Although beset by social, political, and economic instabilities, interwar Vienna was an exhilarating place, with pioneering developments in the arts and innovations in the social sphere. Research on the period long saw the city as a mere shadow of its former imperial self; more recently it has concentrated on high-profile individual figures or party politics. This volume of new essays widens the view, stretching disciplinary boundaries to consider the cultural and social movements that shaped the city. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted not in an abandonment of the arts, but rather led to new forms of expression that were nevertheless conditioned by the legacies of earlier periods. The city's culture was caught between extremes, from neopositivism to cultural pessimism, Catholic mysticism to Austro-Marxism, late Enlightenment liberalism to rabid antisemitism. Concentrating on the paradoxes and often productive tensions that these created, the volume's twelve essays explore achievements and anxieties in fields ranging from modern dance, theater, music, film, and literature to economic, cultural, and racial policy. The volume will appeal to social, cultural, and political historians as well as to specialists in modern European literary and visual culture. Contributors: Andrea Amort, Andrew Barker, Alys X. George, Deborah Holmes, Jon Hughes, Birgit Lang, Wolfgang Maderthaner, Therese Muxeneder, Birgit Peter, Lisa Silverman, Edward Timms, Robert Vilain, John Warren, Paul Weindling. Deborah Holmes is Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Lisa Silverman is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Khaliah Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, shares her success at overcoming obesity through banding surgery--a minimally invasive, reversible, and extremely effective choice for drastically overweight people

When Muhammad Ali's daughter Khaliah hit 325 pounds, she didn't need to be told again that she was morbidly obese. A lifetime of dieting, of starving, had not helped. Miserable, depressed, and unable to walk up a flight of stairs without losing her breath, she did not know which way to turn--until a friend pointed her toward a new type of surgery called gastric banding. It is just as effective as gastric bypass but with a fraction of potential complications. With the band placed around her stomach and completely taking away her hunger, Khaliah slimmed down to half her former size.

Khaliah wraps her story of weight loss in this memoir of what it was like to grow up the daughter of one of the world's most famous men, and teams up with her surgeons at the New York University Medical Center to detail the lifetime of misery suffered by an obese girl; the ins and outs of the banding operation; and the joy, serenity, and health resulting from a solution that until now had eluded her.