Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-linedboulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking fa?ades around everycorner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured theAmerican imagination for as long as there have beenAmericans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left thefamiliar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbaneglamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorkerwriter, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris fordecades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the placethat had for so long been the undisputed capital of everythingcultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise achild who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens,to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (andperhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisiansense of style we Americans find so elusive. So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walkedthe paths of the Tuileries, enjoy
After Out on a Limb , MacLaine now offers more of her familybackground, with reproductions of parental game-playingconversations which must evoke poignant recognitions in children ofconflicting adults. Aided by spirit-guided acupuncture, she hasbeen recovering past-life experiences enabling her to deal withthis pain. Most moving is her meeting with her Higher Self, whichcontinues to guide her. Another colorful love affair in Paris andHollywood provides food for the gossip-column fans. More seriousare her ruminations on creative artistry, first as a dancer, thenas a movie star. Even readers put off by MacLaine's uncritical andwholehearted embrace of reincarnation will have to applaud hercandor and zest for discovering the meaning of her life. Jeanne S.Bagby, Tucson P.L., Ariz. Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information,Inc.
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson s growth a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production.
In an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the1960s, award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the firstauthoritative biography of Emily Post, who changed the mindset ofmillions of Americans with Etiquette, a perennial bestseller andtouchstone of proper behavior. A daughter of high society and one of Manhattan’s mostsought-after debutantes, Emily Price married financier Edwin Post.It was a hopeful union that ended in scandalous divorce. But thetrauma forced Emily Post to become her own person. After writingnovels for fifteen years, Emily took on a different sort ofproject. When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented afifty-year-old woman at her wisest–and a country at its wildest.Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success andgives us a panoramic view of the culture from which it took itsshape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decadeto keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing sociallandscape. Now, nearly fifty years aft
In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegutwrites with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favoritecomedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, andvarious cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey throughlife. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut’s singular voice:the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us withtruth.
MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING. --The New York Times Book Review "MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination throughthe flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notablyby Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. Butneither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literaryimagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . .Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy'sdeath but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one thatremains replete with miscomprehensions, unraveled threads and lackof resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-lifethan any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . VintageMailer." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us ourclearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages youare utterly absorbed." --Detroit Free Press "MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . .EXTREMELY LUCI
As a child in German-occupied Poland, Roma Ligocka was known forthe bright strawberry-red coat she wore against a tide of gatheringdarkness. Fifty years later, Roma, an artist living in Germany,attended a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, andinstantly knew that “the girl in the red coat”—the only splash ofcolor in the film—was her. Thus began a harrowing journey into thepast, as Roma Ligocka sought to reclaim her life and put togetherthe pieces of a shattered childhood. The result is this remarkable memoir, a fifty-year chronicle ofsurvival and its aftermath. With brutal honesty, Ligocka recollectsa childhood at the heart of evil: the flashing black boots, thesudden executions, her mother weeping, her father vanished…then herown harrowing escape and the strange twists of fate that allowedher to live on into the haunted years after the war. Powerful,lyrical, and unique among Holocaust memoirs, The Girl in the RedCoat eloquently explores the power of evil to twist our liveslong
When he was 4 years old, spurred by insatiable curiosity andthe beat of a marching drum, Wole Soyinka slipped silently throughthe gate of his parents' yard and followed a police band to adistant village. This was his first journey beyond Aké, Nigeria,and reading his account is akin to witnessing a child'sepiphany: The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longermattered. Those token bits and pieces of Aké which had entered ourhome on occasions, or which gave off hints of their nature in thoseSunday encounters at church, were beginning to emerge in theirproper shapes and sizes. He returned, perched upon the handlebars of a policeman'sbicycle, "markedly different from whatever I was before the march."The reader's horizons feel similarly expanded after finishing thisastonishing book. Nobel laureate Soyinka is a prolific playwright, poet, novelist,and critic, but seems to have found his purest voice as anautobiographer. Aké: The Years of Childhood is a memoir of st
One climbed to the very top of the social ladder, the otherchose to live among tramps. One was a celebrity at twenty-three,the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One wasright-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist.Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heartof their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell wereessentially the same man. Orwell is best known for "Animal Farm"and "1984," Waugh for "Brideshead Revisited" and comic novels like"Scoop" and "Vile Bodies." How ever different they may seem, thesetwo towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked forthe first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, whichgoes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core oftheir beliefs-a shared vision that was startlingly prescient aboutour own troubled times. Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903,into the same comfortable stratum of England's class-obsessedsociety. But at first glance they seem to have lived
In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal. Translated by Randolf Hogan.
THE LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT is a groundbreaking serieswhere America's finest writers and most brilliant minds tackletoday's most provocative, fascinating, and relevant issues.Striking and daring, creative and important, these original voiceson matters political, social, economic, and cultural, willenlighten, comfort, entertain, enrage, and ignite healthy debateacross the country.
After losing her entire family to the Nazis at age 13, AliciaAppleman-Jurman went on to save the lives of thousands of Jews,offering them her own courage and hope in a time of upheaval andtragedy. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has a young voice sovividly expressed the capacity for humanity and heroism in the faceof Nazi brutality. HC: Bantam.
One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, oneof the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, stillsurprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discov??ered themusic of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a centurylater, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminentAmerican historian as well as the passion of a fan. Drawn in partfrom Wilentz’s essays as “historian in residence” of Dylan’sofficial website, Bob Dylan in America is a unique blend of fact,interpretation, and affinity—a book that, much like its subject,shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion warrants. Beginning with his explosion onto the scene in 1961, this bookfollows Dylan as he continues to develop a body of musical andliterary work unique in our cultural history. Wilentz’s approachplaces Dylan’s music in the context of its time, including theearly influences of Popular Front ideology and Beat aesthetics, andoffers a larger critica
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.
When Anne Rice stopped crafting stories about vampires andbegan writing about Jesus, many of her fans were shocked. Thisautobiographical spiritual memoir provides an account of how theauthor rediscovered and fully embraced her Catholic faith afterdecades as a self-proclaimed atheist. Rice begins with herchildhood in New Orleans, when she seriously considered entering aconvent. As she grows into a young adult she delves into concernsabout faith, God and the Catholic Church that lead her away fromreligion. The author finally reclaims her Catholic faith in thelate 1990s, describing it as a movement toward total surrender toGod. She writes beautifully about how through clouds of doubt andpain she finds clarity, realizing how much she loved God anddesired to surrender her being, including her writing talent, toGod. Covering such a large sequence of time and life events is noteasy, and some of the author's transitions are a bit jarring. Fansof Rice's earlier works will enjoy discovering more about her lifean
Book De*ion Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherlessand unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he wasso renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for asubject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect.During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College,Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave themnames—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes forgranted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveriesand the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible anddared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in hisgeneration. James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the mostacclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader intoNewton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanationsof the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies,rest, and motion—ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it cant
“Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoebox. He wasa creature who would prove in many ways to be more human than Iam.” –from The Good Good Pig A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own amongwild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always feltmore comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladlyopened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away fromnourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inklingthat this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not onlysurvive but flourish–and she soon found herself engaged with hersmall-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible.Unexpectedly, Christopher provided this peripatetic traveler withsomething she had sought all her life: an anchor (eventuallyweighing 750 pounds) to family and home. The Good Good Pig celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all hisglory, from his inauspicious infancy to hog heaven in rural NewHampshire, where his boundless zest for life a
Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, and important book. THE NEW YORK TIMES If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle,and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man wasMalcolm X. His AUTOBIOGRAPHY is the result of a uniquecollaboration between Alex Haley and Malcolm X, whose voice andphilosophy resonate from every page, just as his experience and hisintelligence continue to speak to millions.
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
Barbara Leaming's Marilyn Monroe is a complex, sympatheticportrait that will forever change the way we view the most enduringicon of America sexuality. To those who think they have heard allthere is to hear about Marilyn Monroe, think again. Leaming's booktells a brand-new tale of sexual, psychological, and politicalintrigue of the highest order. Told for the first time in all itscomplexity, this is a compelling portrait of a woman at the centerof a drama with immensely high stakes, a drama in which the otherplayers are some of the most fascinating characters from the worldsof movies, theater, and politics. It is a book that shines a brightlight on one of the most tumultuous, frightening, and excitingperiods in American culture. Basing her research on new interviews and on thousands of primarydocuments--including revealing letters by Arthur Miller, EliaKazan, John Huston, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, DarrylZanuck, Marilyn's psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson, and manyothers--Leaming has rec
Based on ten years' astonishing new research, here is thethrilling story of how a charismatic, dangerous boy became astudent priest, romantic poet, gangster mastermind, prolific lover,murderous revolutionary, and the merciless politician who shapedthe Soviet Empire in his own brutal image: How Stalin becameStalin.
A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the bodynow gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about themysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’sRembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewishgarment worker who came to America in the early years of the lastcentury but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech andmovement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyerruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, andhelpless love that outlasted his death. In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmthand claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world thatimpelled its children toward success yet made them feel liketraitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwaveringobservation, Lost in America deserves a place alongside suchclassics as Patrimony and Call It Sleep .