Brian Moynahan

In 'Leningrad, seige and symphony', Brian Moynahan sets the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it.

Siege and Symphony

Leningrad

Forgotten Soldiers tells the stories of 15 unsung military heroes, none of a rank higher than major, whose deeds changed the course of important battles and, arguably, the course of history. Its timeframe extends from antiquity to the late 20th century, its geographical parameters from Stalingrad to the depths of the North Atlantic and its dramatis personae from a medieval squire to an Israeli reservist.

Ordinary Men Whose Extraordinary Deeds Changed History

Forgotten Soldiers

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin—drinker, thief, womanizer—arrived in St. Petersburg in 1903 as if from the medieval past . . . tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time of his sensational murder thirteen years later, the peasant was the ”beloved Friend” of Czar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, with a seemingly supernatural power to stop the bleeding attacks of their hemophiliac son, Alexis. How could it have happened? As on society lady of the time asked, “How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow?”Drawing on confidential police reports, cabinet meeting memos, and many documents only now available, Moynahan sheds new light on Rasputin's life and disputes some of the widely held details of his death. The Washington Post Book World called the book “balanced and well-researched” hailed its “shrewd analysis of the ways in which Rasputin's manipulative abilities meshed with the emotional needs of isolated, superstitious members of czarist aristocracy. It is an unforgettable portrait of an age as well as of a man.

The Saint Who Sinned

Rasputin

"Moynahan traces the extraordinary journey that Christianity has made from its start as a small and vulnerable sect - "They were crucified or set on fire," Tacitus wrote of Christians, in Nero's Rome, "so that when darkness came they burned like torches in the night" - to the world's greatest congregation of almost two billion baptized souls. The Faith opens with the story of Jesus himself, the Resurrection, and the spreading of the Gospels. It shows how the young religion's growing power in the East, the cradle of its early monks and philosophers, was broken by the Islamic conquests, and how its energies were redirected westward into barbarian Europe. Moynahan covers in lucid detail the intensity of the medieval faith, with its titanic cathedrals, its clashes between Islam and Christendom, and its fracture into Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the religious dissent that drove settlers to seek religious freedom in the Americas." "Based on little-known primary sources (including early Arabic writings), and featuring more than one hundred photographs and illustrations, this extraordinary history will be of interest to Christians of all denominations, to historians, and to every reader who seeks a fuller understanding of a force that has shaped the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A History of Christianity

The Faith

La symphonie du siège La première de la Septième Symphonie de Chostakovitch eut lieu à Leningrad le 9 août 1942, au 335e jour d’un siège qui tua plus de 1 800 000 personnes. Aucun concert n’a jamais égalé celui-ci. Les Allemands avaient commencé le blocus de la ville près d’un an auparavant. Les combats, le froid et surtout la faim avaient déjà fait plusieurs centaines de milliers de victimes. Les musiciens – recrutés jusque dans les bataillons et les fanfares militaires, car seuls vingt des cent membres initiaux de l’orchestre avaient survécu – étaient si affamés qu’on craignait qu’ils ne puissent jouer l’œuvre jusqu’au bout. En ces jours les plus sombres de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, cette musique et l’attitude de défi qu’elle inspirait furent pour le monde entier un rayon de lumière. Entretissant l’histoire de Chostakovitch et de bien d’autres dans le contexte du maelström des purges staliniennes et de l’invasion de la Russie par les Nazis, Le Concert héroïque est le récit magistral et émouvant d’un des épisodes les plus tragiques et héroïques de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et sans doute le plus émouvant de l’histoire de la musique. Traduit de l’anglais par Thierry Piélat

Le concert héroïque

William Tyndale left England in 1524 to translate the word of God into English. This was heresy, punishable by death. Sir Thomas More, hailed as a saint and a man for all seasons, considered it his divine duty to pursue Tyndale. He did so with an obsessive ferocity that, in all probability, led to Tyndale's capture and death. The words that Tyndale wrote during his desperate exile--his New Testament, which he translated, edited, financed, printed, and smuggled into England in 1526--passed with few changes into subsequent versions of the Bible. Brian Moynahan's biography illuminates Tyndale's life, chronicling the birth pangs of the Reformation, the wrath of Henry VIII, the sympathy of Anne Boleyn, and the consuming malice of Thomas More. Above all, it reveals the English Bible as a labor of love, for which a man in an age more spiritual than our own willingly gave his life.--From U.S. publisher's description.

If God Spare My Life : a Story of Martyrdom, Betrayal and the English Bible

William Tyndale

The English Bible--the most familiar book in our language--is the product of a man who was exiled, vilified, betrayed, then strangled, then burnt. William Tyndale left England in 1524 to translate the word of God into English. This was heresy, punishable by death. Sir Thomas More, hailed as a saint and a man for all seasons, considered it his divine duty to pursue Tyndale. He did so with an obsessive ferocity that, in all probability, led to Tyndale's capture and death. The words that Tyndale wrote during his desperate exile have a beauty and familiarity that still resonate across the English-speaking world: "Death, where is thy sting?...eat, drink, and be merry...our Father which art in heaven." His New Testament, which he translated, edited, financed, printed, and smuggled into England in 1526, passed with few changes into subsequent versions of the Bible. So did those books of the Old Testament that he lived to finish. Brian Moynahan's lucid and meticulously researched biography illuminates Tyndale's life, from his childhood in England, to his death outside Brussels. It chronicles the birth pangs of the Reformation, the wrath of Henry VIII, the sympathy of Anne Boleyn, and the consuming malice of Thomas More. Above all, it reveals the English Bible as a labor of love, for which a man in an age more spiritual than our own willingly gave his life.

William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible--A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal

God's Bestseller

The great echoing phrases of the King James Bible that have boomed through the English-speaking mind for 400 years - an eye for an eye . . . eat, drink and be merry . . . . death, where is thy sting? . . . man shall not live by bread alone - are largely the work of a man whose genius for words matches Shakespeare. But William Tyndale, the young Gloucestershire tutor who wrote them, paid for them with his life. He was persecuted, exiled and eventually burned at the stake. Book of Fire is the thrilling, moving story of the man who first translated the word of God into the English vernacular. Tyndale did so in defiance of church and state, hunted by the implacable enmity and the agents of the sainted Thomas More. He was finally betrayed, but by then his courage and poetic instinct had provided the backbone of the single most significant work in the English language. The Tudor heretic had changed the literary, religious and political landscape for ever.

William Tyndale, Thomas More and the Bloody Birth of the English Bible

Book Of Fire

Leningrad Siege and Symp

Leningrad Oblezenie i symfonia

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin came to St. Petersburg from his Siberian cabin in 1903 like a projectile from the medieval past, tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time he was murdered thirteen years later, the peasant was the "beloved" Friend of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra and the sponsor of the most powerful officials in Russia. He had become, a society lady wrote, "a dusk enveloping all our world, eclipsing the sun. How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow? It was inexplicable, maddening, almost incredible. " Rasputin's name has become synonymous with evil, but his legend has obscured the facts of his life. In this evocative biography, Brian Moynahan presents us with a flesh-and-blood Rasputin, more fascinating than the myth--a man in whom debauchery coexisted beside a real (if erratic) spiritual sense, a man whose coarseness hid a savvy awareness of human psychology. Drawing on confidential police reports, cabinet meeting memos, and other documents, some available only since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moynahan sheds new light on Rasputin's life and disputes some of the widely held details of his death. The young Rasputin was a drinker, thief, and womanizer. He claimed to have religious visions and became a wandering holy man, preaching that exposure to sin could drive out sin. He stormed the fashionable salons of St. Petersburg, and in 1905 he met Nicholas and Alexandra, who, increasingly despised by the sophisticated, found in Rasputin reassurance that the "real Russia, the simple and pious peasantry, loved them. Rasputin's mysterious ability to stop the bleeding attacks of their hemophiliac only son, Alexis, sealed the approval of the domineering Alexandra. With royal patronage, Rasputin became increasingly reckless, partying with prostitutes, peddling influence, plotting the disgrace of those who crossed him. Ever contradictory, he was also a devoted family man, a defender of the poor, and a figure of immense charisma. As Germany battered Russia during World War I, as Nicholas's ineptitude as a leader became ever more rampant and the masses went hungry, Rasputin seemed to monarchists to be the cause, and not just the symptom, of corrupt government. A group of conspirators gathered--among them a grand duke and a scion of the richest family in Russia--and one of the most famous murders in history was planned. Set against the vivid backdrop of prerevolutionary Russia, Rasputin is a portrait of an age as well as of a man. NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.

Traces the life of William Tyndale against the backdrop of England in the 1500s, describing the beliefs of the period's people--in particular Sir Thomas More--that led to his efforts to translate the Bible, his flight from England, and his eventual capture and death. 10,000 first printing.

William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible---A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal

An international publishing event: over 300 remarkable, never before published photographs of a Russia that until now has remained hidden from Western eyes.

A Photographic History of Russia's 100 Years

The Russian Century

William Tyndale (1494 - 1536) is one of the most famous of history's martyrs. Being out of sympathy with the contemporary English church and suspected of heresy, he left England in 1522 and matriculated at Wittenberg two years later. Here he got to know Luther. In 1525 he translated the New Testament and the Pentateuch by 1531. He had reached the book of Jonah when he was burned for heresy near Brussels. Brian Moynahan's brilliantly written account ties no less than Sir Thomas More, newly named patron saint of politicians, to the betrayal and burning of Tyndale. The extraordinary feud between the two men has never been shown in such detail before. The book also included vivid portraits of Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey. Burnings alive, early printing, book smuggling, and the linking of More, 'the man for all seasons' to the betrayal and execution of the most quoted writer in the language (84% of the King James New Testament is word-for-word Tyndale) - these are the backdrop to one of the most astonishing lives in British history.

William Tyndale, the English Bible and Sir Thomas More - a Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal

If God Spare My Life

The “gripping story” of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city’s morale (The New York Times Book Review). For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike. Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled “Leningrad” in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra’s hundred members had survived. With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony “brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment” (Booklist, starred review), in “a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan’s descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting.” —The Washington Post

Brian Moynahan

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