26
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born January 1, 1873, Lagos de Moreno, Mexico—died March 1, 1952, Mexico City) Mexican writer whose 20 novels chronicle almost every aspect of the Mexican Revolution.
Azuela received an M.D. degree in Guadalajara in 1899 and practiced medicine, first in his native town and after 1916 in Mexico City. His best-known work, Los de abajo (1916; The Under Dogs), depicting the futility of the revolution, was written at the campfire during forced marches while he served as an army doctor with Pancho Villa in 1915. Forced to flee across the border to El Paso, Texas, he first published the novel as a serial in the newspaper El Paso del Norte (October–December 1915). It received little notice until it was “discovered” in 1924. It widely influenced other Mexican novelists of social protest and was translated into several languages.
Returning from Texas to Mexico City in 1916, Azuela, disillusioned with the revolutionary struggle, wrote novels critical of the new regime: Las moscas (1918) and Los caciques (1917; together translated as Two Novels of Mexico: The Flies. The Bosses), and Las tribulaciones de una familia decente (1918; The Trials of a Respectable Family). He experimented with stylistic devices in later novels such as La malhora (1923; “The Evil Hour”), El desquite (1925; “Revenge”), and La luciérnaga (1932; The Firefly). His complete works appeared in three volumes in 1958–60.
25
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born Nov. 16, 1904, Zungeru, Nigeria—died May 11, 1996, Enugu) First president (1963–66) of independent Nigeria. Azikiwe’s National Council party won the important 1959 federal elections and helped stimulate Nigerian independence. In the conflict over Biafra (1967–70), Azikiwe first backed his fellow Igbo but then threw his support to the federal government. Thereafter he was a leading opponent of the ruling party.
24
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born Jan. 10, 1880, Alcalá de Henares, Spain—died Nov. 4, 1940, Montauban, France) Spanish prime minister and president. As prime minister from 1931 to 1933, he attempted to fashion a moderately liberal government. Elected president in May 1936, he was able to accomplish little before the
Spanish Civil War broke out in July. He lost control of policy and remained in office as only a figurehead until 1939, when he went into exile following the victory of the Nationalist forces of
Francisco Franco.
23
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born May 14, 1907, Hazara, India—died April 19, 1974, near Islamabad, Pak.) President of Pakistan (1958–69). After studies at Aligarh Muslim University and at the British Royal Military College, he became an officer in the Indian army (1928). He fought in Burma (Myanmar) in World War II, and afterward he rose through the ranks in the military in newly independent Pakistan. In 1958 Pakistan’s Pres. Iskander Mirza abrogated the country’s constitution, and Ayub became chief martial-law administrator. He declared himself president the same year, exiling Mirza. He established close ties with China and in 1965 went to war with India over control of the Kashmir region. The failure to take Kashmir, combined with unrest over suffrage restrictions, led to riots, and Ayub resigned in 1969.
22
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born March 29, 1902, Joigny, Fr.—died Oct. 14, 1967, Paris) French novelist, essayist, and playwright. His novels include The Hollow Field (1929), The Fable and the Flesh (1943), and The Transient Hour (1946). He delighted a vast public with witty tales of talking farm animals (reflecting his own farm upbringing), some of which were published in English as The Wonderful Farm (1951). Though his extravagant creations mingling fantasy and reality were long dismissed as minor, he was belatedly recognized as a master of light irony and storytelling.
21
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born July 13, 1936, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died November 1970, New York, N.Y.) African-American tenor saxophonist whose innovations in style and technique were a major influence on free jazz.
As a boy, Ayler studied saxophone with his father, with whom he played duets in church. In his mid-teens he played in rhythm-and-blues bands, and as a young alto saxophonist in Cleveland, he mastered the bop style and repertoire. He began playing tenor saxophone in U.S. Army bands (1958–61), after which his playing became increasingly distant from standard harmonic practices. His first commercial recording, with Danish musicians in 1962–63, included “Summertime,” a masterpiece of dynamic and harmonic contrasts, and exhibited the big sound, multiphonics notes, and overtone cries that came to characterize his work.
Subsequently Ayler not only rejected standard jazz harmonic practices but also eschewed tempered pitch. Virtually all of his mid-1960s playing was in distorted sounds, including low-register honks and a wide, wavery vibrato, resulting in imprecise pitch; furthermore, he usually played his solos at the fastest possible tempos. Even amid these extremes of sound and violent emotion, his soloing was uniquely structured. Despite his radical improvising, the extended themes of his works such as Bells and Spirits Rejoice (both 1965) are in the styles of diatonic, pre-jazz music such as 19th-century hymns, folk songs, marches, and bugle calls. His accompanying bassists and drummers proved equally radical by providing momentum and interplay but not pulse.
Ayler’s music was controversial in his lifetime, and he led his small bands only periodically. Nevertheless, his concepts, especially his saxophone techniques, influenced other musicians virtually since he settled in New York in 1963, and his song “Ghosts” (1964) is a jazz standard. In the late 1960s he experimented with jazz-rock fusion music. On Nov. 25, 1970, about 20 days after he disappeared, his body was found in the East River in New York City.
20
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
Actor, born on July 1, 1952 in Ottawa, Canada. Dan Aykroyd studied at Carleton University, Ottawa, joined the Second City Comedy improvisation group in Toronto, made a name for himself as a stand-up comedian, then joined the cast of the anarchic television show Saturday Night Live (1975–9). He wrote the screenplay for and starred in The Blues Brothers (1980), appeared in Ghostbusters (1984), and earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his first dramatic role in Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Later films include Exit to Eden (1994), Feeling Minnesota (1996), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Antz (voice, 1999), and Christmas with the Kranks (2004). His albums include Briefcase Full of Blues, Made in America, The Blues Brothers, and Best of the Blues Brothers. Aykroyd married Donna Dixon in 1983 and they have three children.
19
Aug
Author: admin // Category:
Uncategorized
(born Oct. 29, 1910, London, Eng.—died June 27, 1989, London) British philosopher. He taught at University College London (1946–59) and later at Oxford (1959–78). He gained international notice in 1936 with the publication of his first book,
Language, Truth and Logic, a manifesto of
logical positivism that drew on the ideas of the
Vienna Circle and the tradition of British
empiricism as represented by
David Hume and
Bertrand Russell. He is also remembered for his contributions to
epistemology and his writings on the history of Anglo-American philosophy (
analytic philosophy). His other works include The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), The Problem of Knowledge (1956), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Russell and Moore (1971), The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973), and Wittgenstein (1985).
18
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
(born April 12, 1939, London, Eng.) British playwright. He began acting with the Stephen Joseph Co. in Scarborough, Yorkshire, where he also wrote his earliest plays under the pseudonym Roland Allen (1959–61). Most of his plays premiered at the company’s theatre, where he was artistic director beginning in 1970. He has written over 50 plays, mostly farces and comedies that deal with marital and class conflicts, including Relatively Speaking (1967), Absurd Person Singular (1972), the trilogy The Norman Conquests (1973), Intimate Exchanges (1982), and Communicating Doors (1995).
17
Aug
Author: admin // Category: Uncategorized
Pharmacologist, born in New York City, New York, USA. He studied at New York University (1941) and George Washington University, Washington DC (1955), and in New York City worked as a chemist at the Laboratory of Industrial Hygiene (1935–45), and as a research associate at Goldwater Memorial Hospital (1946–9). He became a biochemist for the National Heart Institute (1949–55), then joined the National Institute for Mental Health (1955–84), remaining as a guest worker (1984). His studies of neurotransmission of adrenalin and amphetamines led to his investigations into psychoactive drugs for treatment of mental illness, including schizophrenia. He shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler for his work on chemical neurotransmission and pharmacological interactions.