The factors that change the course of history are primarily the product of the contributions made by individual lives to the broad pattern of mortal existence. In his collection of 'historical miniatures,' Stefan Zweig celebrates the monumental power of the spirit to discover, to create, to transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment, while at the same time underlining man's inability to escape from the realities of his own nature. Among Zweig's illustrations of decisive moments in human experience are the stories of a siege during which seventy ships are moved across a mountainous headland in a single night, a love affair between a seventy-four-year-old poet and a nineteen-year-old girl, and a man who legally owned much of the state of California, only to have it taken from him because the government would not defend his rights. .