Great Lives

In Simply Beckett, professor Katherine Weiss provides a highly accessible and insightful introduction to the award-winning author and his paradoxical works, with a particular focus on Beckett’s theater activities, both as a writer and director. Through discussion of the written texts, significant productions of the plays, and audience and critical reactions to Beckett’s work, Weiss helps the listener understand the groundbreaking nature of his achievements and points the way toward a greater appreciation of his oeuvre.

Born in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was largely raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents after his father died when he was two. He attended the renowned École Normale Supérieure, where he studied psychology, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and physics. In 1929, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who went on to become a celebrated feminist writer and philosopher, with whom he had a lifelong intellectual and romantic relationship.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris during a time of great social and political upheaval, a ferment that is dealt with extensively in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. He was a sickly child and spent the earlier part of his short life pursuing a variety of sometimes frivolous activities, which led to his not being taken seriously as a writer. It was not until 1909, when he was 38 years old, that he began work on the groundbreaking novel for which he is known, a task that consumed the rest of his life.

In Simply Chomsky, Professor Raphael Salkie provides a compact, user-friendly introduction to Noam Chomsky’s political activism and his groundbreaking work in linguistics. Unlike most Chomsky studies, Prof. Salkie not only covers the essentials of Chomsky’s thought and accomplishments, but also explores his most recent concerns - including the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear holocaust, and current geopolitical hotspots - which are often very different from the topics that preoccupied him decades ago.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Ulm in the German Empire and received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1900. Unable to secure a teaching post, he eventually found work in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where he began to develop his special theory of relativity. In 1905 (his “miracle year”), he published four revolutionary papers, which came to be recognized as stunning breakthroughs in physics. Simply Einstein offers the listener a unique perspective on the man who occupies a singular place in the popular imagination.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was the only child of a Catholic father and an Austrian-English Lutheran mother. He attended the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1910. For the next 45 years, he held positions at many different universities in Europe, the UK, and the US, a result both of his antipathy to Nazism, as well as his unconventional lifestyle, which often involved living with multiple women at a time.