Friedrich Schlegel was a German poet, philosopher, & literary critic. Mr. Schlegel was on one of the main figures of the first phase of German Romanticism

The Books of Jacob is a superb masterpiece. In my humble, layperson’s opinion, the book is in the same class as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Henry James (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was a British author, considered by many to be one of the greatest novelists in the English language

How I Learned to Understand the World by Hans Rosling is both enlightening and entertaining, bringing forth a new perspective in a relatable manner

Mikhail Bulgakov (15 May, 1891 – 10 March, 1940) was a Russian writer best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which was published posthumously.

Van Wyck Brooks (16 February, 1886 – 2 May, 1963) was an American historian, critic and biographer. He is best known for his 1952 studies which chronicled the 19th Century development of American literature titled Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915. Books by Van Wyck Brooks* 1) Mr. Brooks was born in Plainfield, NJ to an upper middle class family. 2) In Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life by Raymond Nelson, the biographer writes that the young Mr. Brooks was taken on European trips with his parents. In his judgement, he was an already highly educated man by the time he entered Harvard in 1904. 3) As a student, he published Verses by Two Undergraduates, a book of poetry he wrote with his friend John Hall Wheelock. 4) After graduating from college, Mr. Brooks worked as a journalist in England. 5) While working as a journalist, he published his first book The Wine of the Puritans (1908), blaming the English Protestants heritage for America’s cultural shortcomings. He wrote another book on the subject in 1915, America’s Coming-of-Age. 6) In 1936, Mr. Brooks won National Book Award for non-fiction for his book The Flowering of New England 1815-1865. In 1937 he won the Pulitzer Prize in History for the same book….

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a good friend of Mr. Wordsworth for many years. The two poets had a falling out due to Coleridge’s opium addiction.

This is a two part story, the first one, as the name of the book suggests, is the story of the Nazis trying to control people’s beliefs via literature, punishment and spectacles of burning books symbolizing “wrong” ideology. The second part is the painstaking cataloging of millions of books, returning what can be returned (through notes, plates and other identifying marks).

During her lifetime, she was considered one of Europe’s leading contemporary experimentalists.

Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was a poet from California who is considered today an icon of the environmental movement. Jeffers’ was born in Allegheny, PA which is now a part of Pittsburgh. He began to learn Greek at the age of 5. His father, an Old Testament Literature and Biblical History professor at Western Theology Seminary, sent him to study in European schools including at Zurich, Leipzig and Geneva. Most of Jeffers’ poems were written in epic or narrative form. While going to graduate school at the University of Southern California he met his future wife, Una Call Kuster, in a class on Faust. Jeffers’ was admitted to medical school. After his marriage, Jeffers’ moved to Carmel, CA. Jeffers’ didn’t like what has become of the world and how self centered human beings were. Jeffers coined the word inhumanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the “astonishing beauty of things.” During the 1930s and 40s Jeffers’ patriotism was called into question due to references to current events and leading figures. Jeffers’ poems have been translated to many languages but they are most popular in the Czech Republic and Japan. Zohar…