Book Description

The candid, poignant, unforgettable writing of the young girl whose own life story has become an everlasting source of courage and inspiration.

Hiding from the Nazis in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, a thirteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank became a writer. The now famous diary of her private life and thoughts reveals only part of Anne’s story, however. This book rounds out the portrait of this remarkable and talented young author.

Newly translated, complete, and restored to the original order in which Anne herself wrote them in her notebook, Tales from the Secret Annex is a collection of Anne Frank’s lesser-known writings: short stories, fables, personal reminiscences, and an unfinished novel, Cady’s Life. ... Read more

Reviews (22)

Good companion book for the famous diary
Had this been a collection of stories and essays by anybody else, I would have thought it was nothing special. But having read the Diary of Anne Frank first, the stories and essays make so much more sense. You can just see her whiling away the dull moments of the life in the secret annex, honing her writing skills. It is easy to see her skills as a writer increase from story to story. But even more interesting is to read the messages contained within her works. The writing skills she displays are obviously that of a teenager, although much better than most people her age. But the real value of these pieces are the insights which she brings to them; her life experiences and her approach to life's big questions. The last essay in the collection is entitled, "Why" and seems to sum up her short life. Read this book, but only after you read the Diary so the essays will be meaningful.

Unforgettable stories for young and old alike.
In her now famous Diary, Anne Frank said "I want to go on living even after my death". As of 1998, The Diary of Anne Frank had reached sales of 25 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. (source: TIME, October 5, 1998). It has been required classroom reading for half a century now! In a way, her wish has come to pass.
This subsequent publication "Tales From The Secret Annex" combines short stories, reminiscences/vignettes, and even an unfinished novel to show us yet another dimension to this remarkable person. Reading these stories and little essays confirmed my personal opinion that Anne Frank was a childhood genius with unlimited potential to achieve anything she would have set her mind to. It's hard to imagine this thirteen year old girl writing with such depth and perception, while living in seclusion, terror and fear for her life. She was writing from her heart, not with an expectation of being published. And yet these stories shine with a polished brilliance, and a certain unforgettable quality. I read this book for the first time 8 years ago, and have returned to it now, remembering the stories as though I had read them just last week. My favorite is entitled "Kathy". In three short pages, Anne captures every emotion experienced by a kid who is misunderstood by her mother, assaulted by schoolyard bullies who mock and rob her and cause her to lose the gift she was bringing home to her mother.

Here is how she ends her essay entitled "Give":
"If only our country and then Europe and finally the whole world would realize that people were really kindly disposed toward one another, that they are all equal and everything else is transitory!
Open your eyes... give of yourself, give as much as you can! And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness! No one has ever become poor from giving! If you do this, then in a few generations no one will need to pity the beggar children anymore, because they will not exist!
There is plenty of room for everyone in the world, enough money, riches, and beauty for all to share! God has made enough for everyone. Let us all begin by sharing it fairly." (written March 26, 1944).

Anne was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where some time during March 1945, she, her sister Margot and hundreds of other prisoners were stricken with typhus. Their captors, preoccupied with the advancing Allies, left them to die.
World... read her book!

Great stories and reminicenses from a talented young girl.
I truly enjoyed Anne Frank's Diary, now I have had the privilege to read her tales. A talent in it's purest form. I believe it was Anne Frank who said she wanted to be famous and/or to live on after her death, and of course she has in so many ways. Her diary has sold millions upon millions of copies around the world, her story told in a broadway play, countless films and documentary's.To me it looks like Anne has gotten her wish, she has lived on, more than she'll ever know. I like so many other's have wondered what kind of person Anne Frank would have been if she had survived, of course we will never know, but her diary and her story's were left behind to be discovered and to be told to everyone around the world, what a good person we could have a had on this planet, a great and talented young girl who was taken away but not forgotten.

Something other then the diary
Ok, so Anne's diary will almost always out shadow other stories shes written, and with good reason, but the stories here are rather well written. The 1st half of the book contains actuall stories she was writting, some short, some long, and part of an unfinished novel. The 2nd half of the story is memories of events that happend to her in her life that she wrote down.
Anyone who likes her diary should really give her stories a read.

Very Challenging and Fun!
This book was great. So are the rest of the books in the series. They are challenging and require scrutinization of both the exhibits and the court case. Unlike many othe 'Choose your own adventure' books this one is actually a challenge. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Very well written and understandable
This book really helps the reader to understand who Henry Ford was and how is life took place. Very nice illustrations to help intepret the book even easier

very insightful
I thought the book was very well written and a favorable portrait of the Ford Family

clear, interesting biography of Henry Ford
This book is very well written and would be of interest to kids from 4 to 14! I love the design - large photographs, and the little interesting details of Henry's life. For any child who prefers machines to marbles... ... Read more

Book Description

Tells the incredible story of this courageous young writer.

In this groundbreaking new series, DK brings together fresh voices and DK design values to give readers the most information-packed, visually exciting biographies on the market today. Full-color photographs of people, places, and artifacts, definitions of key words, and sidebars on related subjects add dimension and relevance to stories of famous lives that students will love to read. ... Read more

Book Description

In this engaging study of the much-loved statesman andpolymath,Robert Middlekauff uncovers a little-known aspect of Benjamin Franklin'spersonalityhis passionate anger. He reveals a fully human Franklin wholed aremarkable life but nonetheless had his share of hostile relationships politicaladversaries like the Penns, John Adams, and Arthur Leeand greatdisappointmentsthe most significant being his son, William, who sidedwith theBritish. Utilizing an abundance of archival sources, Middlekauff weavesepisodesin Franklin's emotional life into key moments in colonial andRevolutionaryhistory. The result is a highly readable narrative that illuminates howhistorical passions can torment even the most rational and benevolent ofmen. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Extraordinary!
This is an extraordinary literary work of history and biography. Middlekauff stikes the right balance here between erudition and urbanity. Seeing Benjamin Franklin through the eyes of his enemies reveals not just the complicated character of the man but also the complicated moment in history that he occupied. I highly recommend this book! ... Read more

Book Description

The vivid memoirs of Viennese psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Fritz Wittels, published here for the first time, recall his early life and career as friend and rival of Freud and of the great critic of psychoanalysis, satirist Karl Kraus. Wittel`s account of the erotic triangle in which he, Kraus, and the "child woman" became involved, and Freud`s crucial role in the controversy, reveals much about the early years of psychoanalysis and about fin de sicle Vienna. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (2)

Why did Freud abandon his famous seduction theory?
Does anyone other then Sigmund Freud know why he abandoned his seduction theory so quickly, one that he thought would bring him fame and fortune as a revolutionary healer? I would have to say no. Masson and Newton both give compelling arguments to what they both believe to be the truth of why Freud did what he did; Masson claiming Freud abandoned his seduction theory because of political and social preasure, Newton claiming Freud did so because he was fighting a mid life crisis. It is impossible to form an opinion without reading them both carefully, so I think this book, along with Masson's, is worth the read. My synopsis is that Freud never really gave up on the seduction theory at all, but simply realized that he would get much farther going a different route, then bringing Victoria Austria to it's knees by claiming it was laden with child molesters.

Groundbreaking study on Freud
With so many biographies and books on Freud, the question is why read another? Newton's biographical study of Freud is unique in examining the great psychologist's life from an adult developmental viewpoint. The key achievement of this book is a finely detailed study of how Freud's adult development -- his dreams of accomplishment, his relationships, and career decisions -- interlock with Freud's creative achievement in creating the foundations of psychoanalysis in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Newton argues that the tasks of the mid-life crisis were peculiarly interrelated with Freud's creative achievement. Incidentally, this finely researched and written book demolishes Jeffrey Masson's notorious thesis that Freud abandoned his theory of infantile seduction due to cowardice, with Newton relying heavily upon Freud's written correspondence with his friend, Fliess. An exciting book that reads at times like a novel. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

read the fine print....
This "Diary" is actually a collection of scribblings found on Freud's desk after he died. The Diary itself sticks to the last ten years of Freud's life and consists of single phrases: "Doctor's Appointment"; "Editorial Committee Meeting," etc. which are then explained at length.

Given that, this is an interesting compilation sprinkled with intriguing images and photographs. I'd rate it a 5 if it weren't for the poor advertising.

The life of Freud written by his own hands
The diary of Sigmund Freud is a great opportunity to learn more about the everyday life of the father of psychoanalysis written by his own hands. You get to know the man behind the genius. In fact, day after day Freud described his activities, big and little challenges and above all his terrible disease that affected him during his last years. It is a book packed with historical pictures that you are not likely to find anywhere else. I think people who like biographies can really appreciate this work as Freud took notes of what seemed important and very shortly described the events. Thanks to the Freud Museums curators each little note is well explained to give readers the opportunity to build up Freud's everyday life during his last ten year of his life. The book is also a rich source of historical information. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Decent philosophy but nothing of a writer...
Cavell's book, while successful in formulating a few entriguing philosophical points, fails at the most basic level of writing with clarity. Her style is, indeed, anything but clear. While style is certainly not the most important aspect of philosophical work, it is crucial for the effective communication of ideas (a notion that Cavell herself expresses rather obtusely at times in the first few chapters). It seemed to me that the convoluted structure of sentences and overcomplicated lines of argument were intended merely to provide unnecessary flesh to some fairly simple assertions. Look to the first and last few paragraphs of each chapter for the point. Any time that the author directly states a conclusion it leaves me wondering at the purpose of all the other talk. Cavell's book is by no means a complete loss. However, someone looking to this book for an informative philosophical analysis of Freud would benefit far more from Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. It is better writing, and better philosophy.

What are values? What is love?
this book is a fascinating journey into the core of psychoanalysis and philosophy.Beyond that,it brings the reader into a real insight into the questions :What are values ? and even:What is love? For the skeptic,staying with the 234 pages of easy reading are worth your while ... Read more

Book Description

Henry Ford, the inventor of the Ford automobile's and one of the biggest car manufactures in history. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Fascinating revelation on how medicine is developed.
(if this is the book by Robert Steele)This book was most enlightening. I am not a student of medicine or psychology but I have to say that I found this book most enlightening. I had no idea how psychology was founded as ascience(I'm sorry I really think it is a pseudoscience) and I did not know that it was based mostly on lies perpetrated toaggrandize a career or ego. Shame, shame. No wonder the Doctors who hold so tightly to their much paid for licenses and degrees getupset to discuss in detail their knowlegdge. The common layman knows better. That's what they are afraid of. Does anybody out there actually practice according to the Hippocratic oath.Steele does a great job presenting it the way it was. Ifyou like to know the absolute unbiased truth about academia and its supposed great minds - read this book. It will give you great insight. My bet, Ayn Rand had this book in mind when writing portions of Atlas Shrugged. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Combatting the Seven Deadly Sins
On a personal level, most men are concerned with how they shall seem to society and judge that, if they seem well, they are well. Franklin's chief private preoccupation, as revealed by his letters, was to be well himself first. To that end as a young man he devised a chart on which he could record how often he committed each sin each day. Much to his surprise, he found that he was a sinner. In devising methods to overcome what he considered to be his worst faults, he became inspired with the judgement and skills that led him to know almost intinctively what the future nation would need and to follow through on it. We read of him founding the first libraries, the first fire companies, and the first American Philosophical Society, which originally was a discussion group to which members, who were the public at large, were invited to make presentations on some project. To see the slow and often painful growth of a population of small towns and villages into what would become a mighty nation, through Franklin's eyes, is to understand much better the formation of an American identity, the core of which is with us today. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Fascinating case for the prosecution, but how much is Freud?
This book reads not so much like a psychoanalysis as like a settling of scores. Freud, as an Austrian, felt betrayed by Wilson's retreat from his Fourteen Points at Versailles; Bullitt, later Ambassador to Russia and instrumental in rescuing Freud from Vienna at the start of Nazi rule there, was a minor member of the American delegation to Versailles and resigned scandalously from it when Wilson ignored diplomatic overtures from Lenin. Their disappointment in Wilson spills over into unforgiving near-hatred, yet the book is well-argued and clearly-written enough to be well worth reading.

The book opens with a profile of Wilson's childhood, his hero-worshipping relationship with his father, and his much more uncertain relationship with the younger brother who was born when Wilson was 10. The authors repeatedly state that Wilson was "ugly": well, ugly is as ugly does, and it's not clear that this was a major issue for Wilson himself, although he was somewhat sensitive about his appearance. This is followed by a somewhat eccentric explanation of basic Freudian tenets. I'm not very familiar with Freudianism, but the strangely hydraulic talk about five outlets for the libido sounded very odd. However, it can be accepted as explaining the governing terms of the analysis to follow, rather than necessarily as a scientific description.

Wilson had a habit of making extremely close friends -- Hibben at Princeton, House and (to a lesser extent) Tumulty in politics -- and then irrevocably breaking with them following differences in policy. (Cary Grayson, Wilson's doctor for the last twelve years of his life, tells a heartbreaking story of a misunderstanding when Wilson returned to Princeton on a visit, that led to Hibben, face glowing, standing in front of Wilson saying "I believe you sent for me?", only to have Wilson, expressionless, say, "No, no, you are mistaken" and turn away). Freud and Bullitt expend a lot of words studying how these close friendships turned to complete breaks. They explain it as Wilson recreating with these younger men his own relationship with his father, the friends playing the role of the young Wilson, and then breaking because Wilson interpreted political disagreements as rejection of his fatherly wisdom. This is a coherent and useful analysis, though not necessarily the whole story. An interesting note is that Freud and Bullitt, in turning against Wilson whom Bullitt at least had formerly admired, are repeating the pattern they find so striking in Wilson.

The description of Wilson's gradual collapse at Versailles and his failure to ensure fair treatment for the defeated central powers is well told. It seems that recent research on the effect of Wilson's health on these negotiations could have deepened the analysis here if it had been available to the authors.

In the description of Wilson's doomed tour of the West in September 1919, trying to sell the Treaty to the public, some compassion finally breaks through. The authors point out just how little the Treaty Wilson described in his speeches had to do with the Treaty that was signed in Versailles; they regard this not as lying but as a psychosis brought on by the unbearable position he was in.

(...)Although unsympathetic overall, this retelling of the story is a useful part of the ongoing discussion about the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. It should definitely be read by serious Wilson scholars.

I should read this book more often
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt produced a psychological study called THOMAS WOODROW WILSON, but they couldn't call it a psychoanalytical examination because they could not get Wilson, who died in 1924, to submit to the kind of personal investigation that would confirm the factors of his inner life. We all have good reason to fear (it was almost four years ago when I signed a release to allow the Secret Seervice to have a copy of my psychiatric file to see how dangerous I was) what judgments psychiatrists could use to render our souls, and the history of psychiatry shows that politicians are not the first to have reason to complain. THE FREUD/JUNG LETTERS, Edited by William McGuire, allows us to go way back to 18 December 1912, when Jung wrote to Freud, "I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies" (Freud/Jung, p. 534). Freud was quite capable, however, of treating the whole world like patients, and with the assistance of William C. Bullitt, who had known Wilson and wanted to write about him, had produced a final draft of this book in 1932.

Those were raw times, and the final text was not settled until Freud and Bullitt met in London in 1939. Religion was a major factor in Wilson's early life, and its benefits are considered "well suited to women and to men whose femininity exceeded their masculinity. . . . A more masculine boy than Tommy Wilson would have felt hostility to the `mores' of the family and community in which the Minister's son was reared; but he felt no impulse to revolt. His masculinity was feeble. . . . He was fortunate to have been born in a nation which was protected from reality during the nineteenth century by inherited devotion to the ideals of Wyclif, Calvin and Wesley." (p. 71). Now the geopolitical superpower keeps acting like Americans have finally faced the conflicts of those who "had been brought up in the comparative freedom of European civilization." (p. 71).

After Wilson's father died, this book pictures Wilson as the personification of the modern American attitude: "he assumed his father's throne, became God in his unconscious and began to act with a sense of his own inevitable righteousness." (p. 78). Wilson's major confrontations followed the pattern of a "neurotic who has lodged a considerable portion of his libido in identification with Christ is apt, when faced by battle and harassed by fear, to take refuge in the comforting illusion that he too by submitting will achieve ultimate victory. He fears to fight. Therefore, through his identification with Christ he convinces himself that he does not need to fight, that by submitting he will achieve his aims. And, if he has not a firm grip on reality, he is apt to convince himself after he has submitted that he has in fact won a victory, although in reality he has suffered complete defeat." (p. 78). This seems weird, applied to Wilson, because America won World War I, just like America overthrew the government of Iraq in 2003, just before a different kind of hell was breaking loose.

"In Paris at the Peace Conference he feared the consequences of fighting. He submitted, then declared that he had won a victory and announced that the Treaty of Versailles was indeed the peace of `absolute justice' which he had set out to establish. His identification of himself with Christ was the mental mechanism which enabled him to reach that somewhat fantastic conclusion." (p. 79).

In my own lifetime, "Peace is at hand" in October 1972 was followed by an agreement in January 1973 which barely qualified as a ceasefire for troops who were Vietnamese, and for the U.S. Congress, which was asked to keep sending money to support an ongoing war. The North Vietnamese never did get money from the U.S. to rebuild for the incidental damage that might have been caused by American strikes from 1964 to 1973, and victory, as it was proclaimed for those in the United States, seemed to the peace crowd to be more like a nefarious (possibly still secret) plan to get the Vietnamese sides to keep fighting each other with a minimum amount of American assistance. Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford might not have the same ultimate motivation as Wilson, but we can expect that each faced "the conflict between his femininity and his exalted Super-Ego which demanded that he should be all masculinity. If we are asked why from time to time his symptoms increased to the point of `breakdown,' we can answer only by generalization that his symptoms increased in severity whenever the events of his life produced a sharpening of the fundamental conflict." (p. 81).

America needs the kind of president who can face such fundamental conflicts without such symptoms, but democracy ought to allow people who don't want America to out-German the Germans at their own personal, political, and geopolitical goals to have a say in how such conflicts could be avoided. Clearly, if we don't want to fight, we should stay out of endless wars. Even Wilson's troubles did not end "the day when he was received in Paris as the Saviour of Mankind" (p. 82). By September, 1919, he was making speeches in which he complained, "The formula of Pan-Germanism, you remember, was Bremen to Bagdad -- Bremen on the North Sea to Bagdad in Persia." (p. 286). Pages 288-289 show his praise of "the glory that is going to attach to the memories of that great American Army . . . will be this noble army of Americans who saved the world!" Now we are supporting an American army in Baghdad that is beginning to realize that Persia is Iran, the country next door, which Americans have been kicked out of before. ... Read more