History of My Life, Vols. I & II
10 best books like History of My Life, Vols. I & II (Giacomo Casanova): The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, Original Letters from India, The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems, Eugene Onegin and Other Poems, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century, The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island, Naples Declared
| Author | Benvenuto Cellini |
| ISBN | 0140447180 |
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who...
| Author | Virginia Nicholson |
| ISBN | 0060548460 |
They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious...
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
| Author | Eliza Fay |
| ISBN | 1590173368 |
Eliza Fay’s origins are obscure; she was not beautiful, rich, or outlandishly accomplished. Yet the letters she wrote from her 1779 voyage across the globe captivated E. M. Forster, who arranged for their British publication in 1925. The letters have been delighting readers ever since with their...
| Author | Jim Harrison |
| ISBN | 1556590954 |
Astonishing poetry collection. One of the few poets that I read cover to cover and then again few more times, untill I know each poem by heart.
Looking Forward to Age
I will walk down to a marina
on a hot day and not go out to sea.
I will go to bed and get up early,
and carry...
| Author | Alexander Pushkin |
| ISBN | 0375406727 |
Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...
| Author | Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri |
| ISBN | 0143107488 |
An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogues everything known to exist from the perspective of a 14th-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and 30 volumes--here abridged to one volume, and translated...
| Author | Daniel Hernandez |
| ISBN | 1416577033 |
MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion,...
| Author | John McPhee |
| ISBN | 1899863249 |
There was a toast among the clans when they banqueted. A clansman would rise, lift a cup, and say, "To the land of the bens and the glens!" And up from the food the faces would move, and every man would roar out, "To the land of the bens and the glens!"
Och, a toast to start.
Our current President...
| Author | Benjamin Taylor |
| ISBN | 0399159177 |
It is a city of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, simultaneously glorious and ghastly. And it is Ben Taylor’s remarkable ability to meld these contradictions into a whole that makes this the exciting and original book it is. He takes his stroll around the bay with the acute sensitivity of a lover,...
| Author | Earl Thompson |
| ISBN | 0881847275 |
Leaving behind his crumpled mother with competing feelings of disgust and longing for her glory days of radiant, knee-weakening red hair and run-free hose, Jack flees his taboo-transgressing penury in order to inveigle his way into the United States Navy and swap the dust and grime of urban-hopping...
| Author | Cyril Connolly |
| ISBN | 0892550783 |
An enduring classic by one of England's finest critics, on why so many gifted writers fall short of attaining greatness.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.--Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England,...
| Author | Sergei Aksakov |
| ISBN | 0192815733 |
At the center of this chronicle of Russian provincial life in the reign of Catherine the Great stands the patriarchal figure of the author's grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich. A man of great natural dignity, imbued with respect for tradition and love of the land, he is also despotic and virtually illiterate....
The First World War had a powerful effect on many of its participants; Gerald Brenan was one of those. Brenan came from an Anglo-Irish military family. He had the usual public school education, hated it and was bullied. He was expected to go into the army, but at 18 elected instead to walk to China with a...
| Author | Gustave Flaubert |
| ISBN | 0140435824 |
At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a “sensibility on tour,” Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer’s impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert’s traveling companion, Maxime...
| Author | Ross E. Dunn |
| ISBN | 0520243854 |
When I met Professor Dunn, he was already being called America's foremost authority on Ibn Battuta. As we discussed our mutually favored subject, I will never forget how he commented, "I believe I can say that I know just how a Maliki scholar in the 14th century would think."
Ibn Battuta's name...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 0140439900 |
De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by...
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
| Author | Clifford Geertz |
| ISBN | 0520004590 |
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant...
| Author | Fawn M. Brodie |
| ISBN | 0393301664 |
Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself "Why?" and the only echo is "damned fool! . . . the Devil drives!"
So Richard Francis Burton, preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863, wrote to Monckton...
First Footsteps in East Africa
| Author | Richard Francis Burton |
| ISBN | 1428017305 |
Chock full of ethnographical information about the Muslims of Somalia, Richard Burton's "First Footsteps in Africa" is a great look at a white man's first forays into that area of the continent. As an adventure novel, the book is kind of dry -- Burton essentially travels to an area, is held there by its...
| Author | John Dickie |
| ISBN | 0743277996 |
Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian...
| Author | Jean-Christophe Rufin |
| ISBN | 0393049884 |
It is twenty years since Jean-Baptiste Poncet, through his apothecary skills and daring diplomacy, cured the ailing Negus of Abyssinia and saved that country from the political ambitions of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France.
Poncet now finds himself in Isfahan, capital of Persia, practicing...
| Author | Roland Barthes |
| ISBN | 0520071042 |
In 1979, just after having written skeptically on the question of whether a journal was worth keeping "with a view to publication," Roland Barthes began to keep an intimate journal called "Soirées de Paris" in which he gave direct notation to his gay desire in its various states of excitation, panic,...
| Author | Stephen Spender |
| ISBN | 0679640452 |
Spender was one of his generation's most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portrait of his friends--Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood--render a romantic world of...
