Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008 A Half-Century of Greatness paints a vivid and dramatic picture of the creative thought of mid- to late nineteenth century Europe and the influence of the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848. It reveals often unexpected links between novelists, poets, and philosophers from England, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Ukraine-especially Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, the Brontes, and George Eliot; Hegel, Strauss, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Wagner, and several German poets; the Hungarian poet Sandor Petoefi; Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bakunin, and Herzen in Russia, and the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko. Ewen goes on to trace the transition from Romanticism to Victorianism, or what he calls "the Victorian compromise"-the ascendancy of the middle class. The book was reconstructed and edited by Dr. Jeffrey Wollock from Ewen's final manuscript. It includes the author's own reference citations throughout, a reconstructed bibliography, and an updated "further reading" list. This is Ewen's last work, the long-lost companion to his Heroic Imagination. Together, these books present a panorama of the social, political, and artistic aspects of European Romanticism, especially foreshadowing and complementing recent work on the relation of Marxism to romanticism. Anyone interested in what Lukacs called "Romantic anticapitalism,"; who appreciates such books as Marshall Berman's Adventures in Marxism or E.P. Thompson's The Romantics (1997), will find Ewen's work a welcome addition.

In Joyce Reiser Kornblatt's new novel, The Reason for Wings, a Holocaust survivor in Argentina undertakes "the duties of witness, " setting down for her missing granddaughter a multi-generational epic of love in the face of catastrophe.

Rachel Silver's chronicle of devotion begins with the tale of her grandfather's disappearance in the Danube Delta, and his family's subsequent flight from massacre and war. In temporary refuges -- a Carpathian Mountains spa, a Catholic convent, an elegant Prague apartment, the Berounka caves and Pilsen's underground tunnels -- Kornblatt's characters compel us with their dignity, their humor and their endurance even in the face of the Nazi's relentless genocide.

Finding haven at last in Buenos Aires, the descendants of Dov Landau encounter the Fascist nightmare yet again, swept up this time in Argentina's "Dirty War" of the 1970s. When her pregnant daughter and son-in-law vanish into the military's torture camps, Rachael finds strength and courage in the family stories she creates. A legacy for her granddaughter, Rachael's narrative is a testimony to hope and the heart's resilience.