The World Of Yesterday (memoirs Of A European)

By (author) Zweig, Stefan; Translated by Bell, Anthea
Description:
Stefan Zweig''s seminal memoir recalls the golden age of pre-war Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall. Through the story of his life and his relationships with the leading literary figures of the day, Zweig''s fervent, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. This translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell captures the passionate fluency of Zweig''s writing in arguably his most important work, completed the day before his suicide in 1942 - a unique elegy for a lost world of security and peace.
Review quote:
One of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed
Review quote:
No one captures the sweep of history like Stefan Zweig... An eerie, spellbinding read
Review quote:
A marvellous recapturing of a Europe that Hitler and his thugs destroyed. Zweig seems to have known everyone, and writes about the great figures of his day with insight, sympathy and, most unusually for a writer, modesty
Review quote:
This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography... A book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you
Review quote:
A wonderful book... [Zweig''s] writings have come to embody the lost world of the Habsburg Empire... of Europe before the fall
Review quote:
One of the great accounts of life in Europe in the first part of the twentieth century
Review quote:
The book fits the uneasy mood of the moment, the nightmarish ways that history can abruptly overturn even the most secure lives. A powerful statement of the implacable power of circumstance on our lives
Review quote:
One of the canonical European testaments... [Zweig''s] life and work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security-a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear
Review quote:
Unnervingly topical
Review quote:
This is a wonderful book of a lifetime
Review quote:
I can''t recommend it highly enough
Review quote:
Zweig''s memoir speaks an important message to us today about how quickly war can erupt and change our lives for good. It also demonstrates how unprepared most people were, ignoring all the signs. Zweig was one of the best known authors in Europe at his time, an excellent observer and writer
Review quote:
Zweig''s celebration of the brotherhood of peoples reminds us that there is another way
Review quote:
One of liberalism''s greatest defenders
Review quote:
Zweig''s accumulated historical and cultural studies... remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in
Biographical note:
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London where he wrote his only novel, Beware of Pity. He later moved to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. After a short period in New York, Zweig settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide.Much of his work