Ocean State Libraries

A veteran of the Boer War returns to London and sets up in business in one of the poorer areas.

Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the...

"By turns philosophical and darkly comic, an ex-smoker's meditation on the nature and consequences of his nearly lifelong addiction. Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a lifelong addiction, from the thrill of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behavior. He extends...

Hermann Hesse's stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values to supplant the political fanaticism tearing Europe apart. Initially, critics thought his work inaccessible to Americans, but the counterculture of the 1960s--and subsequent generations of admirers--emphatically proved the opposite. Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing...

The author intersperses his account of his youth in Nazi Germanywith numerous documents and photographs from that period.