Storm Jameson Knihy

One of the 20th century's finest memoirs of literary and political life, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, who referred to the book as “literary gold” “Stops you in your tracks. I would like to persuade everyone to read it” — Sunday Times A compulsively readable, beautifully written account of a fascinating twentieth-century woman and life. This candid, affecting portrait of a woman who loathed domesticity explores how she sought to balance a literary career with political commitment. Towards the end of her life, the writer Storm Jameson began her memoir by asking, “can I make sense of my life?” This question propelled her through an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her early years in Whitby, shadowed by her tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and repeated flights from settled domesticity; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always dogged by a lack of money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany. In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells also of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, travels in Europe as fascism was rising and a 1945 trip to recently liberated Warsaw. Throughout, she casts an unsparing eye on her own motivations and psychology, providing a rigorously candid and lively portrait of her life and times.

Trinásťročná Anna Franková sa spolu s rodinou počas druhej svetovej vojny dva roky ukrývala v zadnej časti jednej budovy v Amsterdame. Tesne pred koncom vojny však padla za obeť nacistickému režimu. Anna si zapisovala udalosti od 12. júna 1942 do 1. augusta 1944 a zaznamenala všetko, čo sa okolo nej dialo, aj jednotlivé dni v úkryte. Keď v marci 1944 v Oranžskom rádiu počula výzvu občanom, aby poskytli svoje zápisky do zbierky na historické účely, svoje poznámky začala prepisovať do knižnej podoby. Stihla prepísať podstatnú časť pôvodných listov. Zápisky sa končia textom, ktorý Anna zaznamenala iba pár dní pred tým, ako ju aj jej rodinu našli vojaci a odvliekli do koncentračného tábora. Zápisky sa však zachovali a po vojne sa o ich knižné vydanie zaslúžil Annin otec Otto Frank, ktorý jediný vojnu prežil.