Austria Books

Lauda hits the sweet spot with this book. You are taken behind the scenes of Formula 1 from an insider's insider. You learn what it is like to drive for "The Old Man" Enzo Ferrari and Mclaren's Ron Dennis. What I found fascinating was how Lauda applied his cold non-emotional approach to racing to his life in general. In days where superstar athletes are out 3 months for a hamstring injury, Lauda was back racing after receiving "the last rights" from his near fatal crash at the Nurburgring. If you love racing, you will love this book.

This book is a rare historical work which combines readability and depth of insight. While I have read others that also achieve this mark, OIL EMPIRE is one of the few that does so and still maintains the specificity of an academic work. At times I found the author violated Orwell's dictum to use the simplest vocabulary to convey an idea, but this did not distract from the pleasure of reading this book. I tend to focus more on classical histories, and new nothing about the history of Galicia before I started, but I found the the author was able to situate her research so that this was not a problem. When I finished the book I was reminded of the old saying that to understand a large problem we must first understand a small problem. After the events of 9/11 it is no longer just the leftists who assert that control of the oil economy is at the heart of our foreign policy. This book provides a case study of how the same ambitions that we have today were played out on a smaller scale at the turn of the last century. I look forward to seeing what the author has in store for her next work.

A biography in poetry . . . I was so intrigued. I knew very little about Nannerl, but this book drew me into her complex life, intimately revealing the nuances of her existence in a way no prose narrative has ever done. I appreciated the variety in the poetry, never knowing what to expect with the turn of the page. There is poignancy, anger, irony, humor . . . and each choice of word seems careful. A highly recommended book.

A paraphrase of this memoir would give the sense that 'Henry Green' was a typical British writer of the 1930s: a superposh old Etonian who precociously published his first novel at Oxford, and was driven by class guilt to work as a foundryman. Or, in his words, 'as was said in those days I had a complex and in the end it drove me to go to work in a factory with my wet podgy hands'. The prose style is what makes this book an absolute one-off - chatty, cleverly idiomatic, bathetic, loveable and self-effacing. 'Pack my Bag' isn't a book you'd read for the plot (unless you're interested in the faux-hardships of wealthy, hypersensitive schoolboys?), but its account of the Great War is full of compelling anecdotes (like the shellshocked soldier who stayed at the country estate of Green's parents - 'no longer human when he came to us'). If you like these subtle-ish modernist writers like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen you might fall for Green, as sophisticated a stylist as any of the big modernist names (Woolf, Lawrence etc), but with an intimacy and sweetness that you don't necessarily associate with experimental writing. And he's funny, too. No wonder the people who love Henry Green really, really love Henry Green.

Man! I love Mozart, And totally wanted to know more more about Schik -
(..want to find any bios on libretto writers!!!)
This was a great read - and if you are one of those creative-I want to write produce,sing perform, etc, ya gotta get this - it's a real gem and a great snack! I wish more were known -
A must have biography that is also like a direct connection to his arts, times and acts a really good luck piece!

I have spent time doing the above, and it's a life worth living and reading about!!!! Meet another of your "family members" down through time -

Jen

Wilhelm Reich was many things in his lifetime- a student of Freud, a political activist, a research scientist, and an inventor. His work was decades ahead of its time and is finally being rediscovered and reevaluated by the public. If, like me, you are interested in Reich and his work, you might want to check out a novel called We All Fall Down, by Brian Caldwell. it draws heavily on Reich's theories, particularly Listen Little Man and The Mass Psychology Of Facism. It's a great introduction to Reich's work and the entire novel draws heavily on his theory. It's very interesting watching an author explore his theories in a fictional setting. Well worth reading.

Robert Kann and Zdenek David present a well-crafted survey of the political and cultural development of the different nationalities of the Eastern Habsburg Lands. After a short discussion of the issues involved in their study, the book is organized in chronological sections (1526-1620; 1620-1740; 1740-1867; 1867-1918, subdivided by nationality (Czechs, Slovenes, Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Ukrainians). Within the subsections, national, political, economic and social developments are presented. A final section reviews themes of cultural development. Although no one group or period receives detailed treatment, the book offers a very well-prepared and researched survey of the history of the region, through the eyes of the nationalities

Beautiful as a coffeetable book, informative as a textbook! A joy for any horsey person and a must-have for all lovers of the horses from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Lots of information about the lesser known breeds as well and some treats for the military historian.

Thank you, Martin Haller!

Bert Anido and Brian Austria Tompkins were both avid aviation enthusiasts who combined their efforts to publish this book on the aircraft history of the Philippine Air Force. Both authors have passed away, but their interest in flying is continued by family and friends. The book is out of print but available on Amazon Market Place.

Since the 1970's, it is generally accepted that fin de siècle Vienna was a birthplace of a major part of the modern culture and mentality if not of modernity itself. In the conventional picture of the origins of modernism, the Habsburg capital is the central fixture. This was primarily due to the popular success of Carl Schorske' pioneering study, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980). Very briefly, Schorske explained both the origins of the ahistorical modernist mindset (as well as its discontents) in Vienna as a result of the retreat by the heirs of Austrian liberal tradition from the political realm into aesthetics and psychological in face of the rise of mass illiberal politics as exemplified by the Christian Social Party led by Karl Leuger. Later variants of this paradigm, based on unexamined assumptions about the nature of liberal influence on Austrian society have continued to structure the study of late 19th century politics and culture in Central Europe. The normalization of radical nationalism and anti-Semitism in Austrian political culture around 1900 has been depicted as marking simultaneous rejection of all things liberal and a decisive middle class retreat from politics and emblematic of an entire epoch in European history. Ultimately, this paradigm requires the self-conscious renunciation of liberalism as a necessary and sufficient condition of the birth of the modern.

By late 1980's, (due to Boyer's book and Pieter Judson's work on the liberal legacy) the assumptions underlying the Schorskean paradigm ("failure of liberalism" thesis or his claim that both modern mass politics and the rejection of the bond between art and society simultaneously has their origins in Vienna) were found to be untenable and based on uneven monographic basis.

Boyer focusing in this very detailed study on over five decades (1848-97) of Austrian politics in general and of Vienna in particular, shows that the supposed clash between 'rationalist' liberalism and 'irrationalist' anti-liberalism in Vienna was a distortion of what actually happened. Liberalism's retreat, after the enfranchisement of lower middle classes by the Taaffe regime in the 1880's was more due to their continued anti-democratic stance and continued support of restricted franchise (to those who paid at least an annual 10-florin tax or about 5% of the population) and exclusivity rather than their rationalism. Boyer re-interpretation of the rise of Christian Social party and the demise of liberal tradition centers on the unique coalition of social and occupational groups that was forged in a consecutive four stage process by Karl Leuger between 1880 and 1896, some of these groups being traditional supporters of liberals. The artisans were co-opted between 1880 and 1886, the priests and Democrats between 1886 and 1890, the teachers and civil servants between 1890 and 1894 and finally the property owners in the crucial years of 1895-96. Central to the arguments of the book in tracing the profound reconstruction of the Viennese political system by 1900 by Leuger's party is the examinations of the continuities and radical changes in the political culture of Austria.

Professor Boyer shows very clearly exactly what were the political achievements of Karl Leuger, what liberals in the Habsburg Empire aspired to and why they had to fail in the face of rise of modern mass politics. He deftly demonstrates that Leuger far from being a rightist fanatic was Vienna's first professional politician and whose espousal of anti-Semitic rhetoric was in direct imitation to the liberals' use of anti-clerical rhetoric. In this context, since Christian Socials were the first successful mass political party to programmatically use the rhetoric of anti-Semitism and to present and instill models of political behavior which in other hands and times had such calamitous consequences, the questions of Leuger's relationship to a hypothetical proto fascist tradition cannot be ignored. Careful parsing of the evidence leads Boyer to conclude that in the Viennese context, the use of anti-Semitism was an exceedingly complex defense mechanism against unwarranted social change. The political mode employed by Leuger was deeply rooted in the 19th century traditions and values and if anything, was baroque, not fascistic.
In a nutshell, Boyer's Leuger has very little to do with the merely charismatic Leuger of the "failure of liberalism" thesis and his treatment draws our attention in great detail to the underlying Viennese political tradition and social context. In other words, Boyer's research shows clearly that we cannot begin to understand the relationship of culture to politics until the question of the nature of Viennese society and its values is raised or that without the social history of Vienna, the relation between politics and culture is a purely hypothetical one.

The book is based on extensive archival research, judicious use of economic data and a formidable grasp of the social structure of 19th century Vienna. Apart from Karl Leuger, other politicians and personalities including Vogelsang, Liechtenstein, Albert Gessmann and Robert Pattai receive discerning appraisals. Considering the scope of this study, it is clear that only John Boyer's sharp sense for focusing intellectual problems has prevented the work from expanding ad infinitum.
This work not only offers the best explanation to date of the rise of the first explicitly illiberal political movement with a powerful command of bourgeois loyalties in Central Europe but also subjects crucial classificatory and explanatory categories of scholarship such as fin de siècle, liberal, mass party, anti-Semitism and proto-fascism to penetrating analysis.

Since its publication, Boyer's study however has been criticized for his passing over the underlying vitality of liberalism at the municipal and local level and preferring to base some of his conclusions on its parliamentary decline alone. As Judson's work has shown, this decline was only a small part of the larger story played out within several municipal governments and not primarily in Imperial metro pole Vienna. Outside Vienna it was often the liberals who politicized ethnic and gender differences most successfully in the 1880's and 90's. This omission leads Boyer to leave unexamined the critical connections between liberal tradition and political radicalism of the fin de siècle and the foundational role played by the liberal tradition in organizing the structures of political institutions and popular discourse. The upshot of this is that liberal ideals and culture are implicitly absolved of any responsibility for the later horrors perpetrated by the legacies of fin de siècle nationalism, racism and "irrational" mass politics.

Although this book was published more than twenty five years ago, it is still the best documented and most important book on the political culture of Vienna from 1848-1897 both for amateurs and advanced students of Central European history. It is recommended that this book be read in conjunction with Pieter Judson's, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914.