Forever...

In this vivid fifty-year history of Germany from 1871-1918--which inspired events that forever changed the European continent--here is the story of the Second Reich from its violent beginnings and rise to power to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France--all without destroying itself in the process? In this unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social up

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)Words, voices reek of the worlds from which theyemerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpablearoma, its parameters, limitations, promise.Words—there is a gap, nonetheless alwaysand forever, between words and the world—slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.•Set up a situation,—. . . then reveal an abyss.For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his lif