Diary Of An Unknown

This important new translation brings the diary of Jean Cocteau to America for the first time. Diary of an Unknown was started in 1951, at about the time Cocteau begin his famous journals. This more personal document is at once intensely intimate and deeply philosophical. In these essays - which often recall the essays of Montaigne with their strictness of form, theme, and syntax - Cocteau reveals himself as never before. Like the Surrealists, Cocteau thrived upon, and solicited, public attention. But behind the flamboyance and the mystique, behind the public persona, there was the private self. Here we glimpse the private Jean Cocteau, playing with ideas and musing on all manner of subjects: nature ("I am more fascinated by the underside than by the topside"); New York ("a city that abides neither contempt nor pity"); poetry ("a religion without hope"); and beauty ("The beautiful is always the result of an accident"). Cocteau ruminates on psychoanalysis, the Nuremberg trials, the Trinity, freedom and the death penalty. He also returns to familiar Coctelian themes - angels, invisibility, friendship, memory, and the birth of ideas. He writes of Proust, Picasso, Stravinsky and Sartre, remembering conversations or recording his own observations on their work with extraordinary freshness of insight. In its breadth, its beauty, and its intimacy, DIary of an Unknown deepens our understanding of one of the most original artists of the century. -- from dust jacket.

One winter's morning, illustrator Barroux was walking down a street in Paris when he made an incredible discovery: the diary of a soldier from the First World War. Barroux rescued the diary from the rubbish and subsequently illustrated the soldier's words. We have no idea who our soldier is or what became of him. We just have his own words about the first two months of the war, and Barroux's accompanying images.

A combat history of the American Air Service in World War I.

Expanded from the 1987 World War I Aviation Books in English: An Annotated Bibliography to include about 1,000 books in other European languages and to extend the coverage to 1994. The arrangement is first by language then by author. The annotations are mostly descriptive but occasionally critical. Among the 4,217 listings are privately printed books, limited editions of rare books, and reprints and different editions of the same work. Also includes a listing of government publications, a price checklist of selected books compiled from dealer's catalogs, collectors' evaluations, and a few photographs. Of interest to book collectors as well as historians. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Abstracts of returns of insurance companies were previously published by the secretary of the commonwealth.