Memoirs/Essays

Articles in this section

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• "The Conquest of Constantinople May 29, 1453" - Stefan Zweig’s dramatic account of a decisive moment in history

  1 June 2019 by Stefan Zweig

  In this historical essay Stefan Zweig recounted in his clear, penetrating style the drama and the intensity of one of the most significant events in world history, the campaign of the young twenty-one-year-old Turkish Emperor, the Sultan Mahomet, to overcome the determined resistance of the (...)

• "Typee" (1846) by Herman Melville - a fascinating account of life in a South Sea island before the spread of Western civilization

  1 May 2019 by Herman Melville

  This account of his four-months stay among the fiercest tribe in the remote Marquesas Island of Nukuheva was Herman Melville’s first book, and its enormous success - it was the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime – was essential in deciding the future author of the monumental “Moby (...)

• "Children of Yesterday" - Jan Valtin’s dramatic eyewitness account of the Pacific War in the Philippines 1944-45

  21 November 2017 by Jan Valtin

  After the quite phenomenal success of his monumental political memoir Out of the Night in 1941, Richard Krebs (nom-de-plume: Jan Valtin) was arrested and tried for an attempted (political) murder he was accused of having committed in the twenties – for which he was acquitted – in 1942, and then (...)

• "Out of the Night" (1941) by Jan Valtin - an extraordinary memoir of life in the international Communist movement between the two World Wars

  26 April 2017 by Jan Valtin

  This is the memoir of a militant and full-time party worker in the German Communist Party (KPD) and in the Comintern – the international organization of all the Communist parties in the world - in the twenties and thirties, this is a first-hand account of many of the dramatic events that shaped (...)