Józef Piłsudski (1868-1935) is the heroic and controversial leader of the reconstituted Poland that emerged out of World War I. He was a revolutionary who defeated the Red Armies outside of Warsaw and although he never held an elected office, he placed his personal stamp on the development of the Pre-War Polish Republic. In some ways he was a visionary for the era (A Federation of Eastern States, free education, woman’s suffrage) he also was responsible for a dominant military presence and a coup against the elected government. Dr. Lenkiewicz examines the life of this hero of Poland based on original documentation and people who knew him.

Józef Piłsudski, Marshal of the Polish armies who defeated the Soviets in 1920 before the gates of Warsaw, occupies a special niche in the hearts of his countrymen. This biography by one of the great Marshal's contemporaries is the first in more than forty years. Piłsudski is one of the major figures of Polish history and certainly one of its most important leaders in the 20th century. As a founder of the Polish Socialist Party, soldier, commander-in-chief of the Polish Army and victor of the 1919-1920 Polish-Bolshevik War, and premier, he exercised paramount influence over the policies of Poland during the last decade of his life which ended in 1935. This biography is in no sense "official" but a balanced account addressed to the general reader with an interest in history and political science. -- from dust jacket.

The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup. In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings. Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed his opponents aimed to dismantle the democratic system. Joshua Zimmerman’s authoritative biography examines a national hero in the thick of a changing Europe, and the legacy that still divides supporters and detractors. The Poland that Pilsudski envisioned was modern, democratic, and pluralistic. Domestically, he championed equality for Jews. Internationally, he positioned Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism. But in 1926 he seized power violently, then ruled as a strongman for nearly a decade, imprisoning opponents and eroding legislative power. In Zimmerman’s telling, Pilsudski’s faith in the young democracy was shattered after its first elected president was assassinated. Unnerved by Poles brutally turning on one another, the father of the nation came to doubt his fellow citizens’ democratic commitments and thereby betrayed his own. It is a legacy that dogs today’s Poland, caught on the tortured edge between self-government and authoritarianism.

The epic story of Joseph Pilsudski, the father of Polish independence. Although he is largely either unknown or misunderstood in the West, Pilsudski was a consequential historical figure whose defeat of the Red Army in 1920 preserved Poland's sovereignty and quite possibly spared Europe from Bolshevik revolution. This account of Pilsudski's life places this and other achievements in the proper context by providing sufficient background in Polish history and illuminating his interconnectedness with more well known historical events.

The dramatic and little-known story of how, in the summer of 1920, Lenin came within a hair's breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism to western Europe.

The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

In the face of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, poet Zofia Ilinska (nee Bronski) and her mother, Helena Bronska, fled to England. For years they dreamed of going back to the Bronski house, which over time came to stand for everything they had lost. It was more than a half a century later that Ilinska returned to the village of her birth, asking Marsden to accompany her and entrusting to him Helena's diaries and letters. Best described as a non-fiction novel, the result is not only an account of the poet's quest for her origins but a portrait of the parallel lives of mother and daughter: coming of age, dramatic escapes, and love and loss. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR