House of Twenty Thousand Books, The

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Last edited by MARC Bot
December 21, 2022 | History

House of Twenty Thousand Books, The

From Prologue I: Saying Goodbye...

The House of Books that my grandparents lived in, as well as the lives they lived and the people who made up their vast social circle, drew me across the generational lines and into their world. As a result of the gatherings I took part in at Hillway, for all of my life the shadows and ghosts of history have peered over my shoulder.

From my early childhood days, Chimen taught me how to interpret the world around me, how to use ideas carefully to create patterns out of chaos. He made me realize that we are, in large part, defined by our pasts—both our individual pasts and our collective histories. We are the aggregate of generations of experiences lived by our ancestors; but we are also, inevitably, products of our times, influenced by wars and revolutions, by social upheavals, by economic turmoil, by scientific advances and so on and so forth. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach famously noted that “Man is what man eats.” True, but man is also what man’s ancestors ate and what man’s surrounding community eats. However much we try, we cannot entirely escape the past. What I consumed at the House of Books was not just Mimi’s food but also the grand feast of ideas that accompanied every meal.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Edition Availability
Cover of: House of Twenty Thousand Books, The
House of Twenty Thousand Books, The
2015, New York Review Books
ebook in English

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Book Details


Table of Contents

Prologue I. Saying Goodbye
Prologue II. Saying Hello
Master Bedroom. The Citadel
The Hallway. An Extraordinary Portal
The Kitchen. Salt, Sugar, and a Dash of Love
The Front Room. The Haskalah
The Dining Room. Rituals and Rebels
Upstairs Front Room. Roots
Dining Room Resurgent. Rebirth
Front Room Revisited. Endings
Acknowledgments.
Family Trees.
Index.

Edition Notes

Published in
New York, USA, London, UK

Classifications

Library of Congress
PS221, PS221 .M4 2015

The Physical Object

Format
ebook

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL25934105M
ISBN 13
9781590178065
LCCN
2014036790, 2014029155
OCLC/WorldCat
866615063

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Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
December 21, 2022 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
November 13, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
July 20, 2016 Edited by Alex Herrera TOC change
July 20, 2016 Edited by Alex Herrera Added book, TOC, Cover etc..
July 20, 2016 Created by Alex Herrera Added new book.