Jay Taylor Livres

"In his youth Ching-kuo was a Communist and a Trotskyite, and he lived twelve years in Russia. He died in 1988 as the leader of Taiwan, a Chinese society with a flourishing consumer economy and a budding but already wild, woolly, and open democracy. He was an actor in many of the events of the last century that shaped the history of China's struggles and achievements in the modern era: the surge of nationalism among Chinese youth, the grand appeal of Marxism-Leninism, the terrible battle against fascist Japan, and the long, destructive civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his father and two million Nationalists. He led the brutal suppression of dissent on the island and was a major player in the cold war between Communist China and America." "Jay Taylor underscores the interaction of political developments on the mainland and in Taiwan and concludes that if China ever makes a similar transition, it will owe much to the Taiwan example and the Generalissimo's son."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on the harrowing experiences of a Marine Corps Scout Sniper during the Vietnam War, this memoir delves into the psychological and emotional challenges faced by veterans. It confronts the stark realities of combat, including the trauma of killing and witnessing the suffering of comrades, rather than glorifying war. Aimed at veterans from all eras and their families, it offers a poignant exploration of the lasting impacts of warfare and the struggles of returning home.

This is the first book-length study of the genre of 'artist-opera', in which the work's central character is an artist who is uncomfortable with his place in the world. It investigates how three such operas (Pfitzner's Palestrina (1915), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1926) and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (1935)) contributed to the debate in early twentieth-century Germany about the place of art and the artist in modern society, and examines how far the artist-character may be taken as functioning as a persona for the real composer of the work. Because of their concern with the place of art within society, the works are also engaged with inherently political questions, and each opera is read in the light of the political context of its time: conservatism circa World War I, Americanism and democracy, and the rise of National Socialism.