New Releases by David Roberts

The bestselling author of The Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top chronicles his three attempts to climb the world’s tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made—or attempted—the ascent. “Viesturs and Roberts have written an exhaustively researched and wonderfully compelling history of the most fascinating and dangerous of the Himalayan giants.”—David Breashers, veteran mountaineer and documentary filmmaker, director of IMAX film Everest As a high school student, Ed Viesturs read and was captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog’s famous and grisly account of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When he began his own campaign to climb the world’s fourteen highest peaks in the late 1980s, Viesturs looked forward with trepidation to undertaking Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit in 2000 and 2002 made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 ascent was the triumphant capstone of his climbing quest. In The Will to Climb Viesturs and co-author David Roberts bring the extraordinary challenges of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in the mountain’s history, and of his own failed attempts and eventual success. In the process Viesturs ponders what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions—questions, he believes, that we need to answer to lead our lives well.

The definitive biography of Everett Ruess, the artist, writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age twenty have earned him a large and devoted cult following. “Easily one of [Roberts’s] best . . . thoughtful and passionate . . . a compelling portrait of the Ruess myth.”—Outside Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness. When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess’s closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess’s writings and artwork. More than seventy-five years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. With Winston Churchill receiving unauthorised information on Britain''s rearmament program, the Foreign Office brings in Lord Edward Corinth to investigate the leaks. However, Edward rapidly abandons the investigation to concentrate on the murder of a Foreign Office official, who might have been one of Churchill''s sources. All too soon, he finds himself entangled in a web of deception threatening the very security of the United Kingdom. All too soon there is a second murder. Setting out for Spain to find the victim''s son, Edward joins his friend Verity Browne, whom he fears is in extreme peril. Verity is reporting on the Civil War and is headed for Guernica, where a source has informed her that an attack will take place. But Edward and Verity arrive in the small town just in time to witness a merciless aerial bombardment on the civilian population. And the danger isn''t over yet, as near-certain death awaits Edward in London, where nothing - not even the woman he loves - is what is seems. Praise for David Roberts: ''Roberts just keeps getting better with each book ... highly recommended for fans of Love in a Cold Climate and Gosford Park'' Publishers Weekly ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

Arranged alphabetically by band name for ease of reference, Rock Chronicles offers a fascinating, encyclopedic study of the ever-shifting line-ups, appearances, labels, and sounds of 250 of the best-known and most important rock acts of the past fifty years. Esteemed music author David Roberts offers an insightful review of every group, giving the lowdown on every member - whatever their role in the band, however short-lived their time with them, and however well-known. A photograph of every band member from every line-up supplements the engaging text, and founder and current members are picked out visually for immediate recognition. Innovative, color-coded infographics provide an overview of every aspect of each band''s story, so that readers can see at a glance which musicians featured in each formation, which instruments they played, which label the act was with when, the dates their albums were released, and who played on them. For the ten most commercially successful albums total sales figures are given. And for the 50 biggest acts, a stunning display of iconic photographs charts the artists'' dramatic changes of appearance, relating each iconic ''look'' to the album of the same period. Interspersed throughout the book are six graphic decade features. Each one presents a detailed family tree for that era''s greatest acts, revealing which year every band formed, and to which other bands they are related through line-up changes. Plus, at the end of the book, there''s a fact-filled, cross-referenced performer directory, listing all the bands each performer played in and when. Comprehensive, information-packed, and compelling to read, Rock Chronicles is the essential reference for everyone who loves rock.

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne August 1939, the last hot days of a perfect English summer as the certainty of war descends. Newlyweds Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne are determined to spend these last days of peace quietly in their new house in a sleepy Sussex village - a honeymoon of sorts. But fight against it as he might, for Edward it turns out to be a busman''s holiday. When poet Byron Gates is bizarrely murdered after the village fete - executed, in fact, his head chopped off on a wooden block - Edward is asked to investigate. Alas, murder is not yet done with Verity and Edward, for even in the hallowed studios of Broadcasting House, murder dares to rear its ugly head. Before Verity can take up her new foreign posting, there are more deaths and the intrepid couple embark on one of their most dangerous investigations to date. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938, Verity Browne is one of the first to be deported from Vienna as a well-known anti-Fascist. Before she leaves, she is able to arrange for a young Jew, George Dreiser, to escape to England. But where he expects to find safety, he finds danger and sudden death instead. Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where he least expects it: in the grounds of Lord Mountbatten''s country house. There his nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse. Although the police are satisfied that the man died of natural causes, Edward''s niece persuades Edward that all is not as it seems... In this classic investigation, Verity and Edward find that death comes more often than not to the innocent, and that many lives are left to the mercy of strangers. Praise for David Roberts: ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne Returning from Prague with suspected tuberculosis, Verity Browne checks into a private clinic on Henley-on-Thames - the perfect place for her new fiancé, Lord Edward Corinth, to keep an eye on her. While Verity recuperates at the clinic, Edward is called to investigate a series of murders. Edward''s dentist, Dr Eric Silver has been found murdered, shortly after sharing with Edward his suspicions about the deaths of three of his elderly patients. Dr Silver thinks the three deaths have an entomological connection: General Lowther had had a heart attack drinking a wine called Clos des Mouches; Hermione Totteridge, a well-known gardener, had been poisoned by the new insecticide with which she had been experimenting; and James Herold had been stung to death by his bees. Edward''s investigation comes to a thrilling climax during what many believe will be the last Henley Royal Regatta before a new European war, and both Edward and Verity are threatened by someone, or something, wicked. Praise for David Roberts: ''A classic murder mystery [...] and a most engaging pair of amateur sleuths'' Charles Osborne, author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. August 1935. The Duke of Mersham''s exclusive party ends in tragedy as General Sir Alistair Craig VC collapses, victim of a poisoned glass of port, just as Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne join the soirée. The unlikely pair - the younger son of a duke and a journalist committed to the Communist Party - find common ground as they seek the truth and discover that everyone present that evening, including the Duke of Mersham himself, had motive for wanting Sir Alistair out of the picture. But more deaths will follow before Lord Edward and Verity can get to the bottom of this intriguing mystery... Praise for David Roberts: ''A classic murder mystery [...] and a most engaging pair of amateur sleuths'' Charles Osborne, author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie ''A gripping, richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters, sparkling with insouciance and stinging menace'' Peter James ''A really well-crafted and charming mystery story'' Daily Mail ''A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away'' Guardian

This book examines the limits to cosmopolitan liberal peacebuilding caused by its preoccupation with the values and assumptions of neoliberal global governance. The peace people experience is determined by the processes privileged in peacebuilding. This book is about four things that shape the processes involved. First, it is a critique of orthodox postconflict peacebuilding. It takes the position that the present approach, although seemingly hegemonic, is routinely ignored or manipulated by elites and society and converted into a miasma that to some degree wastes the energies and opportunities involved. Second, it is about alternatives which invoke the kind of peace people might seek in postconflict places if they had more control over the process of peacebuilding, a notion referred to here as ‘popular peace’. It is thus not the kind of critical work that some describe as ‘reflexive anti-liberalism’. Rather, it seeks alternatives that are grounded in the lives of people in postconflict spaces and which also reflect some of the essential values of Liberalism. Third, it is about the role of both informal and formal actors, institutions and practices in the creation of such a peace. For instance, it is concerned with the legitimacy of informal practices that lie beyond Liberal tolerance and which are vital in the pursuit of everyday peace. Fourth, it is about a ‘transversal’ (rather than vertical or hierarchical) relationship of global and local governance in securing a peace that reflects the needs and values of both. In short, this work is a response to the substantial inconsistencies that appear between peacebuilding rhetoric and everyday outcomes in postconflict places. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, post-conflict statebuilding, conflict studies, global governance and International Relations in general.

During the westward settlement, for more than twenty years Apache tribes eluded both US and Mexican armies, and by 1886 an estimated 9,000 armed men were in pursuit. Roberts (Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative) presents a moving account of the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. He portrays the great Apache leaders—Cochise, Nana, Juh, Geronimo, the woman warrior Lozen—and U.S. generals George Crock and Nelson Miles. Drawing on contemporary American and Mexican sources, he weaves a somber story of treachery and misunderstanding. After Geronimo''s surrender in 1886, the Apaches were sent to Florida, then to Alabama where many succumbed to malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition and finally in 1894 to Oklahoma, remaining prisoners of war until 1913. The book is history at its most engrossing. —Publishers Weekly

A thrilling chronicle of the tragedy-ridden history of climbing the world''s most difficult and unpredictable mountain, by the bestselling authors of The Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top “Gripping . . . reveals a good deal about the rarefied noble-gonzo world of high-altitude mountaineering.”—The New York Times Ed Viesturs, one of the world''s premier high-altitude mountaineers, explores the remarkable history of K2 and of those who have attempted to conquer it. At the same time, he probes the mountain''s most memorable sagas in order to illustrate lessons about the fundamental questions mountaineering raises—questions of risk, ambition, loyalty to one''s teammates, self-sacrifice, and the price of glory. Viesturs knows the mountain firsthand. He and renowned alpinist Scott Fischer climbed it in 1992 and got caught in an avalanche that sent them sliding to almost certain death before Ed managed to get into a self-arrest position with his ice ax and stop both his fall and Scott''s. Focusing on seven of the mountain''s most dramatic campaigns, from his own troubled ascent to the 2008 tragedy, Viesturs crafts an edge-of-your-seat narrative that climbers and armchair travelers alike will find unforgettably compelling. With photographs from Viesturs''s personal collection and from historical sources, this is the definitive account of the world''s ultimate mountain, and of the lessons that can be gleaned from struggling toward its elusive summit.

Restoration London''s leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre''s responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. David Roberts''s entertaining study unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadowy figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton''s relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, Thomas Betterton gives one of England''s greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his death.

Originally published in 1915. This volume from the Cornell University Library''s print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

The eighth murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne.

The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. In total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory. Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease? David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.

Traces the tragedy-marked 1856 journey of three thousand Mormons from Iowa to Utah, explaining how leader Brigham Young disregarded warnings and then convinced his followers that hardships and deaths were part of a higher plan.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This gripping and triumphant memoir from the author of The Mountain follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. “From the drama of the peaks, to the struggle of making a living as a professional climber, to the basic how-tos of life at 26,000 feet, No Shortcuts to the Top is fascinating reading.”—Aron Ralston, author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place and subject of the film 127 Hours For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts to the Top is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It is more than the first full account of one of the staggering accomplishments of our time; it is a portrait of a brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.

One of the world''s best-known writers on mountaineering recalls his climbing career and reconsiders the cost of this most perilous sport.

By developing a long-term supranational perspective, this ambitious, multi-faceted work provides a new understanding of ‘totalitarianism’, the troubling common element linking Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. The book’s original analysis of antecedent ideas on the subject sheds light on the common origins and practices of the regimes. Through this fresh appreciation of their initial frame of mind, Roberts demonstrates how the three political experiments yielded unprecedented collective mobilization but also a characteristic combination of radicalization, myth-making, and failure. Providing deep historical analysis, the book proves that ''totalitarianism'' best characterizes the common features in the originating aspirations, the mode of action and even the outcomes of Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. By enhancing our knowledge of what ‘totalitarianism’ was and where it came from, Roberts affords important lessons about the ongoing challenges, possibilities, and dangers of the modern political experiment.

The crisis of tradition early in the twentieth century?signaled by the collapse of perspective in painting and tonality in music and evident in the explosive ferment of the avant-garde movements?opened a new stage of modern art, which aesthetic theory is still struggling to comprehend. David Roberts situates the current aesthetic and cultural debates in a wider historical frame which extends from Hegel and the German Romantics to Luk¾cs and Adorno, Benjamin and Baudrillard. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno is the first detailed analysis in English of Theodor Adorno?s seminal Philosophy of Modern Music, which can be seen as a turning point between modern and postmodern art and theory. Adorno''s diagnosis of the crisis of modernist values points back to Hegel''s thesis of the end of art and also forward to the postmodernist debate. Thus the paradoxes of Adorno?s negative aesthetics return to haunt the current discussion by representatives of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Anglo-American Marxism, and French poststructuralism. Going beyond Adorno''s dialectic of musical enlighten-ment, Roberts proposes an alternative model of the enlightenment, of art applied to literature and exemplified in the outline of a theory of parody. In its critique of Adorno, Art and Enlightenment clears the way for a reconsideration of twentieth-century artistic theory and practice and also, in offering a model of postmodern art, seeks to disentangle critical issues in the discussion of the avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism.

Dialectic of Romanticism presents a radical new assessment of the aesthetic and philosophical history and future of modernity. An exploration of the internal critique of modernism treats romanticism (later historicism and post-modernism) as central to the development of European modernism alongside enlightenment, and, like the enlightenment, subject to its own dead-ends and fatalities. An external critique of modernism recovers concepts of civilization and civic aesthetics which are trans-historical -simultaneously modern and classically inspired - and provides a counter both to romantic historicism and enlightened models of progress. Finally, a retrospective critique of modernism analyses what happens to modernism''s romantic-archaic and technological-futurist visions when they are translated from Europe to America. Dialectic of Romanticism argues that out of the European dialectic of romanticism and enlightenment a new dialectic of modernity is emerging in the New World-one which points beyond modernism and postmodernism.

In 1743, four stranded Russian sailors survived the next six years in the Arctic with no provisions. Making a bow and arrows from driftwood--since there are no trees there--they survived on reindeer meat until another ship blown off course rescued them.

In analyses of Auto da Fe, Crowds and Power, and the aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti''s interrogation of human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics, theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of Canetti''s thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization."--BOOK JACKET.

Jean Stafford burst on the literary scene in 1944, when, at the age of twenty-nine, she published her bestselling novel, Boston Adventure. Three years later, Life magazine hailed her as the "most brilliant of the new fiction writers." Bafflingly, for the rest of her life, Stafford would struggle--and fail--to capitalize on that early promise. David Roberts'' compelling biography examines Stafford''s disastrous marriages, including her first marriage to the volatile poet Robert Lowell, which culminated for her in a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital. Beautiful and gifted, Stafford squandered her health as well as her talent, ending her life embittered and alone.

This is Roberts'' quest to reconstruct one of the most amazing and inspirational survival story in history: the tale of how four 18th- century sailors endured six years on a barren Arctic island.

In A Newer World, David Roberts serves as a guide through John C. Frémont''s and Kit Carson''s adventures through unknown American territory to achieve manifest destiny. Between 1842 and 1854 John C. Frémont, renowned as the nineteenth century''s greatest explorer, and Kit Carson, the legendary scout and Indian fighter, boldly ventured into untamed territory to fulfill America''s "manifest destiny." Drawing on little-known primary sources, as well as his own travels through the lands Frémont and Carson explored, David Roberts recreates their expeditions, second in significance only to those of Lewis and Clark. A Newer World is a harrowing narrative of hardship and adventure and a poignant reminder of the cultural tragedy that westward expansion inflicted on the Native American.

In 1937, 17,150-foot Mt. Lucania was the highest unclimbed peak in North America. But two men--Bradford Washburn and Bob Bates--set out to climb Lucania by flying to the base of the mountain. With the assistance of both men, Roberts, one of the finest writers on mountaineering, narrates this extraordinary journey of conquest and survival with all the richness it deserves. Illustrations & photos.

In 1838, Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) embarked on a three-year journey that would shape Europe''s perception of the Middle East. Nurtured on Bible stories and tales of the exotic Orient, Roberts had always dreamed of exploring the Holy Land, though travel there was an arduous, dangerous undertaking. While he set himself the goal of bringing home an accurate visual record, he returned with a portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs that lost nothing of romanticism. His use of light, color, and atmosphere lent an aura of exoticism to his realistic view.