A fter a lifetime of writing and editing prose, Jacques Barzun has set down his view of the best ways to improve one's style. His discussions of diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision guide the reader through the technique of making the written word clear and agreeable to read. Exercises, model passages both literary and casual, and hundreds of amusing examples of usage gone wrong show how to choose the right path to self-expression in forceful and distinctive words.

This anthology features unabridged translations of Diderot's best work as a literary artist, including those writings that embody his most original and influential ideas.

A collection of essays commemorating Hector Berlioz's life and work on the 200th anniversary of his birth. This far-reaching collection of heretofore unpublished studies ushers in the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hector Berlioz [1803-1869]. The contributors include leading music historians and two prominent historians of culture, Peter Gay and Jacques Barzun. The essays discuss Berlioz's views of the music of the "past," Berlioz's interactions with music and musicians of his "present," and views of Berlioz during the several generations after his death [the "future"]. A long-awaited piece by Richard Macnutt meticulously inventories and investigates more than two hundred letters and documents that are now known to have been forged but that have sometimes been accepted as authentic. Further contributions, from David Charlton, Heather Hadlock, Sylvia L'Ecuyer, Katherine Kolb, Catherine Massip, Kerry Murphy, Jean-Michel Nectoux, Cecile Reynaud, and Lesley Wright, consider specific aspects of Berlioz's creative work and critical reception. The editor, Peter Bloom, is Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Music at Smith College. His scholarly work has focused primarily on the life and workof Berlioz. He is a member of the Panel of Advisors of the New Berlioz Edition and the author of The Life of Berlioz.

From the medieval worldview to the modern outlook, this work presents a sweeping intellectual history in one volume. The emphasis is on ideas in their historical setting, on how modes of thought emerge, grow, influence and react to one another, and die. The result is a grand synthesis of the main currents in western thought, bringing together religion, philosophy, politics, science, economics, literature and the arts, and the social and behavioral sciences- all the diverse systems man has devised in his effort to understand, interpret, and shape human experience.

New studies of the great French composer by Jacques Barzun, David Cairns, Joel-Marie Fauquet, Hugh Macdonald, Julian Rushton, and other prominent experts. These twelve essays bring new breadth and depth to our knowledge of the life and work of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. A distinguished international array of scholars here treat such matters as Berlioz's "aesthetics" and what it means to write about the meaning of his music; the political implications of his fiction and the affinities of his projects as composer and as critic; what the Germans thought of his work before his travels in Germany and what the English made of him when he visited their capital city; what he seems to have written immediately after encountering Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (a surprise), and where he profited from Beethoven in what later became Romeo et Juliette. The volume closes with two reflective essays on Berlioz's literary masterpiece, the Memoires. Contributors: Lord Aberdare (Alastair Bruce), Jean-Pierre Bartoli, JacquesBarzun, Peter Bloom, David Cairns, Gunther Braam, Gerard Conde, Pepijn van Doesburg, Joel-Marie Fauquet, Frank Heidlberger, Hugh Macdonald, and Julian Rushton Peter Bloom (Smith College) is author of The Life of Berlioz (1998) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (2000).

"When an extremely intellectual, extremely experienced, extremely wise man shares his thoughts with others, the result seizes the imagination at once. Such is the effect of these essays, a series given as lectures at the National Gallery in 1973. Mr. Barzun examines art as religion, as destroyer, as redeemer, and in relation to what he calls "its temper, science", but never forgets the basic essential. As he says, "the last word on art should indeed be: mystery. But that need not stop any of us from dealing with it as if we understood more than we can". And how good it is to have one's mind stretched to that understanding of "more.""--Virginia Quarterly Review

In "Simple & Direct," Jacques Barzun, celebrated author and educator, distills from a lifetime of writing and teaching his thoughts about the craft of writing. In chapters on diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision, Barzun describes and prescribes the techniques to correct even the most ponderous style. Exercises, model passages -- both literary and unorthodox -- and hundreds of often amusing examples of usage gone wrong demonstrate the process of making intelligent choices and guide us toward developing strong and distinctive prose.

This anthology features unabridged translations of Diderot's best work as a literary artist, including those writings that embody his most original and influential ideas. A reprint of the Library of Liberal Arts edition of 1964.

Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.

In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.

The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.

Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

Contributing Authors Include John C. Daniels, Hunter Diack, Glenn McCracken, And Many Others.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

How do we define culture? To what uses should our concept of culture be put? What costs and benefits do these uses entail? Adam Muller brings together a diverse group of emerging and established scholars to probe the nature of the concept of culture while shedding light on its many different applications and contexts of use. In particular, they examine the assumed unity of culture and with arguments being made for and against over discussions of popular culture, film, globalization, sport, aesthetics, and human values. This volume brings together a variety of perspectives to add much-needed substance to our understanding of the history and politics of culture. Rigorous and interdisciplinary, Concepts of Culture secures a place for analytic philosophy, humanism, and liberal political theory in the ongoing discussion of exactly what culture is and how culture works.

A classic since its first edition in 1966, "Modern American Usage" has been called a book that "every literate American ought to read." Now fully revised and brought up-to-date, this one-volume course in good writing brims with helpful answers--large and small--for readers who want to use English clearly, naturally, and correctly.
Alphabetical for easy consulting (and full of cross-references), the book carries the reader to the entry that explains a troublesome word or phrase--and shows how to use or avoid it. Every page offers natural ways to avoid saying or writing the vague, the long-winded, the needlessly technical, and the hopelessly stale. With verve and eloquence, Erik Wensberg spears the empty words that clog clear thought--"impact," "frustrated," "basically," and many more--and offers us good English words that are definite and have more life.
Offering standards by which to judge language now and in the future, Modern American Usage takes account of a generation of changes in American idiom and of attempts to reform the use of pronouns, titles, and phrases to fit shifting ideals of social justice. All this it does with easy learning and with sympathy alike for the experienced writer and for those who come new to American English.

Throughout his career Jacques Barzun, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist From Dawn to Decadence, has always been known as a witty and graceful essayist, one who combines a depth of knowledge and a rare facility with words.

Now Michael Murray has carefully selected eighty of Barzun's most inventive, accomplished, and insightful essays, and compiled them in one impressive volume. With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

Barzun, Essay on French Verse. From the author of From Dawn to Decadence.

Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliche, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the "right thinking" swaddle their minds. After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as a Dictionnaire des idees recues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, the Dictionnairewas long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each "accepted idea" Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirist's wit and a scholar's precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.

This collection of writings allows the reader a rare opportunity to see Barzun's lively, engaging, rich, and original mind at work on several strategic areas of cultural inquiry: music and the musical life, esthetics, biography, criticism, and social commentary. Barzun makes use of a variety of contexts as a forum for evidence and opinion, including essays, program notes, letters, and reviews. And he approaches a wide variety of particular and general questions. What is it like to sit in on a recording session with a great orchestra? What is the role of the piano in Western culture? What is art in relation to objective reality and to the perceiving mind? Can one translate music into words? What is cultural history?
For anyone unfamiliar with Barzun's work, "Critical Questions" will serve as a valuable introduction to one of the most important cultural historians of our time. Others will be glad to have these pieces--most of them no longer easily available--brought together in a single volume. Uniformly insightful, provocative, and a pleasure to read, they show the consistency of Barzun's thought even as they exhibit diversity.

When it was published in 1968, a year noted for historic student protests on campuses across the country, "The American University" spoke in Jacques Barzun's characteristically wise and lucid voice about what colleges and universities were really meant to do--and how they actually worked. Drawing on a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment as a teacher, administrator, and scholar, Barzun here describes the immense demands placed on the university by its competing constituencies--students, faculty, administrators, alumni, trustees, and the political world around it all.
"American higher education is fortunate to have had a scholar and intellectual of Jacques Barzun's stature give so many years of service to the daily bread-and-butter details of running a great university and then share his reflections with us in a literate, humane, and engaging book."--Charles Donovan, "America"