personal recollections and eye-witness accounts as well as a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors who were kind enough to share their stories with her. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the detailed history of how Swiss, Portuguese, and other bankers avoided repatriation of billions of dollars worth of money, gold bullion, and art treasures stolen from displaced and murdered Jews during the Holocaust.

This book won the 1998 Karl Barth prize in Germany, which is awarded to secondary sources on Barth. That is an honorable prize, considering that one of the judges was Eberhard Jungel, who is a great Barth scholar himself. For any interested in Barth, this is a book that must be read in order to understand the current state of discussion.

McCormack manages to trace through the complex world of pre-WW2 Germany to show Barth's influences from the Marburg neo-Kantians, expressionism, socialism, etc. His basic point is that Barth's break with liberalism and his "decisive turn to analogy" were not as radical as one would think. In other words, the Barth of Romans has far more in common with the mature Barth of the Church Dogmatics. This book also proceeds to correct a number of misperceptions about Barth, based on historical work. In the final analysis, McCormack has hoped that his work will press theologians to read the primary sources firsthand, rather than relying on "received interpretations."

I would recommend reading this book, then von Balthsar's _Theology of Karl Barth_ (in that order). The von Balthsar book is interesting, because it tells you how people have understood Barth (up to now), and because of von Balthasar himself. But in the final analysis, I find McCormack's book to be more technically correct.

Let's be honest -- Barth would despise most contemporary so-called "Barthians." All sorts of folks who are teaching theologies he abhored and risked his career to battle have tried to appropriate his name. Most "Barthians" are far less orthodox than Barth. Often they have affinities to some small aspect of his approach to theology, while rejecting the rest of this thought that hangs with it.

Bruce McCormack is not one of these pretenders! While perhaps not a "slavish" Barthian, McCormack is a Barthian that Barth would recognize, appreciate, and support.

In general, McCormack wants to present Barth as classically orthodox, not "neo-orthodox." This is a difficult task in many ways, because of Barth's novel appraoch and his departure from the theology of the Reformation on many points (outright rejection of all natural theology, Barth's universal salvation, his rejection of Biblical inspiration opting for an emphasis on illumination instead, etc.)

McCormack is one of the sharpest minds in the mainline church. I studied under him for two degrees at Princeton, where he was clearly the brightest theologian in a brilliant department. Unfortunately, like his hero Barth, he is not often kind to his reader. He makes you work very hard. This is a difficult read. But many will find it worth the effort, not matter what their view of Karl Barth.

Rick Steves is as entertaining in his books as on TV. Especially for those who have visited places before, his books really help give a local feel to the area. He has great "insider" tips that we look forward to when we revisit a country. All of his books are exceptional

Ideal for historians who want to find out what Switzerland was like in 2005 or for Swiss people who want to reminisce.