Customer Reviews (1)

A Daring Play about a great lady!
Only the great Julie Harris could have played Isak Dinesen in a one woman show on Broadway. I have to admit that this play is no easy reading or easy to put on stage unless you have somebody who can play Isak so well. Reading it gives me a better understanding of the play itself and how one person can do it for so long. ... Read more

Product Description
Born into a Victorian Danish family, Karen Christentze Dinesen married her second cousin, a high-spirited and philandering Baron, and moved to Kenya where she ran a coffee plantation, painted and wrote. She later returned to Denmark, lived through the German occupation during World War II, and became a pivotal figure in Heretica, a major literary movement that flourished in Denmark after the war. By the time of her death, Dinesen was internationally known, particularly for her work "Out of Africa". For this biography, Pelensky has uncovered papers in libraries and private collections and interviewed sources in Africa, Denmark and England to help put the pieces of Dinesen's life together. Her father's outspoken sympathy of the plight of the American Indians, his suicide and the effects of his personal anguish as a failed adventurer are illuminated as major forces on Dinesen's imagination. The Danish history of romance and masquerade and the tradition of pantomime are also explored as themes that recur in Dinesen's work. ... Read more

Product Description
Lucan has been orphaned and Zosine has been deserted, and London is a hostile place for two young girls without a home. Bound together by poverty, grief and their shared years at school, they set out to make a future for themselves in new surroundings. They are adopted by the austere, puritanical Reverend Pennhallow and his wife, and in their large, gloomy house they become immersed in study. But, after a chain of disturbing events, it does not take long before they realize that the cleric and his wife are not all they seem to be. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Victorian tale of adventure with a feminist edge
With a title that sounds like a modern day adventure comic, The Angelic Avengers is a Victorian tale of adventure with a feminist edge. Written in World War II Denmark by Karen Blixen (the Isak Dinesen of Out Of Africa), it is the story of two young ladies who have lost their possessions and families. One is the forward-thinking daughter of a scientist, and the other a pampered child of the aristocracy. They bond together to protect themselves against the evils of a society corrupted by men. Yet they find themselves in the clutches of the most evil man they can imagine. I feel that Blixen wrote this book as an amusement to carry her through the horror of world war. Yet the book has a substance greater than its title and plot suggest.

According to one web site:
"During WW II, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, Karen Blixen started to write her only full-length novel, the introspective GENGÆLDELSENS VEJE (The Angelic Avengers), which was published in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. The horrors experienced by the young heroines in the novel were interpreted as an allegory of falling Nazism."

The novel is divided into three parts. In "Rose-Strewn Roads And Thorny Paths," we see the golden cage of the well-bred life and the perils faced by women without means. Part Two is called "The Canary Birds." Here the young women find themselves in a position where they are like birds in a cage, fed and cared for, but helpless to control their fate. The last section of the novel is called "The Buried Treasure." In the end, the young women confront their avenging natures and find their true treasure is their angelic ability to oppose evil with goodness and compassion.

The happy ending reveals the book as a parable with a clear message as to how humanity should act when faced with evil: feelings of vengeance must be overcome and replaced with compassionate love. Righteous anger will destroy not only evil in the other, but the goodness within. Another theme is how the aristocracy and the middle class differ in facing adversity. The two young women's strengths compliment each other through the book suggesting that the two classes must work together to build a just society.

It is a well-written and tightly scripted adventure that will keep you involved and enthralled. I highly recommend it. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Very good book!
I have been reading this author for years.The book arrived quickly and in perfect condition.I am very happy with it. ... Read more

Product Description
To Soar with Eagles is a collection of letters, anecdotes and conversations spanning the ten-year period of a unique relationship between the world famous Danish author Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen) and the young African American musician Eugene Haynes. Dinesen, once considered for the Nobel Prize, is best known for her books Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales and Angelic Avengers.

The friendship between Isak Dinesen and Eugene Haynes has been written about in several of her biographies: Judith Thurman's Isak Dinesen-The Life of a Storyteller; Olga Pelensky's Isak Dinesen-The Life and Imagination of a Seducer; and most extensively in Parmenia Migel's Titania-The Biography of Isak Dinesen.

After reading To Soar With Eagles, William Maxwell, noted author and former literary editor for the New Yorker called it " a constant pleasure and a real treat." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

To Soar With Eagles
This is long overdue, albeit, brief view of a long and lustrous career of a man who never received the accolades in this country that he should have.Many musical luminaries in the world have paid tribute to him, including his friend Miles Davis.This book covers about a 10 year period in his career, mostly in Europe.It details elements of his career and the friends he made while there.There is a section of the book with photographs of many of these frriends and some of his family..Othermembers of my family have read the book and found it to be informative and an interesting story of this renowned classical musician who never really attained the kind of fame many of his comtempories received.I recommend it highly if you are looking for an autobiography of a remarkable man and just a small part of his career. ... Read more

Product Description
CUENTOS DE INVIERNO (1942) contiene una serie de relatos que muchos críticos han emparentado con LAS MIL Y UNA NOCHES. Parecería como si una nueva Sherezade estuviera entreteniendo a un califa moderno. Por su maestría para el dialogo, Truman Capote definio a Isak Dinesen como 'una auténtica seductora, una seductora por conversación'. ... Read more

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If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenya and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they derive their themes and locales from Isak Dinesen's childhood in Denmark. Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931. ... Read more

Product Description
Lucan has been orphaned, Zosine has been deserted, and London in the 1840s is a hostile place for two young girls without a home. Bound together by poverty, isolation and a shared childhood, they set out to make a future for themselves in new surroundings. ... Read more