Bøger af Robert Zaretsky

A remarkable man who “led an extraordinary life.”Leaving an equally impressive legacy as both an art collector and philanthropist, Jacob Greenberg’s life, spanning most of the twentieth century, illuminates many unfamiliar yet fascinating facets to the American Jewish experience. After his birth on a homestead in the Badlands of North Dakota to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Greenberg was fortunate to pursue intellectual studies, first at the progressive Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, then the University of Minnesota, and Columbia University. He focused on economic geography, and upon graduation, he served an apprenticeship at the Sears headquarters in Chicago under the transformative direction of Julius Rosenwald. Determined to follow his own star, Greenberg left his mark, and made his fortune, first in the garment industry in rural Oklahoma then in the energy industry in Tennessee and Texas. In the 1990s, Jacob and his wife Joyce embarked on a new project: the Jewish Heritage Program, which protects and restores Jewish sites throughout the world. Zaretsky’s fine biography of this extraordinary man explores the dark history of anti-Semitism in this country, and the struggles and successes of the Eastern European Jews who fled hostilities in their homeland only to find further blockades in the land of opportunity. > “Zaretsky vividly sets the life of one (extra)ordinary man into the American twentieth century in the context of immigration, anti-Semitism, and assimilation; capitalism, education, and philanthropy. A secular Jew who moved and worked in assimilated America, Jacob Greenberg lived a rich life grounded in a deep sense of the ethical imperatives of the Jewish tradition.”—Martha T. Roth, Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (OI), Dept. of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the College, The University of Chicago "The story of the remarkable of life of Jacob Greenberg reflects a passion for global culture and history witnessed through decades of travel and a dedication to preserving heritage. Jacob and Joyce Greenberg’s generous support of World Monuments Fund’s Jewish Heritage Program during its early years, played a transformative role in restoring several synagogues across Europe and beyond, and provided a strong foundation for this important initiative that continues to preserve and protect Jewish heritage around the world."—Bénédicte de Montlaur, President and CEO of World Monuments Fund

"We are far from knowing how and when the present pandemic will end, nor can we know what will be the most enduring stories that writers tell about it. We can, however, turn for guidance to earlier writers who confronted past plagues. Robert Zaretsky spent much of the past year working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas, tending to residents isolated by Covid-19. When not at work, he turned to great novelists, essayists, and historians of the past to help him make sense of everyday, yet often extraordinary experiences at the residence. In this book, Zaretsky adroitly weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the experiences of six major writers during their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus. Each of these enduring authors knew mass death firsthand. Thucydides survived the great plague that swept through Athens from 430 to 429 BCE and described it in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Marcus Aurelius was Rome's emperor during the Antonine Plague that raged from 165 to 180 CE. Montaigne was the mayor of Bordeaux when, in 1585, it was battered by the bubonic plague, and several of his greatest essays are marked by that experience. Defoe was, of course, the author of Journal of a Plague Year, which in turn influenced both Mary Shelley in her apocalyptic novel The Last Man and Albert Camus in The Plague. Zaretsky layers accessible discussions of these authors with his own experience of the tragedy that slowly enveloped his Texas nursing home-a tragedy that first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom Zaretsky cared for and whom we come to know. The result is an indelible work of witness and a tribute to the consoling powers of great literature"--

Distinguished literary biographer Robert Zaretsky upends our thinking on Simone Weil, bringing us a woman and a philosopher who is complicated and challenging, while remaining incredibly relevant.

In a dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb, Robert Zaretsky invites us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.

Exploring themes that preoccupied Albert Camus--absurdity, silence, revolt, fidelity, and moderation--Robert Zaretsky portrays a moralist who refused to be fooled by the nobler names we assign to our actions, and who pushed himself, and those about him, to challenge the status quo. For Camus, rebellion against injustice is the human condition.

Throughout his life James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Few periods better crystallize this turmoil than 1763-1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky's thrilling intellectual adventure.

In the French Camargue - the delta surrounding the mouth of the Rhone River and part of the southern "nation" of Occitania - the bull is a powerful icon of nationalism, literature, and culture. This book discusses and analyses how the Camargue bull came to confront the French cock, venerable symbol of a unified and republican France.

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers.In this lively and revealing book, Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the otherand himselfilluminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actionsof the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosophers contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world.