Alicia

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Leon Zelman with Armin Thurnher

Leon Zelman is in love with Vienna, his adopted city, where he has carved out a life for himself as a "public Jew," despite the city's anti-Semitic legacy. In Leon Zelman's memoir, we learn how he came to choose Vienna and how he walked a political tightrope for fifty years in postwar Austria. He is founding editor and publisher of Das Judische Echo, a distinguished journal of culture and politics, and co-founder of the Jewish Welcome Service, whose original goal was to document the presence of a vital Jewish community after the Holocaust and, later, to establish student exchange programs between Austria and Israel. In his memoir, we experience his unique perspective on the psychology of displacement and on postwar politics - and we read of his experiences with Bruno Kreisky, the Waldheim affair, the World Jewish Congress, and Edgar Bronfman. However, of his many achievements, Zelman is most proud of providing a bridge between Jews (past and present) and new generations of Austrians, and in recognition of this, he was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor of the City of Vienna in 1994.

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Sheldon Anderson

"In A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc, Sheldon Anderson uses recently declassified documents from Polish and East German communist party and foreign ministry archives to examine the interplay of national interests with the exigencies of communist party relations within the Soviet bloc. Anderson explores how Polish-East German relations were strained over the permanence of the Oder-Neisse border, the correct road to socialism, German repatriation from Poland, and trade policy; he provides an inside account of the heated debates that seriously divided the Polish and East German communists."--BOOK JACKET.

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John Callaghan

Rajani Palme Dutt (1896-1974) was a leading figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. His strong links with the Comintern made him, throughout this period, a devoted - and stern - supporter of orthodoxy within the CPGB. This new political biography gives a fascinating insight into the mind of a Stalinist, and the twists and turns of communist politics, from the first enthusiastic support for the Bolshevik revolution through to the beginnings of decay in 1956. Dutt was an intriguing political character. He had a brilliant analytical mind, and a strong commitment to the international working class movement and the cause of national liberation - especially in India, his father's birthplace; yet it seems that, even within the leading circles of the Party, he was regarded as a cold, dogmatic and ruthless operator. Through an intertwining of personal and political history, this well-documented book not only tells the fascinating story of Palme Dutt's life, but also provides a key to understanding the rise and fall of communism in the twentieth century.

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Lynn H. Parsons

As son of the second president of the United States, father to the minister to the Court of St. James, and grandfather to author Henry Adams, John Quincy Adams was part of an American dynasty. In his own career as secretary of state, President, senator, and congressman, Adams was an actor in some of the most dramatic events of the nineteenth century. In this biography, Lynn Hudson Parsons chronicles the life of one of America's most absorbing figures. From the day in 1778 when as a boy he accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission to France, to his last years as an eloquent opponent of his country's foreign and domestic policies, Adams was rarely detached from public affairs. And yet, this biography reveals Adams as a man never truly at home anywhere -- in Washington he was stubborn and reclusive, in Europe he was a phlegmatic ideologue, a bulldog among spaniels. His story parallels America's own.