Showing results for "the world" in Letters & Correspondence

A born storyteller, Charlie May's vivid eye for detail and warm good humour brings his experience in the trenches to life for a 21st-century audience. A journalist before the war and a born storyteller, May's diaries give a vivid picture of battalion life in and behind the trenches during the build-up to the greatest battle fought by a British army and are filled with the friendships and tensions, the home-sickness, frustrations, the fog of ignorance, the combination of boredom and terror to which every man that has ever fought could testify.

History cannot be relived, but thanks to a tradition that spans millennia, we can revisit it in the letters of the people who influenced or witnessed the moments it changed forever. In Written In History, acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects some of the greatest letters ever written from ancient times to the 20th century: declarations of war, petitions for peace, diplomatic entanglements, steamy love letters and beyond.

The largest gathering of Union and Confederate veterans ever held was front-page news throughout the country. “[It] will be talked about and written about as long as the American people boast of the dauntless courage of Gettysburg,” declared a woman who accompanied her father to the reunion. But as the years passed, the memorable event was all but forgotten. John Hopkins’s The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 goes a long way toward making sure the world will remember.

The Second World War had been under way for a year when Marie and John Williamson welcomed two English brothers to join them and their two children in their small house in north Toronto for the duration of the conflict. Marie wrote over 150 letters to the boys’ mother, Margaret Sharp, imagining that she could make Margaret feel she was still with her children. She shepherded the boys through education decisions and illnesses, eased them into a strange new life, and rejoiced when they embraced unfamiliar winter sports.

In summer 1939, war was brewing. Eileen Alexander was a bright young graduate just leaving Cambridge and newly smitten with Gershon Ellenbogen, a fellow student who had inadvertently involved her in a car crash. Her first letter to him, written from the hospital, sparked a correspondence that would last the length of the war and define the love of their lifetimes. Love in the Blitz is a remarkable portrait of one woman’s coming-of-age. Her previously undiscovered letters are vivid, intimate and crackling with intelligence.

A giant in American journalism in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation" reveals his World War II experiences in this National Geographic book. More than 100 of Cronkite's letters from 1943-45 (plus a few earlier letters) survive. They reveal surprising and little-known facts about this storied public figure in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation". They chronicle both a great love story and a great war story.

While Pilot Officer Geoffrey Myers was caught up in the Battle of Britain, his French wife and two half-Jewish children were trapped in increasingly dangerous circumstances in Nazi-occupied France. In intimate, frank, and powerful letters, Myers kept a record of his war, his deep love for his wife Margot and their children, and his heart-wrenching fear for their safety as they tried to escape. Secret Letters: A Battle of Britain Love Story is an incredibly rare personal account of some of the major turning points of WWII.

In these days of nonstop, round-the-clock division, where confrontation is our most prevalent form of entertainment, we’ve forgotten the more fundamental things that unite us. We’ve lost track of the importance of conversations that foster growth, self-reflection, and discovery of one another while cultivating our sense of shared humanity. In her new book, Dear Hartley, Jedediah Bila reignites much-needed conversations about everything from character and empathy to parenting and friendship, from education and family to fitness and food.

The men and women honored in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation speak in this collection of letters from and about the Depression and World War II.

"If war spares me," wrote Vera Brittain to her brother, Edward, in 1916, "it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four." Seventeen years later, Vera was to achieve her aim with the acclaimed Testament of Youth. This series of letters was the inspiration behind Testament. Written between Vera; her brother; her fiancé, Roland Leighton; and their two best friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, they give a unique perspective on the most horrifying conflict the world has ever seen.

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline.

Ne crois pas, ne crois pas, Alfred, que je puisse être heureuse avec la pensée d'avoir perdu ton cœur. Que j'aie été ta maîtresse ou ta mère, peu importe. Que je t'aie inspiré de l'amour ou de l'amitié ; que j'aie été heureuse ou malheureuse avec toi, tout cela ne change rien à l'état de mon âme à présent. Je sais que je t'aime et c'est tout. Veiller sur toi, te préserver de tout mal, de toute contrariété, t'entourer de distractions et de plaisirs, voilà tout le besoin et le regret que je sens depuis que je t'ai perdu. George Sand à Alfred de Musset, Venise, le 15 avril 1834

"Chère Maître", c'est en ces termes que Gustave Flaubert s'adresse à George Sand. Au fil de la correspondance qu'ils échangèrent, de 1866 à 1876, se révèlent deux conceptions du monde, deux esthétiques, deux tempéraments. La générosité et l'attention aux autres de George Sand et l'esprit torturé et solitaire de Gustave Flaubert. L'amitié forte et durable qui les unira ne sera interrompue que par la mort de George Sand. Cette correspondance, belle d'intelligence, pose sur la société du XIXe siècle, un regard d'une grande pertinence.