After a gap of 15 years, from the third autobiographical volume, The Taste of War, and shortly after his appointment to New York University, as Director of the new Center for Applied Social Research and Professor of Social Theory in Government, De Grazia commenced a journal. It was continued for a decade in some fullness, but then largely sidetracked by the Vietnam War and a concentration upon the dozen books that marked the decade from 1968 on. The founding of a college in Switzerland and the beginning of his Naxos Island adventures also came then. Additional Volumes will follow here on the Grazian Archive in due course. They will overtake and pass over two autobiographical volumes also on line now, Cosmic Heretics and The End of Spydom. A burgeoning family life in Princeton and the many toils of avantgarde academia in Manhattan are the leitmotifs of the new works here published for the first time.
Autobiography of a child of Chicago of the roaring twenties and the great depression. Politics, family, schools, gangs, churches, games, sex --all through a child's senses from birth through the fifteenth year. Hailed as an extraordinary utterly frank excursion into deep memory, anthropologically correct, yet written in the style of the Chicago Tribune of the old days
Rare in American literature -- or any other -- an intimate account of student life, this at the University of Chicago in Robert Maynard Hutchins' hey-day. Classics, sports, music, sex, and cheap labor as they were there in the Great Depression, when it seemed that great ideas and planning could solve the world's problems. Wisconsin resorts and European travels. Research and graduate study in the social sciences. Campus radicals and conservatives.
An unexcelled account of World War II as experienced from Private to Commanding Officer in artillery, intelligence and combat propaganda units of the U.S. Army, from Maryland to the Mohave Desert and then in six campaigns in Africa, Italy, France and Germany. Highly commended by experts, "best account of Cassino" (Paul Fussell), "tough, picturesque, humane" (Stephanie Neuman of West Point and Columbia).
A Personal History of Attempts to Establish and Resist Theories of Quantavolution and Catastrophe in the Natural and Human Sciences, 1963 to 1983. A journal, treatise on the sociology of science, and the story behind the Velikovsky Affair, in the intellectual fabric of Princeton and London, authoritative, informative and written in an original style.
Fall of Spydom: earlier entitled "The Venus Spy-Trap," . A full and true account of the arrest, indictment, investigation and trial for espionage of a Swiss computer expert and afficionado of quantavolution -- particularly with regard to the catastrophes involving planet Venus. A cosmopolitan setting, centering in Basle. A seemingly serious case treated with high irony and amusing at the conduct of practically everyone involved, including the author.