No Ordinary Men

“Well written and engaging, this is a tale of quiet courage.” The Lady “A story that needs to be heard.” Library Journal “Fritz Stern’s pointed reflections [in Five Germanys I Have Known] upon the fragility of democratic liberties and the unpredictable ease with which they can wither and die should be required reading for every informed citizen.” Tony Judt “[The Politics of Cultural Despair] is a superb cultural history, erudite, thoughtful, imaginative, beautifully written.” Klemens von Klemperer, professor emeritus of European history at Smith College “The Politics of Cultural Despair is one of the durable masterpieces of 20th-century history because it seems to locate the roots of a peculiarly modern malaise.” The New York Times “[Stern] is a man of nuances; when he defines himself, it is with a kind of fastidious detail.” Roger Cohen “I cannot praise [Gold and Iron] too highly. It is a work of original scholarship, both exact and profound. It restores a buried chapter of history and penetrates, with insight and understanding, one of the most disturbing historical problems of modern times.” Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Times (London) “He writes with the wisdom and truth of a historian who never fails to empathize with the human uncertainty and frailty that operate in extreme as well as everyday historical conditions…No one has written better on the country’s rise and fall than Fritz Stern.” Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times “A landmark work on the liberal ideals of the progressive American tradition, reaffirming their relevance for today… A major contribution to the intellectual history of modernity.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “[An] ebullient and shrewd meditation on faith and social action… A peaceable state of mind simply accompanies the reader as he ends this effortlessly elegant, uniformly sensible paean to the human faith that Sifton inherited.” Carlin Romano, Philadelphia “This [is a] splendid and strenuous book.” David Tracy, The New Republic

Elisabeth Sifton has been an editor and book publisher for many decades. She is the author of The Serenity Prayer- Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War (2004), about the background to the famous prayer written by her father, Reinhold Niebuhr.

Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus and the former provost of Columbia University, with which he has been associated since the 1940s. His many books include The Politics of Cultural Despair (1963), Gold and Iron- Bismarck, Bleichr der, and the Building of the German Empire (1977), Einstein’s German World (1999), and Five Germanys I Have Known (2006).

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