<div>In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews--pillars of an embattled community--invested their fortunes in France's cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country's army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt--the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers--McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of "invading" France's cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind--many ultimately donated to the French state--were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.</div>

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

Arts & Photography

McAuley, James

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Review\n"Engrossing . . . traces the long, vexed relationship of these families with materiality, their faith that they could 'create something beautiful in an increasingly hostile environment', their attempt to control works of art as they could not control life."--Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times 
"A moving portrait of a glittering, doomed world."--The Economist 
"Ghosts from the pages of Proust and the paintings of Renoir wander through sumptuously appointed salons and galleries, charmed to life by James McAuley in his alluring and disturbing history The House of Fragile Things . . .The depths of French anti-Semitism is the stunning subject that Mr. McAuley lays bare . . . [He] tells this haunting saga in eloquent detail. As French anti-Semitism rises once again today, the effect is nothing less than chilling."--Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal 
"A comprehensive and accessible account of one of the great communal acts of generosity--and then betrayal--in modern history."--Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian 
"Deeply researched and elegantly written. . . . Astute and perceptive. . . . McAuley's nuanced narrative leaves the reader with a range of villains from which to choose."--Ori Z. Soltes, Washington Post 
"Provides a new narrative that is at once rigorous and sensitive [and] endows these "houses of fragile things", which are still standing today, with a new solidity and life"--Vincent Delieuvin, Art Newspaper 
"This group portrait re-creates the milieu of fin-de-siècle French Jewish dynasties like the Rothschilds and the Camondos through the art collections they amassed . . . McAuley chronicles how many of his central figures were deported by the Vichy government and describes the fate of their collections. A study of 'obsessions with objects' becomes a darker tale."--New Yorker 
"Unsettling. . . . As much as McAuley seeks to recover histories effaced by the Holocaust, [he] emphasizes that these histories persist in our present."--Chelsea Haines, Art in America 
"[McAuley] has a tenderness for his subjects framed by a beautiful moral register. His conclusions are chilling."--Helen Elliott, The Monthly (Australia) 
"A well-judged investigation"--Julian Barnes, London Review of Books 
"Elegantly written and deeply moving . . . A meditation on the shaping and expression of identities through the acquisition and donation of beautiful things, a glimpse into a world blasted to dust by the horrors of the twentieth century, and a tragic story about the unrequited love of men and women for a country that savagely turned on them. . . . [A] haunting book."--David A. Bell, New York Review of Books 
"Engaging and poignant."--Hannah Stamler, The Nation 
"Elegiac, beautifully written. . . . [An] elegant and moving book."--Abigail Green, Jewish Review of Books 
"By reminding us how extensive France's unforgiving anti-Semitism was under Vichy, McAuley not only sheds light on a discomforting slice of French history. He also provides a timely contribution to France's polarizing contemporary debates about what it means to be French."--Tom Peebles, Tocqueville 21 
"This is the book I have been waiting for. A magisterial account of aspiration and loss. Please read it."--Edmund de Waal\n'A haunting and melancholy book that brings to life a wealthy but beleaguered Jewish milieu that was determined to demonstrate its loyalty to France.'--Philip Nord, author of France 1940: Defending the Republic 
'A remarkable book. I've finished reading with a sense of wonder at the unknown world its author recreates for us, and with shock at how senselessly that world was destroyed.'--Alice Kaplan, author of Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic 
'Fascinating, sensitive and heartbreaking, deeply researched and elegantly written, filled with flamboyant dynasties of art collectors, McAuley guides us between the chic glamourous sophistication of the Paris art world and the murderous greed of the Nazis and their collaborators.'--Simon Sebag Montefio

Drawing on over 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF and UFF prisoners, this is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are "top-down," relying upon the views of political elites. This book is "bottom-up," analyzing the voices of those who actually "fought the war." What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones? Using unrivalled access to members of the armed groups, the book offering a critical appraisal of one-dimensional accounts of the onset of peace, grounded in "mutually hurting stalemate" and "ripeness," which downgrade the political and economic aspects of conflict. Military stalemate had been evident since the early 1970s and offers little in explaining the timing of the peace process. Moreover, republicans and loyalists based their ceasefires upon very different perceptions of transformation or victory. Based on a Leverhulme Trust project and written by an expert team, Abandoning Histroical Conflict? offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences. Combined, these allowed combatants to move from violence to peace whilst retaining core ideological beliefs and maintaining long-term constitutional visions.  Former prisoners now act as ambassadors for peace in Northern Ireland. Knowledge of why and how combatants switched to peaceful methodologies amid widespread skepticism over prospects for peace is essential to our understanding of the management of global peace processes. Abandoning Histroical Conflict? is essential reading for policy-makers, academics, students and anyone with an interest in how war can become peace.

Abandoning historical conflict?: Former political prisoners and reconciliation in Northern Ireland

Shirlow, Peter

Tonge, Jon

McGlynn, Catherine

Reference

Manchester University Press

Drawing on over 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF and UFF prisoners, this is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are ‘top-down’, relying upon the views of political elites. This book is ‘bottom-up’, analysing the voices of those who actually ‘fought the war’. What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones? Using unrivalled access to members of the armed groups, the book, available for the first time in paperback, offers a critical appraisal of one-dimensional accounts of the onset of peace, grounded in ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ and ‘ripeness’, which downgrade the political and economic aspects of conflict. Military stalemate had been evident since the early 1970s and offers little in explaining the timing of the peace process. Moreover, republicans and loyalists based their ceasefires upon very different perceptions of transformation or victory. Based on a Leverhulme Trust project and written by an expert team, Abandoning Conflict offers a new analysis, based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences.

An Introduction to Politics, State and Society

This major new textbook will equip students with a complete understanding of contemporary politics, state and society in the United Kingdom today. Key underlying themes include: <ul>
<li>The differences between traditional and alternative ′sites of power′ and what we mean by ′political′</li> <li>the relationships between politics, society and how individuals become and remain engaged with politics</li> <li>the rapid transformations in contemporary social structures and their impact on social and political life</li> <li>the role of human agency and its significance to social and political action and movements</li> <li>contemporary cultural and social dislocations and their impact on some of the major contested areas of political life today.</li>
</ul>
 Key features include: <ul>
<li>Key concepts and issues</li> <li>Key theorists and writers</li> <li>Discussion questions</li>
</ul>
Comprehensive and accessible, An Introduction to Politics, State &amp; Society is an essential text for all undergraduate students of politics, the contemporary state, power and political sociology.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Sage Publications Ltd.

Versification: A Short Introduction is written by one of Australia's most distinguished poets. The book discusses poetic meter, and may be the only source you need. McAuley devotes a short chapter to versification based on accent, syllable count, free verse and "classical" meters, but the book as a whole focuses on metrical verse and its constant reference back to stress in normal speech―it suceeds in showing meterical verse as a natural outgrowth of what we do naturally. This dispels quickly any sense of the esoteric―poetry is of and for people in general not for a special literati. After establishing meter in the normal sphere of speech, McAuley then discusses how abstract meterical patterns are actually applied and how variety is added to avoid a sing-song effect.

Versification: A Short Introduction

Literature & Fiction

Michigan State University Press

At the center of this new collection―the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected―is the sequence, "God's Pattern," meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or "pattern" still practiced in rural parishes of the poet's native country, Ireland. The meditations are interrupted by several "distractions," hence the book's title. Forming a more casual sequence of sorts, from a longish work in progress, are the poems from "Hospital," a mythic institution we all have to visit some time or other, where comedy and tragedy are also frequent visitors. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room ("Cantata for the Feast of Saint Anonymous") to the scathing Celtic-style satire, "The Gingriad." McAuley is well regarded for his knowledge of experiments with traditional forms and rhythms; herein are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence (the result of an argument about Haiku); a "Triptych" and other sonnets; a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century ("A Famine Field in Kildare"); even a carmen figurata ("Cross," "station" III of "God's Pattern"). The range of subjects is broad: "Brother Cornelius" recounts the life of a deaf-mute monk; "A Shift in the Wind" is about sailing; "Breathing" is, of course, about drowning. There are several poems of place, like "A Famine Field in Kildare," "Easter, Key Biscayne," "Holyhead," and "Samarkand" (which turns out to be a beach in Oregon). Childhood memoirs ("The Sorrowful Mysteries," "The Shirt") and painterly ("Self-Portrait, with Masks") or music-derived ("After a Chorus from Mefistofele") studies in verse continue persistent themes from McAuley's earliest work.

Meditations, With Distractions: Poems, 1988-1998

Poetry

University of Arkansas Press

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

Goldsmith, Jack

Vendler, Helen

Pippin, Robert B.

Mutongi, Kenda

Jenkins, Alan

Białoszewski, Miron

Shapira, Anita

Cavanagh, Clare

West, Adrian Nathan

Rusinek, Michal

Forostyna, Oksana

Lorentzen, Christian

Jensen, Morton Hoi

Dersesiewicz, William

Ballan, Anna

Bialik, Chaim Nachman

Liberties Journal

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