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...

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.

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.

"Berlioz the person-composer-writer is the sensitive child of his century and a most passionate voice of his time." --The Opera Quarterly

"Berlioz could hardly have been better served than by the translator of this English edition... It is an invaluable and long-overdue addition to the Berlioz literature in English. Elisabeth Csicsery-Ronay has given us an A travers chants for the millennium." --Music and Letters

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was equally prominent as composer and music critic. A Travers Chants is the collection of writings he himself selected from his thirty-odd...

As the "social anchor" in middle-class homes of the nineteenth century, the piano was simultaneously an elegant piece of drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, and a means of introducing the young to music. In this admirably balanced and leisurely account of the popular instrument, the late, internationally known concert pianist Arthur Loesser takes a "piano's-eye view" of the recent social history of Western Europe and the United States.
Drawing on newspapers, music manuscripts, popular accounts, and other sources, Loesser traces the history of the piano from its...

The lecturer traces the historical development of attitudes toward the arts over the past 150 years, suggesting that the present is a period of cultural liquidation, nothing less than the ending of the modern age that began with the Renaissance.

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,...