Edward O. Wilson

Nancy Pick

Mark Sloan

The combination of Ikebana and haiku is a more than successful one. The similarities between the arts go far beyond their Japanese origins. The seductive simplicity of haiku, its subtleties and sparse use of words, its silences and depth of meaning, its rhythms and seasons... these are only some of the characteristics that haiku shares with Ikebana.Both Ikebana and haiku have the power to move people. They evoke emotions using material that has carefully been trimmed of the superfluous. Their minimalism is convincing and reveals the essence. They manage to hold our gaze and temporarily slow down our daily rhythm. Both Ikebana and haiku invite us to see more than what the visible world has to offer. Members of the centre for poetry in Ghent, led by Hedwig Aerts, made a selection of their favourite traditional haiku by master poets such as Basho, Issa and Shiki. On the occasion of this book, they also created some new personal haiku. Poetical Ikebana is the floral translation of these haiku, a collection of evocative floral design that stirs the senses and touches the heart."

The Stories Behind the Harvard Museum of Natural History

Rarest of the Rare

Richard Branson

Desmond Tutu

Jeppe Wikstrom

A Day in The World

Frank Ward

Professor Hitchcock's Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College

Curious Footprints

Lo Dagerman

"A wonderful blend of literary and personal history. -- author Johannes Lichtman Sometimes life presents a mystery. An innocuous email from a stranger sets off a passionate journey of discovery. Why did Stig Dagerman, Swedish literary wunderkind (and Lo's father) write a shockingly cruel play based on Nancy Pick's relative, Etta Federn, the once eminent Austro-Jewish refugee he encountered in postwar Paris? What happened when Stig and Etta met? Nancy is determined to reclaim Etta [feminist, writer, single mother, radical - the relative nobody ever spoke about] from the shadows. Lo is searching for the father she never knew. Each simply has to know. Stockholm 1947. Stig Dagerman was the new-generation writer on everybody's lips. Over the previous two years, at breakneck speed, he had written two novels and a much-praised short-story collection; made a spectacular debut as a playwright; and reported from the ruins of postwar Germany in a book titled German Autumn, destined to become a classic. Now, he was being sent to France to pen a sequel. He will indeed write about postwar France, but in an entirely unexpected way. Instead of a journalistic account, he feverishly writes a new play, Marty's Shadow . The play was modeled on people he'd met in a dank refugee hotel in Paris: The Austro-Jewish writer Etta Federn and Michel, her younger son. When Stig meets Etta she is old and ailing. Her elder son, Jean, had died a hero in the French Resistance. She had been on the run from Nazis and fascists since 1932, when as a fifty-year old single mother, a Jew and a radical, she had fled Berlin for Barcelona, taking her two young sons with her. In Berlin, she had been widely recognized as a writer (most notable are her biographies of Walther Rathenau and Christiane von Goethe, the wife of Goethe); as an accomplished translator working in sixteen languages; and as a radical feminist and anarcho-syndicalist in the vein of Emma Goldman. In her new life in Barcelona she builds a reputation as someone with the power to interpret character by looking into your hands. (Paul Federn, her brother, was a well-known psychoanalyst who had worked with Freud.) In 2011, I am astounded to receive an email from Nancy Pick, an American relative of Etta's. Nancy has heard of Stig's play about Etta and her sons, and wants to know more. Anxious, but also intrigued, I search for a way to break the bad news to her: Stig's play is brutal, a punch to the solar plexus: a monstrous mother murdered by a son. Marty's Shadow brings Nancy and me together. It confronts us with a shared question - but one which we initially want to answer in different ways: What could have driven my father, the young writer Stig Dagerman, to paint such a cruel portrait of the brilliant, heroic refugee, Etta Federn? This book lays out our search for answers. Lo Dagerman

The Writer and the Refugee: Paris 1947. Stig Dagerman and Etta Federn. Their Encounter Sparks a Brilliant Play - But Why Is It So Cruel?

Shares the discovery stories of some of Harvard University's rarest natural history specimens, recounting the origins of such items as Nabokov's butterflies, George Washington's pheasants, a sand dollar collected by Darwin during his Beagle voyage, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition. 25,000 first printing.

Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History

The Rarest of the Rare

1947. Stig Dagerman, den unge svenske författaren som är på allas läppar, arbetar frenetisk med en pjäs. Hans tredje. Han kommer att kalla den för Skuggan av Mart. Det blir hans mest kända pjäs, som fortfarande spelas nästan frekvent i Sverige och utomlands. Den handlar om en mamma och hennes två söner och är inspirerad av verkliga människor den Wien-judiska författaren Etta Federn, Jean, hennes äldsta son som är en död krigshjälte, och Michel, hennes yngste son. Stig Dagerman besökte Etta i Paris några veckor innan han börjar skriva på sin pjäs. Ungefär sextio år senare håller jag och Nancy Pick oberoende och ovetandes om varandra på och forskar om våra släktingar. Vi är båda två mycket angelägna att försöka första människor som inte har varit delaktiga i våra liv. Människor, som vi tror, har nycklar till förståelsen av oss själva. Skuggan av Mart kommer att föra samman Nancy och mig. Men pjäsen är så brutal att den nästan får oss att bryta. Varför skrev Stig ett så brutalt porträtt av Etta? Varför ville ha en monstermamma i sin pjäs? Och vilka var de? Stig och Etta. Egentligen. Lo Dagerman

Stig Dagerman möter Etta Federn i Paris 1947

Skuggorna vi bär

It's 1947. Stig Dagerman, the young Swedish author on everybody's lips, is feverishly working on a play, his third. Skuggan av Mart/Marty's Shadow, as Stig will call it, will be his best-known play, and the most frequently staged both in Sweden and abroad. The play is inspired by real people: the Viennese-Jewish writer Etta Federn and her sons Jean and Michel. Stig Dagerman and his wife have visited Etta in Paris just weeks before he sits down to write the play. Some sixty years later, unknowingly and independently of each other, Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick are pursuing research. Lo is in search of her father, the star writer who committed suicide when she was only three; Nancy is in search of her distant cousin Etta, the anarchist, feminist, journalist, force of nature, and role model; both are driven by a need to understand the persons whose absences from their lives bear such significance for their identities today. The play, Skuggan av Mart, brings Lo and Nancy together on their quests. And the brutality of it almost tears them apart. Why did Stig paint such a cruel and garbled portrait of Etta and her family? Lo and Nancy's pursuit of who Stig and Etta really were imbues the book, and pieces of the puzzle are fitted together along the way.

Nancy Pick

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