Witness To A Century

Description for WITNESS TO A CENTURY: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE NOTED, THE NOTORIOUS, AND THE THREE SOB's by George Seldes:

Ninety-six years of anyone's life would surely yield some good stories, but when that life is George Seldes's , the stories are the history of the twentieth century. One of the great, tireless journalists of all time, George Sledes was always present alongside the movers and shakers who made history. Trotsky, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Freud, Lenin, William Jennings Bryan, Emma Goldman, Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, J Edgar Hoover, Tito, Mussolini, George Seldes knew them, interviewed them, corresponded with them, argued with them and broke bread with them. And, in WITNESS TO A CENTURY we meet them and many others as Seldes leads us on a fascinating journey through the turbulent decades that changed the world.

WITNESS TO A CENTURY is a book full of surprises. Here we see William Jennings Bryan in his hotel room, discussing his presidential plans, in an encounter with young cub reporter Seldes that made front page headlines. We join Emma Goldman at Seldes's breakfast table as she chats about bobbed hairdos. We listen as Lenin cracks jokes, Hindenberg breaks down and cries, and Isadora Duncan laments about love. Here we watch as Seldes goads Trotsky into posing for photos in Red Square. And here we relive, in a way never before possible, all the great events form the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, from the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in the twenties and thirties to Russia in the sixties. We visit the coffee houses of Greenwich Village in the teens and the cabarets of Paris and Berlin in the twenties. Here, we too become witnesses to the human side of history.

For George Seldes is a man with a unique gift---for being where the action is, for getting people to talk and reveal themselves, for uncovering a side of history most of us would never have access to. His extraordinary career has a committed and indefatigable reporter who dug for the truth behind the headlines, his bountiful life as a man who gained the respect of all he encountered, make for exciting reading as he chronicles, with incomparable wit and style, the underside if history.

WITNESS TO A CENTURY is one of the most important primary historical documents of our time, a book to relish and learn from, a book that celebrates history---and storytelling---at their very best.