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AlokeKumar

Last seen: 10 hours ago

Aloke is a 53 year old guy from Calcutta(kolkata), WB, India

We live in a fantasy world. I know this because I live in that world, and I actually receive my e-mail there.And, sometimes when I don't ,I think I am having a bad dream.......

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Biography and Works

    Rated Dec 11 2008 • 1 review • biographies • online-literature.com

    JOHANN. WOLFANG GOETHE

    (1749-1832)

    Goethe is referred to as the last Renaissance man. German writer, scientist, and statesman. The dominant figure of the German Classicist-Romantic period, and for many still the most influential of all German writers, The many-sided activities of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stand as a tribute to the greatness of his mind and his personality.

    Goethe was the first child of a patrician couple in Frankfurt am Main. Retired imperial councillor Johann Caspar Goethe and Katharina Elisabeth, née Textor ,a major's daughter, led a cultured life and valued artistic endeavors. The only surviving son, Goethe enjoyed a privileged humanistic education at home together with his sister Cornelia . In 1765 Goethe was sent to study law at Leipzig University, where he also cultivated his interests in art and literature.

    He was exposed to Enlightened thinkers and the new English literature of sensibility, and he wrote elegant erotic poetry and a pastoral play. After a severe case of tuberculosis in 1768 and a subsequent return to Frankfurt, he continued his studies in Strasbourg in 1770. There he met the young East Prussian writer Johann Gottfried Herder , later a theologian in Weimar. They shared criticism of rationalism and the prevailing French taste and enthusiasm for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, German folk song, and medieval architecture, and each found in Shakespeare and Homer models for original creativity. Goethe graduated in 1771 with a Lizentiat (doctoral degree) and became an attorney for the Frankfurt juridical court; increasingly, though, he devoted his efforts to writing and drawing.

    He initiated a radically subjective style, commonly referred to as "Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress), that marked the beginning of German Romanticism. He soon became famous across Europe through his love poems, his Shakespearean chronicle play Götz von Berlichingen based on the controversial knight of that name during the Peasants' War, and his scandalous epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ( The sufferings of young Werther). In the fall of 1775 young Carl August of Saxe-Weimar invited Goethe to Weimar. In June 1776 Goethe became a member of the duke's cabinet and his privy councillor. Except for Goethe's "flight" to Italy from his many bureaucratic obligations , a journey to Venice , the German campaign against revolutionary France, and shorter travels, he remained in the small province for the rest of his long life. In 1806 he married the lowborn Christiane Vulpius with whom he had lived since 1788, much to the outrage of Weimar society.

    Goethe, best known for his wide range of poetry, plays, and novels, was also a respected administrator, knowledgeable art collector, and successful director of the Weimar Hoftheater (court theater, including opera) from 1791 to 1813. He admired Napoleon and recognized the genius of Beethoven. His interest in the sciences ranged from osteology and botany to optics and mineralogy; he believed strongly in his theory of colors (Zur Farbenlehre; 1810), which contradicted Newton's.

    However, the crowning achievement of Goethe's literary career was the completion of the second part of Faust. This work had accompanied Goethe since his early 20s and constitutes a full "confession" of his life.

    Goethe died in Weimar on March 22, 1832. He was buried in the ducal crypt at Weimar beside Schiller.
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    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Biography and Works

  • Diego Armando Maradona - Biography

    Rated Dec 08 2008 • 1 review • sports, diego maradona, biographies, footballer, argentina • expertfootball.com

    DIEGO MARADONA

    (1960-present)

    Argentine ex-football player, and coach of the Argentine national side. He shared the FIFA Player of the Century award with Pelé .

    Diego Maradona is in Calcutta (Kolkata). He visited the Missionaries of Charity, popularly known as Mother House, where Nobel Laureate Mother Teresa served the poorest of the poor till her last days. Maradona said earlier that he had accepted the invitation to come to the city, cause he had a keen interest in seeing first hand the place where Mother Teresa had lived and worked.



    Diego Armando Maradona was born in Lanus, but raised in Villa Fiorito, a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, to a poor family that had moved from Corrientes Province. He was the first son after three daughters. He has two younger brothers, Hugo (el Turco) and Eduardo (Lalo), both of whom were also professional football players.At age 11, Maradona was spotted by a talent scout while he was playing in his neighborhood club Estrella Roja. He became a staple of Los Cebollitas (The Little Onions), the junior team of Buenos Aires's Argentinos Juniors. As a 12-year-old ball boy, he amused spectators by showing his wizardry with the ball during the halftime intermissions of first division games. This was the beginning of his football carrer.

    Over the course of his professsional club career Maradona played for Boca Juniors, FC Barcelona, and, most distinguishedly, SSC Napoli. In his international career, playing for Argentina, he earned 91 caps and scored 34 goals. He played in four FIFA World Cup tournaments, including the 1986 World Cup where he captained Argentina and led them to their victory over West Germany in the final, winning the Golden Ball award as the tournament's best player. In that same tournament's quarter-final round he scored two remarkable goals in a 2-1 victory over England which instantly cemented his fame. The first goal was an unpenalized handball known as the "Hand of God", while the second goal was a spectacular 60-metre weave through six England players, commonly referred to as "The Goal of the Century".

    For various reasons, Maradona is considered one of the sport's most controversial and newsworthy figure. He was suspended from football for 15 months in 1991 after failing a doping test for cocaine in Italy, and he was sent home from the 1994 World Cup in the USA for using ephedrine.

    After retiring from playing on his 37th birthday in 1997, he increasingly suffered ill health and weight gain, hardly helped by ongoing cocaine abuse. In 2005 a stomach stapling operation helped control his weight gain. After overcoming his cocaine addiction, he became a popular TV host in Argentina.

    In October 2008, in a move which surprised many, Maradona was named as the new head coach of the Argentina national football team. Maradona took over the Argentine national team in November, in the team's victory over Scotland by 1-0.

    Overwhelmed by the response of the fans in Calcutta, Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona says he might consider helping Indian football by becoming its brand ambassador.
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    Diego Armando Maradona - Biography

  • Joan Miro Biography

    Rated Dec 07 2008 • 1 review • biographies, spanish, painter, joan miro • e-fineart.com

    JOAN MIRO

    (1893-1983)

    The Spanish painter Joan Miró one of the first surrealists, developed a highly personalized pictorial language derived from prehistoric and naive sources.

    Joan Miró was born in 1893, in Montroig near Barcelona. At the age of 8 he was drawing regularly. His sketchbooks of 1905 contain nature studies from Tarragona and Palma de Majorca. He attended the Lonja School of Fine Arts (1907-1909) and the Gali School of Art (1912-1915) in Barcelona, after which he produced portraits and landscapes in the Fauve manner. He had his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1918. That year he became a member of the Agrupacio Courbet, to which the ceramist Joseph Llorenz Artigas belonged.

    In 1919 Miró made his first trip to Paris, and thereafter he spent the winters in Paris and the summers in Montroig. He met members of the Dada group and took part in Dada activities. His first one-man show in Paris was held in 1921. His paintings of this period reflect cubist influences; Montroig (The Olive Grove; 1919), for example, has a frontal, geometric pattern derived from cubism.The Tilled Field (1923-1924) marked the turning point in Miró's art toward a personal style. The change in his art was furthered by his encounter with the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jean Arp.

    Miró was connected with the surrealists from 1924 to 1930. Surrealism was a source of inspiration to him, and he made use of its methods; however, he never accepted any surrealist "doctrine." Rather, his art, like Klee's, belongs to modern fantastic art. Under the impact of surrealism Miró painted the Harlequin's Carnival (1924-1925) with its frantic movement of semiabstract forms. In 1926 he collaborated with Max Ernst on the sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet Roméo et Juliette.

    In 1928 Miró visited Netherlands Inspired by the Dutch masters, he executed the series of "Dutch Interiors." In his Dutch Interior II (1928) objects are endowed with a fantastic animation and personality and float in ambiguous space. In 1928-1929 he made his first collages and papiers collés (pasted papers). He designed the scenery and costumes for Léonide Massine's ballet Jeux d'enfants in 1932.

    In 1936 Miró fled the Civil War in Spain and lived in Paris. The following year he executed a large mural, the Reaper, for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris. He settled in Palma de Majorca in 1940. The series of gouaches entitled "Constellations" (1940-1941) are full of delicate beauty and gaiety. In 1944 he produced his first ceramics with Artigas's assistance. The following year Miró painted a number of large compositions. His work achieved great power through increased simplicity, intensified color, and abstraction, as in the Bullfight (1945), Woman and Bird in Moonlight (1949), and Painting (1953). He was awarded the Grand Prix International at the Venice Biennale for his graphic work.

    Miró's most famous monumental works are the two ceramic walls (1957-1959), Night and Day, for the UNESCO building in Paris, executed with Artigas and the ceramic mural (1960) for Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Miró died in 1983 at the age of 90.
    326 views
    Joan Miro Biography

  • Albert Camus Biography (1913-1960)

    Rated Dec 02 2008 • 1 review • biographies, essayist, playwright, novelist, albert camus • leninimports.com

    ALBERT CAMUS

    (1913-1960)

    The French novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus was obsessed with the philosophical problems of the meaning of life and of man's search for values in a world without God.

    Albert Camus may be grouped with André Malraux and Jean Paul Sartre, in marking a break with the traditional bourgeois novel. Like them, he is less interested in psychological analysis than in philosophical problems in his books. Camus developed a conception of the "absurd," which provides the theme for much of his work.

    Camus was born in 1913, at Mondovi in Algeria, then part of France. His father, who was French, was killed at the front in 1914; his mother was of Spanish origin. His childhood was one of poverty, and his education at school and later at the University of Algiers was completed only with help from scholarships. He was a brilliant student of philosophy, and his major outside interests were sports and drama. Having contracted tuberculosis, which periodically forced him to spend time in a sanatorium, he was medically unable to become a teacher and worked at various jobs before becoming a journalist in 1938. His first published works were L'Envers et l'endroit (1937; The Wrong Side and the Right Side) and Noces (1938; Festivities), books of essays dealing with the meaning of life and its joys, as well as its underlying meaninglessness.

    At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 Camus was unfit for military service; in the following year he moved to Paris and completed his first novel, L'Étranger (The Stranger), published in 1942. The theme of the novel is embodied in the "stranger" of its title, a young clerk called Meursault, who is narrator as well as hero. Meursault is a stranger to all conventional human reactions. Unable to find work in France during the German occupation, Camus returned to Algeria in 1941 and finished his next book, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), also published in 1942. This is a philosophical essay on the nature of the absurd, which is embodied in the mythical figure of Sisyphus.

    In 1942 Camus, back in France, joined a Resistance group and engaged in underground journalism until the Liberation in 1944, when he became editor of the former Resistance newspaper Combat for 3 years. Also during this period his first two plays were staged: Le Malentendu (Cross-Purpose) in 1944 and Caligula in 1945. Here again the principal theme is the meaninglessness of life and the finality of death.
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    Albert Camus Biography (1913-1960)

  • Terror in Mumbai: India under attack | The Economist

    Rated Nov 27 2008 • 1 review • india, terrorism, india under attack • economist.com


    INDIA

    (1947-present )

    INDIA UNDER ATTACK

    At the time of posting 125 people were killed, 327 injured and up to 100 still under hostage by suspected Islamic terrorists in a series of attacks in Mumbai targeting British ,American and Israeli citizens, other than Indians.

    Militants attacked a crowded railway station, two luxury hotels, an Israeli Centre and a backpacker bar frequented by foreigners, with automatic rifles, bombs and grenades. All the sites were in the south of India's financial capital.

    Hostages were seized at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, where a group of British MEPs were staying, and the Oberoi nearby. Paramilitary forces had gathered around both buildings. A police inspector said: "The terrorists are throwing grenades at us from the rooftop of the Taj and trying to stop us from moving in." The co-ordinated attacks, on soft Western targets, showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy. Intelligence "chatter" in recent weeks indicated that al-Qaeda was plotting an attack. The first incidents were reported at about 10.30pm local time.

    Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.

    A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups. Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning.Hours after the assaults began, the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, next to the famed waterfront monument the Gateway of India, was in flames.


    Fire also raged inside the luxurious Oberoi Hotel. Some guests, including two members of the European Parliament, remained in hiding in the hotels, making desperate cellphone calls,describing their ordeal.

    Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen, told the television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands."They were talking about British and Americans specifically," he said. "There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, `Where are you from?' and he said `Iam from Italy', and they let him go."

    Attackers had also entered Cama and Albless Hospital, struck Nariman House, home to the city's Israel and attacked the Victorial Railway Terminus. Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed. The military was quickly called in to assist the police.

    Photobucket . This spot is dedicated to Hemant Karkare , Chief of Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) who was killed in the Mumbai siege.
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    Terror in Mumbai: India under attack | The Economist

  • Swami Vivekananda : Biography

    Rated Nov 25 2008 • 2 reviews • india, religion, spiritual leader, biographies, swami vivekananda • geocities.com


    SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

    (1863-1902)

    Vivekananda was an Indian spiritual leader who promulgated Indian religious and philosophical values in Europe, England, and the United States, founding the Vedanta Society and the Ramakrishna mission.

    Vivekananda was born in Calcutta of high-caste parents. His family name was Narendranath ("son of the lord of man") Datta. His father was a distinguished lawyer, and his mother a woman of deep religious piety. The influence of both parental figures clearly affected Vivekananda's early life and mature self-conception. He was a fun-loving boy who also showed great intellectual promise in the humanities, music, the sciences, and languages at high school and college. At the age of 15 he had an experience of spiritual ecstasy which served to reinforce his latent sense of religious calling - through he was openly skeptical of traditional religious practices. He joined the liberal Hindu reforming movement, the Brahmo Samaj (Association of God). But his deeper religious aspirations were still unsatisfied.



    In 1881 Vivekananda met the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna, who recognized the young man's immense talents and finally persuaded him to join his community of disciples. After Ramakrishna's death in 1885, Vivekananda assumed leadership of the Ramakrishna order. He prepared the disciples for extensive missionary work, which he himself undertook throughout India - preaching both on the spiritual uniqueness of Indian civilization and on the need for massive reforms, especially the alleviation of the poverty of the Indian masses and the dissolution of caste discrimination. In 1893 his fame and brilliance gained him the nomination as Indian representative to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

    Vivekananda's successes there led to an extended lecture tour. He stressed the mutual relevance of Indian spirituality and Western material progress - both, in his view, were in need of each other. In Boston he found much in common with the philosophy of the transcendentalists - Emerson, Thoreau, and their followers. After touring England and Europe, Vivekananda returned to the United States, founding the Vedanta Society of New York in 1896. His lectures on the Vedanta philosophy and yoga systems deeply impressed William James, Josiah Royce, and other members of the Harvard faculty. Vivekananda then went back to India to promote the Ramakrishna mission and reforming activities.

    Swami Vivekananda took Samadhi, a willful cessation of physical existence through
    Yoga, on July 4, 1902.


    PhotobucketThis spot is for my friend Pihu from India,who comes from the land of Swami Vivekananda. For more on her visit: pihujain.stumbleupon.com [pihujain.stumbleupon.com]
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    Swami Vivekananda : Biography

  • Nat King Cole Biography

    Rated Nov 19 2008 • 1 review • jazz, biographies, pianist, singer, nat king cole • highstreets.co.uk

    NAT`KING' COLE

    (1919-1965)

    The American musician Nat was beloved by millions as a singer of popular songs, but his forte was piano, in the "cool" jazz idiom.

    Nathaniel Adams Coles, the youngest son of the Reverend Edwards Coles and Perlina (Adams) Coles, was born on March 17, 1917 (St. Patrick's Day), in Montgomery, Alabama. Cole and his family were moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1921 by his father, who served as pastor of the Truelight Spiritual Temple on the South Side of Chicago. By the time he reached the age of 12, Cole was playing the organ and singing in the choir of his father's church under his mother's choir direction.

    He took piano lessons "mostly to learn to read'. Cole formed his own big band, the Rogues of Rhythm, joined by his older brother Eddie. Working with the band in Chicago nightclubs and dance halls enabled Cole to develop both as a pianist and a singer. Leaving the Chicago circuit, Cole and the band joined the Shuffle . Cole went to California where, in 1937, he met and married Nadine Robinson, a chorus girl with the show. When the show folded, he and the band played a short-lived booking at the Ubangi Club in Maywood.

    Cole's was introduced to Oscar Moore, a movie studio-guitarist. They formed the trio which reached its apex with the combination of the genius of Cole, Moore, and Miller. The trio wove a fabric of blues licks, riffs, runs, arpeggios, and scalewise invented melodies, classically composed in an original and precise musical logic. Legend has it that upon an occasion of Cole's after-hours venture, a young woman present in the club figuratively crowned him the "King," an affectionate nickname which stuck ever after.

    After the Swanee Inn, the trio worked night spots in Hollywood and its environs; later, in Chicago, they played on the same bill with the Bob Crosby band. Moving on through Washington, D.C., they arrived in Manhattan in 1941 to play Nick's in Greenwich Village, Kelly's Stable and one week at the Paramount, but the pay was "slim pickens," impelling the trio to return to the West Coast, where they played the 331 Club.

    Cole and some of his Californian friends, including songwriter-singer Frankie Laine, prepared original compositions for what proved to be a successful concert tour, but as success mounted, and the trio faded into the background. With his recording of Mel Torme's "Christmas Song," a new career was launched for Cole which left little room for Moore and Miller; the trio broke up. Unfortunately, new success marked the end of old friendship.

    After the successes of "Dance, Ballerina, Dance," "Nature Boy," and "Lush Life," in 1965,there came the sudden and most sad end to the artist's life. When Cole died, a consummate jazz artist and a voice millions knew as the voice of a friend was irreplaceably lost to the world.


    This spot is for my friend FuzzyDoodle from Tennessee,USA who likes Jazz. For more on her visit : fuzzydoodle.stumbleupon.com [fuzzydoodle.stumbleupon.com]
    9 views
    Nat King Cole Biography

  • Jacques Tati Biography

    Rated Nov 19 2008 • 1 review • biographies, french, actor, comic director, jaques tati • starpulse.com



    JACQUUES TATI

    (1908-1982)


    Jacques Tatischeff, is recognized inter nationally as one of the twen tieth-century film's most innovative and perceptive comic directors and actors.

    Tati's film personas - Francois the Postman Playtime, and Traffic - helped reveal the inherent humor of humanity attempting to exist in a mechanized society and drew positive comparisons to the silent film comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. While hugely successful with popular filmgoers, these films are also recognized by film critics for Tati's revolutionary method of conveying humor through overlapping audio effects and mise-en-scenes in which several comedic acts occur at once, which sometimes required more than one viewing to witness every action.

    Tati's father was an art framer and restorer who was disappointed that his son did not enter the family business. He attended the Lycee de St.-Germain-en-Laye and was a rugby player for the Racing Club de Paris from 1925 to 1930. In the 1930s, he worked as an impressionist and toured European music halls and circuses. Much of his act consisted of pantomimes of famous athletes of the era.

    Tati mounted his first film short, the comedy Oscar, Champion du Tennis, in 1931.His subsequent early work, including 1934's On Demande une Brute, 1935's Gai Dimanche, and 1936's Soigne ton Gauche, presaged his later features in their fascination with natural and mechanical sounds. After completing the 1938 short Retour à la terre, he did not appear before the camera again prior to Claude Autant-Lara's 1945 comedy Sylvie et le fantôme.

    With his 1947 short L' Ecole de Fact eurs, Tati created François the postman, a character he reprised in his feature-length directorial debut, 1949's Jour de Fete. Jour de Fete established the riffing gag formula which Tati continued throughout his later features. However, he began creating a new persona whom he dubbed Monsieur Hulot; a poker-faced cipher perennially clad in a crumpled raincoat, always with a pipe in his mouth and an umbrella in his hands. First appearing in 1953's Academy Award-nominated Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, the persona became immensely popular, and remained Tati's alter ego for years to come.

    The intricacy of the Hulot films took Tati years to achieve, and as a result the second film in the series, Mon Oncle, did not appear until 1958. It took the director until 1967 to deliver his masterpiece, Playtime. A remarkable essay on life in the post-industrial world,but failed at the box-office. He never fully recovered from the setback, and 1972's Trafic, the fourth and final Hulot feature, was also a box-office disappointment. In 1974 Tati released Parade, a low-budget collection of slapstick gags and pantomime which he shot on video; it was to be his last completed work.He died November 5, 1982.

    Photobucket.This spot is for Storygirl from NewYork , who likes the movies. Incidentally she also speaks French. For more on her visit : astorygirl.stumbleupon.com [astorygirl.stumbleupon.com]
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    Jacques Tati Biography

  • Sven Hedin Biography Summary

    Rated Nov 17 2008 • 1 review • biographies, geographer, swedish, explorer, sven hedin • bookrags.com

    SVEN ANDERS HEDIN

    (1865-1952)

    Swedish explorer and geographer whose investigations in Tibet and western China made him one of the most eminent explorers of Asia.

    Sven Hedin was born in 1865, in Stockholm to middle-class parents. He received his undergraduate education at Uppsala and studied at Berlin and Halle. He came under the influence of the distinguished explorer of China, Von Richthofen, and decided to devote his career to opening up unexplored areas of Asia.

    Hedin's first chance came in 1885, when he became a private tutor in Baku, a post that allowed him to travel in Mesopotamia and Persia. In 1890 he was appointed Sweden's ambassador to Persia and received support from King Oscar II for a trip to the Chinese border. Starting in 1891 from Teheran, he crossed the Khurasan region and Bukhara to Samarkand, reaching Kashgar in Sinkiang.

    Between 1893 and 1932 Hedin led five major expeditions and several lesser ones. The first (1893-1897) started from Orenburg, crossed the Ural and Pamir mountains, went over the Takla Maklan Desert .

    On the second journey (1899-1902) Hedin followed the Tarim River, crossed the desert, visited Lop Nor, and discovered the ruins of the archeologically important ancient city Loulan. The Lama turned the expedition back before they reach Lhasa, and they had to cross the Karakoram Range to Kashgar in order to return to Europe. The main achievement was to study the mystery of the "wandering" lake, Lop Nor. Hedin offered his solution, that the ancient lake had not changed its location but had dried up and replaced by new lakes. He had covered 6,300 miles in 1,300 days.

    On Hedin's greatest journey (1906-1908) he crossed Persia and Afghanistan, entered Tibet, and identified the true sources of the Indus, Sutlej, and Brahmaputra rivers. He discovered and mapped the Transhimalayan Mountains, crossing the range eight times and overcoming formidable obstacles of winter weather, mountain passes never crossed before, and hostile local tribesmen, who kept Hedin prisoner for a time.

    Hedin's fourth journey (1923-1924) was a trip around the world, through the United States, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union. His last big expedition (1928-1932) was a joint Swedish-Chinese-German effort. It made surveys in Mongolia, western kansu, Sinkiang, and the Gobi Desert. His last trip (1934) was to retrace some of the old silk-caravan routes in China.

    After 1934 Hedin ceased traveling in order to write. During his lifetime he was given their highest awards by leading geographical societies; made a Swedish noble (1902); elected one of the 18 members of the Swedish Academy; and knighted by India (1909).He died in Stockholm on in 1952.

    Photobucket . This spot is for Bente from Norway who likes the work of Sven Hedin , the Swedish explorer and
    geographer.For more on her visit : stellare.stumbleupon.com [stellare.stumbleupon.com]
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    Sven Hedin Biography Summary

  • Aesop Biography

    Rated Nov 16 2008 • 1 review • biographies, aesop, greece, story teller, fables • biographybase.com

    AESOP

    ( 620 560 B.C.)

    Little is known about the ancient Greek writer, whose stories of clever animals and foolish humans are considered Western civilization's first morality tales.

    The first recorded mention of his life came about a hundred years after he died, in a work by the eminent Greek historian Herodotus, who noted that he was a slave of one Iadmon of Samos and died at Delphi. In the first century C.E., Plutarch, another Greek historian, also speculated on Aesop's origins and life. Plutarch placed Aesop at the court of immensely weighty Croesus, the king of Lydia (now northwestern Turkey). A source from Egypt dating back to this same century also described Aesop as a slave from the Aegean island of Samos, near the Turkish mainland. The source claims that after he was released from bondage he went to Babylon. Aesop has also been referred to as Phrygian, pointing to origins in central Turkey settled by Balkan tribes around 1200 B.C.E. They spoke an Indo-European language and their communities were regularly raided for slaves to serve in Greece.

    The various collections that go under the rubric "Aesop's Fables" are still taught as moral lessons and used as subjects for various entertainments, especially children's plays and cartoons. Most of what are known as Aesopic fables is a compilation of tales from various sources, many of which originated with authors who lived long before Aesop. Aesop himself is said to have composed many fables, which were passed down by oral tradition. Socrates was thought to have spent his time turning Aesop's fables into verse while he was in prison. Demetrius Phalereus, another Greek philosopher, made the first collection of these fables around 300 BC.

    This was later translated into Latin by Phaedrus, a slave himself, around 25 BC. The fables from these two collections were soon brought together and were eventually retranslated into Greek by Babrius around A.D. 230. Many additional fables were included, and the collection was in turn translated to Arabic and Hebrew, further enriched by additional fables from these cultures.

    Aesop's Fables or the collection of fables assembled as Aesopica refers to various collections of moralized fables credited to Aesop. "Aesop's Fables" has also become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals. The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" is derived), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun and The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf (also known as The Boy Who Cried Wolf), are well-known throughout the world.

    French poet Jean de La Fontaine adapted many of the fables.Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote free adaptations of some of his fables.

    According to the historian Herodotus, Aesop met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi, though the cause was not stated.

    This spot on Aesop , is for my friend Sarah from Michigan, USA who likes fables. For more on her visit: intotheplanet.stumbleupon.com [intotheplanet.stumbleupon.com]
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    Aesop Biography