Word: budapester
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thomas Szasz has been the most controversial psychiatrist in the nation for years, so perhaps it's no shock that he has become Yoder's biggest defender. Born in Budapest, Szasz, 82, immigrated to the U.S. in 1938. He has been a psychiatry professor at the State University of New York for nearly 46 years. Szasz's most famous book, The Myth of Mental Illness, was published in 1961. As the Atlantic Monthly said, the book argued "that both our uses of the term 'mental illness' and the activities of the psychiatric profession are often scientifically untenable and morally indefensible...
...Capa held his camera only inches from the faces of the grief-stricken and the grievously wounded, Kershaw focuses - tightly and unblinkingly - on a man who "invented himself" and who was exposed to an excess of both joy and horror in his 41 years. Born André Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, Capa entered a world in conflict, between nations and between his parents. In his teens, André - poor, clever, bored, romantic at heart and discriminated against as a Jew - became involved with leftist revolutionaries, seeking out conflict and danger. When he was barely 18, he moved to Berlin...
...when the Iron Curtain went down in 1991, hordes of American slackers poured into East bloc cities like Prague, Cracow and Budapest, quaint, cobblestoned capitals where a recent college grad could sit in a cafe all day, smoke bad cigarettes, drink bad wine, bask in the low, low exchange rates and attempt to write the Great American Novel. In 1991 the inaugural issue of the English-language weekly Prague Post proclaimed, "We are living in the Left Bank of the '90s." So where are those novels, and how great are they? A decade later--blame it on those long Slavic...
Mark Phillips went to Budapest in search of money too, but by his own admission he didn't make much of it. He did produce Prague, a novel about five assorted young expatriates: a gay grad student, an idealistic young embassy staffer and so on--think The Budapest Breakfast Club. They form a loose, chatty little clique and stumble from bar to bar, job to job and bed to bed, often with the obliging locals. Their story lines go nowhere--a love affair fails to materialize, two angry brothers never make their peace--but the book almost stays aloft...
...punch line of Prague is that the characters never get there--they're stuck in the backwater of Budapest. Prague is the symbol of everything they feel they're missing, the place where "life waited ... waited with some goal, achievable yet elegant and thrilling." The irony is, 10 years later, even Prague isn't Prague anymore. These days, the economy is looking up, the tourists have arrived, and you can't get a decent table. Whatever these writers were looking for there, it's long gone--these books are like lost postcards, smudged and crumpled, their point of origin already...