Bøger af Matthew Mills Stevenson

The life of Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) is an extraordinary story of survival against the odds that ends in triumph. In this brilliant introduction to his life, Matthew Mills Stevenson explores the significant moments and places that helped to shape Churchill's remarkable career as a British politician, prime minister, soldier, and author.Stevenson visits Pretoria in South Africa where in 1899 the young journalist Churchill was imprisoned and then escaped from Boer captivity. He walks the battlefields of Gallipoli in Turkey and looks out on the Dardanelles to ponder why Churchill's bold military strategy failed. He rides his bicycle along the Western Front of World War I to visit Ploegsteert in Belgium, where Churchill commanded a battalion of the Scots Fusiliers. He visits Chartwell where Churchill spent the years out of office in the 1930s, warning the world of the dangers to come from Hitler and Fascism. He travels to Yalta (yes, on his bicycle) to write about Churchill's 1945 meetings with Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, to evaluate his leadership during the Second World War.

During the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, Matthew Mills Stevenson followed the many Republican and Democratic candidates in primary states, at political conventions, and in various debates--coming away with first-hand impressions of those who would be president, including Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. He travels across New Hampshire and Iowa, hears candidates in New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago, and attends numerous political rallies. His book, however, is anything but conventional, as he writies with verve and humor about everything he sees and hears on the campaign trails. He attends one of the first Trump rallies in New Hampshire in 2015, writing: "From where I stood at the back of the room, Donald was hard to see coming into the ballroom. At first all I could make out, bobbing along the stage over the heads of the adoring cops, was his trapezoidal hair, which is the color of marmalade and turns on more angles than the track of the Daytona Speedway. That his 'do' stays in place is a marvel of Western spray technology." Also in 2015, he senses early trouble for the Hillary campaign, noting: "The reason she loses, however, is because she is playing it safe, and her campaign feels more like a coronation than an election. Even her devoted supporters can hardly muster much enthusiasm for her. I have heard more cheering for a third-grade pageant than Hillary got in two events." Of Joe Biden, in Iowa in 2020, he writes: "Unlike other candidates that I have seen over the years, Biden seems genuinely to like the American people and, in particular, his supporters. He knew personally a number of the firemen in the audience, and he talks about the issues as though you had bumped into Biden at Home Depot and asked him how he was fixed for dental insurance. He doesn't speak in Lincoln-Douglas complete sentences. Instead he riffs in fragments from memory (something of a risk, I am sure, to his staff) about the issues of the day while strolling around the stage with a mic in his hand--the Dr. Oz of the Iowa caucuses." The result is a political book that is an endless delight--for the first-hand accounts of the candidates, for the rich humor in the language, and for the insights into a system that is closer to carnival barking than Athenian democracy. This is a book you will want to share with friends.--Matthew Mills Stevenson

Here is the new collection of essays from Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper'(TM)s Magazine who lives in Switzerland and who is the author of the critically acclaimed Letters of Transit: Essays on Travel, History, Politics, and Family Life Abroad, which the poet Robert Watson called "a stunning book, the best travel writing I have seen in years." In 1991, Stevenson moved from Brooklyn to a house in the vineyards outside Geneva, Switzerland. In this book he writes about his travels around Europe ("On a hot July evening, in the company of other backpackers, we boarded the midnight Geneva-Trieste express and scrambled to our compartment, so that long into the night children could bicker about who was most deserving of the upper bunks.") and his impressions of visiting the United States ("the size of the suburban houses made me think America has become a nation of great Gatsbys.") In these essays, Stevenson, with wit and insight, describes crossing Poland by bicycle, the countries of former Yugoslavia, visiting the battlefields of Okinawa, and Albania'(TM)s brave new world ("The province of pyramid schemes and stolen cars"). He explores the myths of Omaha Beach and Steven Spielberg'(TM)s Saving Private Ryan ("a war movie by a guy who has seen a lot of war movies"). Whenin New York after September 11, he recalls his earlier visits to Asian battlefields ("the skeletal frame of the Trade Center evokes the dome at Hiroshima").

Noted travel writer Matthew Stevenson sets out by train and bicycle from his home in Geneva, Switzerland, and rides from the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War around Sedan to Paris, Tours, and Biarritz. The book is an easy blend of travel, diplomatic history, literature, and French politics. Along the way Stevenson sees the trenches around Verdun, the siege lines at Sedan, the cities of Paris and Orleans, and the haunts of Biarrtiz, which so enticed German Chancellor Bismarck. Stevenson writes with empathy and humor, making him the ideal companion for this little tour of France.

From the author of Letters of Transit, Reading the Rails, and Appalachia Spring comes this delightful account of a journey across the People's Republic of China, in search of the men who shaped its modern history. Along the way Matthew Stevenson visits Mao's cave house in Yenan, where Chiang was kidnapped in Xian, General Joseph Stilwell's house in Chongqing, and Sun Yat-sen's hideouts in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Between Beijing and Hong Kong, and many places in between, Stevenson moves around by bicycle, train, and foot, allowing him to describe the places that shaped the lives of China's founders. Of Mao's cave in Yenan, Stevenson writes: "The simple houses are dug into the side of the hill and are reached by climbing steps from the parking lot. Most have nothing more than a bed, a few chairs, a table, and a cupboard--the revolution playing out in what New Yorkers would call a 'single-room occupancy.'" The Revolution as a Dinner Party is a graceful book, full of observation and humor, that is perfect for one today thinking about China--either its past or future. It also an accessible history of China's last hundred years and biographies of the men at the heart of the country's many conflicts.

Acclaimed travel writer Matthew Stevenson, author of Whistle-Stopping America and other books, drives across Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, in search of the coal industry and forgotten battles of the American Civil War