Originally published in six volumes, Sandburgs Abraham Lincolnwas called the greatest historical biography of our generation.Sandburg distilled this work into one volume that became thedefinitive life of Lincoln. Index; photographs.
Condoleezza Rice has excelled as a diplomat, politicalscientist, and concert pianist. Her achievements run thegamut from helping to oversee the collapse of communism in Europeand the decline of the Soviet Union, to working to protect thecountry in the aftermath of 9-11, to becoming only the second woman- and the first black woman ever -- to serve as Secretary ofState. But until she was 25 she never learned to swim. Not because she wouldn't have loved to, but because when she wasa little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, Commissioner of Public SafetyBull Connor decided he'd rather shut down the city's pools thangive black citizens access. Throughout the 1950's, Birmingham's black middle class largelysucceeded in insulating their children from the most corrosiveeffects of racism, providing multiple support systems to ensure thenext generation would live better than the last. But by 1963,when Rice was applying herself to her fourth grader's lessons, thesituation had grown intolerable. Birm
Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn “the best book we’veever had. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing as goodsince.” Critical opinion of this book hasn’t dimmed since Hemingwayuttered these words; as author Russell Banks says in these pages,Twain “makes possible an American literature which would otherwisenot have been possible.” He was the most famous American of hisday, and remains in ours the most universally revered Americanwriter. Here the master storytellers Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns, andDayton Duncan give us the first fully illustrated biography of MarkTwain, American literature’s touchstone, its funniest and mostinventive figure. This book pulls together material from a variety of published andunpublished sources. It examines not merely his justly famousnovels, stories, travelogues, and lectures, but also his diaries,letters, and 275 illustrations and photographs from throughout hislife. The authors take us from Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s boyhoodin Hanniba
From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winningbiographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather , comesa superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women ofletters. Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with theimage of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new EdithWharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as herfiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as anadult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renownednovels and stories have become classics of American literature, butas Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal,was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuriesand two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life inthe skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of ourtime.
