Books by George Rousseau

Sir John Hill (17141775) was one of Georgian England's most vilified men despite having contributed prolifically to its medicine, science and literature. Born into a humble Northamptonshire family, the son of an impecunious God-faring Anglican minister, he started out as an apothecary, went on to collect natural objects for the great Whig lords and became a botanist of distinction. But his scandalous behavior prevented his election to the Royal Society and entry to all other professions for which he was qualified. Today, we can understand his actions as the result of a personality disorder; then he was understood entirely in moral terms. When he saw the dye cast he turned to journalism and publication, and strove maniacally to succeed without patronage. As a writer he was also cut down in ferocious ';paper wars'. Yet by the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. His life was a series of paradoxes without coherence, perhaps because he was above all a provocateur.In time he would also become a filter for the century in which he lived: its personalitiesgreat and smallas well as the broad canvas of its culture, and for this reason any biography necessarily stretches beyond the man himself to those whose profiles he also illuminates.

New York City in 1949. A poor, Jewish, eight-year old boy named George, who has shown remarkable talent on the piano, accidentally breaks his rich friend's cello. The mother, Evelyn Amster, a former aspiring concert pianist, makes light of the accident. The eight-year old boy grows up to become a professional academic historian, and develops a keen friendship with his friend's mother, a generation older than he is. But multiple tragedies alter her life course. This memoir describes her despair and conflicts, especially her strange infatuation with composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). It also reconstructs Rachmaninoff's life by offering a new way of interpreting it. Rachmaninoff's Cape captures the musical worlds of Silver Age Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and New York City in the twentieth. The author himself was immersed in this musical culture in New York after World War Two.