Books about Twentieth from Amazon.com

Anyone who has ever gamely tried and failed to absorb, enjoy, and--especially--understand the complex works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, or even Philip Glass will allow themselves a wry smile reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's outstanding The Rest Is Noise. Not only does Ross manage to give historical, biographical, and social context to 20th-century pieces both major and minor, he brings the scores alive in language that's accessible and dramatic.

Take Ross's description of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, "in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forming in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music at the time. It contains fragments of the folk song 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'--the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler. For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is 'Alles ist hin' (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals."

Armed with such a detailed aural roadmap, even a troglodyte--or a heavy metal fan--can explore these pivotal works anew. But it's not all crashing cymbals, honking tubas, and somber Germans stroking their chins. Ross also presents the human dramas (affairs, wars, etc.) behind these sweeping compositions while managing, against the odds, to discuss C-major triads, pentatonic scales, and B-flat dominant sevenths without making our eyes glaze over. And he draws a direct link between the Beatles and Sibelius. It's no surprise that the New York Times named The Rest Is Noise one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. Music nerds have found their most articulate valedictorian. --Kim Hughes.
Price: $19.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.

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Price: $15.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A legendary bestseller for more than forty years, this is the classic survey to the field from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century

With 274 authors, the Eighth Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamas Heaney's award-winning translation of Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, and More's Utopia to the great poets and prose writers of the nineteenth century—Blake and Austen, Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson and Barrett Browning—to twentieth-century classics of a truly global English literature—Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Friel's Translations, to name but a few. Color plates—over 75 in all—and thematic clusters of brief and historically significant texts bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature..
Price: $49.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Recognized as the finest survey of Western art music in the English language, this distinguished book has enlightened a multitude of music lovers since it first appeared in 1960. This handsome new edition incorporates the latest advances in music scholarship..
Price: $44.10 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past..
Price: $9.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history.".
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Duiker's comprehensive, balanced history of the world in the twentieth century provides you with context for interpreting the events that you hear about in the news each day. You'll view history from the broader global perspective, while at the same time gaining insight into the distinctive character of individual civilizations and regions. And to ensure that you'll have a well-rounded understanding of the most decisive moments in recent times, Duiker integrates political, economic, social, and cultural history into a smoothly written narrative. What's more, the text includes a special insert that guides you in using the text's many detailed maps, which help you make important connections between geography and the turn of historic events; timelines that highlight and contrast different cultures and nations, thus giving you an "at-a-glance," holistic perspective on eras and their defining events; photos from William Duiker's own collection that giving you a closer, more personal look at the world we live in; and primary-source documents that illustrate and clarify key points..
Price: $73.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible—The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool..
Price: $59.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Cities of Tomorrow is a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.

• A critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.
  
• Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject.
  
• Comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective.
  
• Reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century.

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Price: $34.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]