This account of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign is by the author of the famous treatise, On War. A preface by the original 19th century translator precedes the editor's preface.

The Campaign of 1812 in Russia

History

Clausewitz, Gen. Carl von

Europe

Blue Crane Books, Incorporated

The Great American loneliness is an autobiography in the form of short narratives written between the Seventies and the Nineties. Its central theme, the journey of an artist in the middle of his life where the way is sometimes lost. The narratives move from America to India in the aftermath of the Sixties, painting a kind of road to the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, where amidst the human loss and suffering, the narrator learns again the impermanence of everything in life. Then, between portraits of his mother and her peasant Armenian roots, are the memoirs of his fellow artists in Oakland, California, and these point to the rest of the journey.  “Peter Najarian is a passionate and idealistic American who has been in exile from America—sometimes actually, sometimes metaphorically—for much of his life; and now he has published a really eloquent and compelling account of his many-layered journey, which I hope will find the warm and wide reception it deserves,” writes Michael Arlen about The Great American loneliness.  In his Preface addressed to “My Friends,” Najarian talks about himself and his work: “This loneliness is not just ‘American’ of course, but of a universal nature, or what we call the self’s search for the soul, yet it comes dressed in a culture, . . . When I was young I used this name [America] for the cause of my personal suffering, as if it were an enemy to what my ideal America was supposed to be, and when I lived in England I felt more natural as an alien than feeling one in the land where I was born. My parents had found refuge here, but I grew up longing for a home I imagined in their childhood.”  Later, he continues, “Then I realized I was not really starving but in love, and it was this love of making lines that kept me searching for my true subject, for I was in love not only with my soul but how it was mirrored in my friends who are my true America, my mother the most important of all. It is to them I dedicate this humble book.”  Interlaced with the stories are the author-artist’s drawings of elegant women, of his mother and self-portraits, and of landscapes. “I’ve been writing since boyhood, but I started painting late in life,” says Najarian. In The Great American loneliness he has successfully combined both artistic expressions to create an attractive volume.  “I am again bowled over by the power of your work,” says Leo E. Litwak. “It is lyrical, earthy, celebratory, grounded in the profane as it reaches for the sacred. Yours isn’t an E.M. Forster India but a more erotic and more fetid and spicier India that seems truer to me. I have more faith in your women than in any drawn by Henry Miller. Your writing, as well as your art, justifies your adoration of them.”  Peter Najarian is an accomplished contemporary American writer. His writings, mostly autobiographical, reflect his Armenian roots and his experience growing up in America. His first novel, Voyages, was published in 1971 by Pantheon Books, followed by Wash Me on Home Mama in 1978, and Daughters of Memory, in 1986.

The Great American Loneliness

Biographies & Memoirs

Najarian, Peter

Arts & Literature

<p>An independent candidate, Mehdi Zana was elected by popular vote as the first Kurdish mayor of a major city during the 1977 elections in Turkey. Surprised by the election results, the Turkish government resolved to thwart this experiment, which it judged as dangerous by its popularity. “On September 12, 1980, under the pretext of restoring law and order,” writes Mehdi Zana, “the army provoked another coup with its customary brutality. Parliament was dissolved, and the political parties, associations, and unions were banned. Members of Parliament, ministers, heads of political parties, unions, municipal governments, academics, and journalists—in brief, all elements deemed undesirable and harmful to the ideal Kemalist Republic—were arrested.” On September 24, twelve days after the coup, Mehdi Zana was arrested and jailed. After serving eleven years in the notorious Turkish military prison in Diyarakir, Mehdi Zana was released in 1991 following a conditional amnesty, only to be sentenced again in 1994 to four more years of imprisonment for his testimony to the European Parliament Human Rights Sub-Committee and in 1997 to ten more months for publishing a poetry book. His wife, Leyla Zana—a Noble Peace Prize candidate and winner of Sakharov Prize for Freedom—was one of the six Kurdish deputies in Turkey who were charged with “separatism” and were arrested in March 1994. She spent 10 years in Ankara Prison. Leyla was elected once again in 2011 and currently serves as a member of the Turkish Parliament. Father of two children, Mehdi Zana continues his work as a peace activist from his home in Sweden, where he lives in exile.</p>

Wait Diyarbakir: Account of Kurdish Struggle Told by Mehdi Zana

Zana, Mehdi

Ozturk, Ali

Constitutional Law

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