Books about Faustian from Amazon.com

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany.
Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today.
Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich..
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In The Global Gamble, Peter Gowan argues that, since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the US government has been pursuing an attempt to construct a global empire--a unipolar world in which Washington can control and shape the pattern of economic and political change in all regions of the globe. Only by understanding this ambition can we grasp the dynamics of international politics and economics in the contemporary world. Gowan explores the origins and distinctive forms of Washington's imperial project, from the collapse of the Soviet bloc through to the Gulf War of 1991, developments in the European Union, the enlargement of NATO and East Asian financial collapse. He also explores the efforts of various neo-liberal intellectuals to legitimate the American project in terms of liberalism. He concludes that the US Faustian project is almost certainly doomed to failure and unless plans are made now for such an eventuality, the world could face grave and possibly catastrophic breakdowns early in the next century..
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Professor Joan Hoff's A Faustian Foreign Policy: Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush critiques U.S. foreign policy during this period by showing how moralistic diplomacy has increasingly taken on Faustian overtones. As long as the ideological outcome of the Cold War remained in doubt, there was little reason for presidents or government decision makers to question the unethical aspects of U.S. relations with the rest of the world or the universal and exceptional nature of American values. September 11 allowed the United States to assert its exceptionalism and dominance more unilaterally than ever before..
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The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel written by Oscar Wilde, first appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on June 20, 1890. Wilde later revised this edition, making several alterations, and adding new chapters; the amended version was published by Ward, Lock, and Company in April 1891. The story's title is often misreferenced as "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" (for example, a "The Far Side" strip satirizes the story with the caption, "The portrait of Dorian Gray and his dog").

The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is greatly impressed by Dorian's physical beauty and becomes strongly infatuated with him, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is beauty, and the fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, subsequently plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered one of the last works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, and homosexuality, both of which caused some controversy when the book was first published. However, in modern times, the book has been referred to as "one of the modern classics of Western literature."

Source: Wikipedia.org.
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This digital document is an article from Daedalus, published by American Academy of Arts and Sciences on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 4496 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Happiness as a Faustian bargain.
Author: Bernard Reginster
Publication:Daedalus (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2004
Publisher: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Volume: 133 Issue: 2 Page: 52(8)

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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