The Loser
A Novel
1983 · 208 pages
Two pianists at the Salzburg Mozarteum hear Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations and understand they will never be that. Bernhard gives the ruin that follows in one unbroken paragraph of spite.
★ 6.8
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1983
Showing 6 books from 1983
The Discoverers
1983 · 745 pages
The obstacle to discovery was never ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, Boorstin argues, then walks through the clock, the compass and the microscope as victories over what everyone was certain of.
★ 6.6
Imagined Communities
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
1983 · 256 pages
Nations are imagined communities, Anderson argues, assembled by print: strangers reading the same newspapers and novels came to feel like one people. He gave the study of nationalism its vocabulary.
★ 6.3
A Man's Place
1983 · 90 pages
Ernaux's father ran a café and grocery in Normandy, terrified all his life of using the wrong word. Educated out of his class, she writes him in flat sentences that never condescend.
★ 5.4
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
1983 · 293 pages
Two centuries of crusade told from the receiving end, out of the Arab chroniclers: the Franj, as they called the invaders, eat the dead at Maarat and sack Jerusalem the following year.
★ 5.4
Examples
The Making of 40 Photographs
1983 · 177 pages
Forty photographs, and Adams tells how each was made. His meter lost in New Mexico, he computed the exposure from the moon's known brightness and got one negative before the light went.
★ 5.0