Translated by Audie E. Bock. "A first rate book and a joy to read.... It's doubtful that acomplete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtainedwithout reading this book.... Also indispensable for buddingdirectors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefson the primacy of a good *, on *writing as an essentialtool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, andon the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novelsto detective fiction." -- Variety "For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of mustreading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic andabsorbing screen entertainments." -- Washington Post Book World
A rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offersincisive insights into his major works, including LOLITA, PNIN,DESPAIR, THE GIFT and others.
Fidel Castro is perhaps the most charismatic and controversialhead of state in modern times. A dictatorial pariah to some, he hasbecome a hero and inspiration for many of the world's poor,defiantly charting an independent and revolutionary path for Cubaover nearly half a century. Numerous attempts have been made to get Castro to tell his ownstory. But only now, in the twilight of his years, has he beenprepared to set out the details of his remarkable biography for theworld to read. This book is nothing less than his living testament.As he told reporters, his desire to finish checking its text wasthe one thing that kept him going through his recent illness. Hepresented a copy of the book in its Spanish edition to his compadrePresident Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. In these pages, Castro narrates a compelling chronicle thatspans the harshness of his elementary school teachers; the earlyfailures of the revolution; his intense comradeship with CheGuevara and their astonishing, against-all-odds victory over thedic
Norman Rockwell ’s hundreds of memorable covers for The Saturday Evening Post made him a twentieth-centuryAmerican icon. However, because of the very popularity of hisidealized depictions of middle-class life, his more seriouspaintings have been largely ignored, and he has often been deemed amere illustrator, not a “real” artist. In this, the first comprehensive biography of America’s mostpopular artist, Laura Claridge breaks new ground with herappreciative but clear-eyed view of Rockwell’s work—and his life.Based upon previously unpublished family archives and hundreds ofinterviews, this account reveals for the first time the deepdisparity between the artist’s public image and his privatelife.
Far more than a superb memoir about the highest levels ofprofessional tennis, Open is the engrossing story of a remarkablelife. Andre Agassi had his life mapped out for him before he left thecrib. Groomed to be a tennis champion by his moody and demandingfather, by the age of twenty-two Agassi had won the first of hiseight grand slams and achieved wealth, celebrity, and the game’shighest honors. But as he reveals in this searching autobiography,off the court he was often unhappy and confused, unfulfilled by hisgreat achievements in a sport he had come to resent. Agassi writescandidly about his early success and his uncomfortable relationshipwith fame, his marriage to Brooke Shields, his growing interest inphilanthropy, and—described in haunting, point-by-point detail—thehighs and lows of his celebrated career.
When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulatedcalculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that whitelight was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678,Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planetsand published Principia, a milestone in the history of science,which set forth his famous laws of motion and universalgravitation. Newton’s long-time research on calculus, finally madepublic in 1704, triggered a heated controversy as Europeanscientists accused him of plagiarizing the work of the Germanscientist Gottfried Leibniz. In this third volume in the acclaimed Ackroyd’s Brief Livesseries, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd provides an engagingportrait of Isaac Newton, illuminating what we think we know abouthim and describing his seminal contributions to science andmathematics. A man of wide and eclectic interests, Newton blurred theborders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was aspassionate about astrology as astronomy an
