Vienna Review of Books

Not long after Arafat took his final breaths in a hospital in France, his arch rival, Sharon, briefly sputtered and then sank into unconsciousness. Angry Jewish settlers were dragged from their homes in Gaza while the total Jewish settler population in West Bank continues to explode. Hamas won a democratic election to the Legislative Council, largely interpreted as a vote against corruption and ineptitude of Fatah, provoking a crippling international blockade. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rode to narrow victory with a plan to unilaterally make large Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank permanently part of Israel.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela makes a little known and seldom quoted observation. South Africa’s iconic liberation hero pays tribute to Bram Fischer, a white Afrikaner lawyer who defended Mandela and his ANC comrades in court against charges of terrorism, sabotage and high treason.

Today, walking through the sleepy streets of Trieste, it is hard to imagine the city James Joyce lived in for a dozen years at the turn of the 20th Century. It was then the fourth largest seaport in Europe, the hub of trade from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a major connection point between Europe and Asia. According to travel writer Jan Morris, the first commercial vessel to sail through the Suez Canal in the 1860s was the steam ship Primo of Trieste.

When Miss Dunne typed in: “16 June 1904,” she fixed for once and ever the celebration of Bloomsday. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, this is the day on which all the action involving protagonist Leopold Bloom takes place and that has become the day for the celebration of James Joyce himself, as the pioneering novelist of the unconscious.

Summer Reading Book Sale

Summer reading book sale on the ground floor of the English and American Studies Library in the 9th district. Light reading and other english books for the summer. Good reads at a fair price for all you bookworms out there!

Jul. and Sep., Mon-Thu., 10:00 - 16:00
Fri., 10:00 - 14:00
Aug., Mon-Fri., 10:00 - 14:00
University Campus, Altes AKH
9., Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 8
(01) 4277 16531
www.bibliothek.univie.ac.at

33rd International Wittgenstein Symposium 2010

Just released, there is now an Only in Vienna audio CD of guided walks through Duncan Smith’s hidden city, a circular walk around Vienna’s Innerestadt, discovering the city from what he calls “a less conventional standpoint.” That’s an understatement. Smith’s voice is conspiratorial, almost seductive, as he leads you along with his warm and polished Oxbridge diction that feels like the person you hoped to be seated next to the best dinner party this season.

Recorded live as he walks the streets, Smith reveals the secrets behind the stones of Vienna as if it were hot gossip from the beaches of Cannes during the festival, deconstructing the layers of history back into the tales of power and personality that are always the real story.

Like many, I often have a dream in which I imagine I enter a room in my house and discover a door I never noticed before; opening it, I discover another room I never knew was there, filled with furnishings, books and pictures, and perhaps windows and other doors, all new and yet already known, and I recognize it immediately; it is my own world, only more so.

On February 4, 1957 a plane from Prague landed at Vienna International Airport. On board was humble-looking 27-year-old Paul Lendvai, struggling with his broken German. He was one of some 200,000 Hungarian refugees who fled to Austria after the Soviet attack against Imre Nagy’s government during 1956-1957.

It was raining when I arrived at Shakespeare & Company’s street fair on May 7, so the festivities celebrating Sylvia Beach were over. But no matter—because I was there for the books.

Secreted away on a picturesque lane in the heart of the Ruprechtsviertel, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, Shakespeare & Company at Sterngaße 2 has the cozy, been-there-forever feeling that devoted readers adore in bookshops.

We are the involuntary heirs to a debate with which most people are altogether unfamiliar. When asked what lies behind the new (old) economic thinking, we can reply that it was the work of Anglo-American economists associated overwhelmingly with the University of Chicago. But if we ask where the ‘Chicago boys’ got their ideas, we shall find that the greatest influence was exercised by a handful of foreigners, all of them immigrants from Central Europe: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker.