The manuscript of Alma Mahler's Diaries, a pile of old exercise books, lay unread and seemingly illegible in the library of an American university. In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them and found what he was looking for. But he found far more: the authentic saga of one of the century's most charismatic personalities. The Diaries depict in intimate detail the four years during which Alma grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Gustav Klimt, they break off shortly before her marriage to Gustav Mahler. "To me," writes Beaumont, "reading The Diaries is like raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty, and so close that one can almost reach out and touch it. The vitality of everyday life, eye-witness accounts of significant artistic events, unique insights into the behavioral patterns and linguistic conventions of homo austriacus all these serve to make the book unique."Having come to grips with Alma's handwriting, Beaumont and his coeditor for the German edition, Susanne Rode-Breymann, added meticulously researched commentaries and annotations. The German edition was published in the autumn of 1997."

Born in 1879 in Vienna, Alma Mahler-Werfel was the daughter of the popular landscape painter, Emil J. Schindler. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was instrumental in forming the Secession movement and she became the pupil, friend and lover of many famous men, including Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Klimt and Max Burckhard. In 1902 she married Gustav Mahler. After his death she married Walter Gropius, had a liaison with Oskar Kokoschka, and later married Franz Werfel. As a young girl she began writing a diary. This selection from four years of that diary gives a breathtaking (and breathless) account of cultural life in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. With their mixture of beady-eyed observation and impassioned confession, the pages of Alma Mahler-Werfel's diary make for gripping reading.

The original manuscript of these diaries, which present an eye-witness record of historical events in the worlds of art and music at the turn of the century, lay unread in the library of an American university until Antony Beaumont read it in search of the truth about Mahler-Werfel and Zemlinsky. But he found more: an account, in intimate detail, of the four years during which Mahler-Werfel grew from adolescence into womanhood.

Muskox Land provides a meticulously researched and richly illustrated treatment of Canada's High Arctic as it interweaves insights from historiography, Native studies, ecology, anthropology, and polar exploration.

Paul Klee was endowed with a rich and many-sided personality that was continually spilling over into forms of expression other than his painting and that made him one of the most extraordinary phenomena of modern European art. These abilities have left their record in the four intimate Diaries in which he faithfully recorded the events of his inner and outer life from his nineteenth to his fortieth year. Here, together with recollections of his childhood in Bern, his relations with his family and such friends as Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, and many others, his observations on nature and people, his trips to Italy and Tunisia, and his military service, the reader will find Klee's crucial experience with literature and music, as well as many of his essential ideas about his own artistic technique and the creative process.

Following his English edition of Alma Mahler-Werfel's Diaries 1898-1902, Antony Beaumont presents both the first comprehensive biography of the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) and a critical assessment of his works. "Zemlinsky--all hail to you!" wrote the young Alma. "All hail to you and your art." When she first met him, Zemlinsky was the most promising Viennese composer of his generation. In 1901, when Alma abruptly ended their passionate love affair in order to marry Gustav Mahler, the crisis served to transform Zemlinsky's talent into mastery. Only long after his death, however, did his music begin to receive its due. Zemlinsky was central to the musical life of Vienna and Central Europe, and this brilliant biography illuminates a social and cultural milieu that disappeared forever with the triumph of Hitler's Reich. Beaumont details the composer's early years as a protégé of Brahms and Mahler, his complex friendship with his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg, the influence of his teaching on the boy-prodigy Erich Korngold, his kindly and helpful attitude toward the hypersensitive Anton Webern, and his heartfelt friendship with Alban Berg. Zemlinsky was one of the leading conductors of the interwar period, considered by both Schoenberg and Stravinsky the finest they had ever heard. Beaumont charts Zemlinsky's career from Vienna to Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Prague, providing insight into his Catholic-Sephardic background and investigating his keen interest in esoteric aspects of music, including color symbolism and numerology. The author's analyses of Zemlinsky's major scores are accessible and fully contextualized.

Family correspondence, journals, drawings, and other materials form the basis of this collection documenting a slice of life at Cape Prince of Wales, an Alaska Eskimo village 55 miles across the Bering Strait from Siberia. Most of the letters were written by Ellen Louise Kittredge Lopp, a white teacher, missionary, and mother, who describes everyday Native life and celebrations, schoolroom adventures, visitors from trading and whaling ships, the environment, the subsistence way of life, and the herding of reindeer the school and mission acquired in 1894. Printed on heavy stock with crisp b & w illustrations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

In this cultural history of Cuba during the United States' brief but influential occupation from 1898 to 1902--a key transitional period following the Spanish-American War--Marial Iglesias Utset sheds light on the complex set of pressures that guided the formation and production of a burgeoning Cuban nationalism. Drawing on archival and published sources, Iglesias illustrates the process by which Cubans maintained and created their own culturally relevant national symbols in the face of the U.S. occupation. Tracing Cuba's efforts to modernize in conjunction with plans by U.S. officials to shape the process, Iglesias analyzes, among other things, the influence of the English language on Spanish usage; the imposition of North American holidays, such as Thanksgiving, in place of traditional Cuban celebrations; the transformation of Havana into a new metropolis; and the development of patriotic symbols, including the Cuban flag, songs, monuments, and ceremonies. Iglesias argues that the Cuban response to U.S. imperialism, though largely critical, indeed involved elements of reliance, accommodation, and welcome. Above all, Iglesias argues, Cubans engaged the Americans on multiple levels, and her work demonstrates how their ambiguous responses to the U.S. occupation shaped the cultural transformation that gave rise to a new Cuban nationalism.

The author became sickened by the brutal and repressive nature of Nazi rule which overshadowed every aspect of her life. She became involved in the Resistance and the diaries vividly describe her part in the drama and its aftermath.