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"Astonishing literary energy and historical insight" - (Publishers' Weekly, Books of the Year)
What do Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Tito, Freud, the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand have in common? They were all in Vienna during the carnival of 1913, living within a square mile of each other. Here, in this laboratory of cultural, social and political experiment, some of the key figures of the twentieth century met and collided: Stalin on a mission for the revolution, Trotsky publishing the first edition of Pravda - and establishing a feud with Lenin in nearby Hapsburg; Hitler, still just a failed artist, spouting tirades at fellow drifters in the flophouse; Tito, a car mechanic, taking dancing and fencing lessons; and Freud, completing an essay he would use in his duel with Jung. He called it Totem and Taboo, and it dealt with the myth - ancient and prophetic - of the slaying of a prince by the crowd. As, just twenty months later, the bullet that killed the Archduke would set of the war that killed 10 million more.
Morton brilliantly explores the coincidence and seedbed of disaster, in a perspective that includes a mercurial Churchill, the posturings of Kaiser Wilhelm and the waverings of Tsar Nicholas. But above all, he evokes Vienna with the eye of a master novelist - the elegant, opulent, divided, incomparable sunset metropolis: the volcano of the 20th century Zeitgeist.
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About Frederic Morton Frederic Morton was born in Vienna and lives in New York. As both novelist and historian, he has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. His other work includes the novel The Forever Street as well as The Rothschilds and A Nervous Splendour: Vienna 1888 - 1889
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