Abbé Sicard's Deaf Education

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Alistair Horne

The age of Napoleon transformed Europe, laying the foundations for the modern world. Now Alistair Horne, one of the great chroniclers of French history gives us a fresh account of that remarkable time. Born into poverty on the remote island of Corsica, he rose to prominence in the turbulent years following the French Revolution, when most of Europe was arrayed against France. Through a string of brilliant and improbable victories (gained as much through his remarkable ability to inspire his troops as through his military genius), Napoleon brought about a triumphant peace that made him the idol of France and, later, its absolute ruler.Heir to the Revolution, Napoleon himself was not a revolutionary; rather he was a reformer and a modernizer, both liberator and autocrat. Looking to the Napoleonic wars that raged on the one hand, and to the new social order emerging on the other, Horne incisively guides readers through every aspect of Napoleon's two-decade rule: from France's newfound commitment to an aristocracy based on merit rather than inheritance, to its civil code (Napoleon's most important and enduring legacy), to censorship, cuisine, the texture of daily life in Paris, and the influence of Napoleon abroad. At the center of Horne's story is a singular man, one whose ambition, willpower, energy and ability to command changed history, and continues to fascinate us today.From the Hardcover edition.

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Serena Vitale

Pushkin's Button is a narrative about the four months of Pushkin's life leading up to the fatal duel in the snow on January 27, 1837, when a young French officer in the Russian Army shot and killed Russia's greatest living artist. Ever since, Russian leaders, critics, and poets have advanced theories about the terrible deed, none of them wholly satisfactory. Serena Vitale has opened the archives and studied the case more closely, and more imaginatively, than anyone before her; her account of the Pushkin "dilemma" is also a wonderfully astute, original assessment of the poet's literary and national importance. Vitale has unearthed family secrets, diaries, courtroom records, and a cache of letters found in a Paris attic ten years ago; she shows us how a pawnbroker's slip and even a button missing from Pushkin's Kamerjunker uniform are significant details in the story. Her close examination of the record sparkles with Pushkin's own genial wit and brings to life the international yet very Russian world of St. Petersburg in the 1830s, with its imperial halls, its political and literary gossip, and its beautiful women - notable among them Natalya Pushkin, the poet's wife. Vitale adds another level to the narrative with her absorbing references to her own archival detection work, work that enabled her to accomplish this double feat of literary interpretation and superb history.

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Elsie Anne McKee

The life story and theological writings of Katharina Schütz Zell (1498-1562) present an unusually full picture of an urban lay woman in the Protestant Reformation. The daughter of an established artisan in the free imperial city of Strasbourg, Katharina Schütz married the reformer Matthew Zell and became a partner in one of the first Protestant 'clergy couples'. More than a pioneer pastor's wife, Schütz Zell carried out a lifelong ministry of teaching, writing, and speaking out, as well as the charitable work and hospitality traditionally expected of a woman. Part one of Volume 1 paints Schütz Zell's biography in the context of her age, part two explores the main features of her biblical theology and literary activity, giving particular attention to Schütz Zell's convictions about the ministries of women and laity. Volume 2 provides access for the first time to the literary corpus of an outstanding lay leader of the early Protestant Reformation, one of the most articulate women authors of her age. An educated Strasbourg craftswoman and pastor's wife, Katharina Schütz Zell wrote German fluently. Her works, some published in her lifetime, others preserved only in manuscript, are remarkable for their time-span (1524-1558) and the range of genres: from devotional, educational, and pastoral text to sermonic literature and theological polemic. Schütz Zell's writings reveal a lively mind, considerable biblical knowledge, and unusual historical gifts. Her practically unknown autograph letter to Caspar Schwenckfeld is particularly important for the new light it sheds on confessionalization in the 1550's and one woman's friendly but sturdy intellectual independence. - Publisher.

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Shari Benstock

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstocks̀ biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton. No Gifts from Chance also examines long-ignored facets of Wharton's life - her complex and often calculating relationships with publishers, her internationally acclaimed charitable work during World War I, and the poignant story of her ultimate financial distress that contributed to her death, a story told here for the first time. At the center of this biography is Wharton's writing life. No Gifts from Chance charts her immense literary productivity (some forty-seven books, including The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome), tracking her writing processes from notebook entries through editorial revisions and examining the critical reception of her narrative fiction, poetry, travel writing, literary and cultural criticism, and memoir. Here, too, is a rare glimpse of the intricate relationship between the writer's public reputation and her private life, from her lonely literary apprenticeship in late-Victorian America to her emergence as a literary figure in Edwardian England and Belle Epoque Paris, when she developed enduring friendships with Henry James and Bernard Berenson, to her Age of Acclaim as America's most respected writer during the postwar jazz age. A magisterial Edith Wharton dominates these pages: astute and tough-minded in business, passionate and sexually confident in love, audacious and prolific in her art, principled and courageous in her life. This is the story of an artist who had no role models in a society that feared creative and independent women, but who triumphantly defied convention and made herself into America's first great and most beloved woman novelist.