Enigma: The Battle for the Code

Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary is one of the great journals of all time: a Russian girl, transplanted to France, begins a little diary at the age of fourteen. Eleven years later, upon her death, she has written thousands and thousands of pages, creating an obsessively detailed monument to her own life. .”..because I hope that I will be read…I am absolutely sincere. If this hook is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be.” But Bashkirtseff was betrayed by her own family. The diary, published posthumously in 1887, was expurgated, sanitized, and denuded. Marie’s mother made sure that none of her daughter’s more radical opinions – and more importantly, their strange family history – appeared in the diary’s pages. Even so, it was hailed as the true portrait of a woman by the French press, and Bashkirtseff was alternately canonized as a misunderstood genius and damned as a self-absorbed misfit. Now, in this new translation, Phyllis Howard Kernberger has returned to the original text – Marie’s notebooks, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Her scrupulous, decades-long research has unearthed the true self-portrait that Marie Bashkirtseff hoped to reveal. Marie was enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by the constraints of society (especially for women), and determined to achieve success and fame at any cost, and her diary is a vivid portrait of a free-thinking woman born before her time. Working straight from the source, Kernberger has revived the honest image of Marie – in a seductively funny, warmly personal, and thoroughly mesmerizing account of a life lived to its fullest.

Practically a classic itself, Invitation to the Classics is a popular guide to those great works of literature that you always meant to read. Full color and engaging, this book is a gateway to the fulfilling pursuit of understanding our culture by exploring its most enduring writings. “These sparkling essays remind us of the deep pleasures of literature and its power to instruct and delight.”–Publishers Weekly “A magnificent resource, an urgently needed publication in an era when politically correct higher education is trying to deconstruct Western civilization. Wonderful!”–Charles Colson “This important publication should be in every library and out on the table in every Christian home.”–Dallas Willard “Immerses us in the wisdom of the ages, those noble thoughts that enrich society’s values and guide our youth along positive paths toward fruitful lives.”–President Jimmy Carter