Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed bycritics as both "monumental" (The Boston Globe) and "utterlyromantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Véra (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatestliterary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigréauthor of Lolita ; Pale Fire ; and Speak,Memory --wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife,Véra, and third for no one at all. "Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a singlenovel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much ofthe century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriagereads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, isits outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligentlyas did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. StacySchiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.
From one of our most acclaimed novelists, a David-and-Goliath biography for the digital age. One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois–Iowaborder, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at IowaState University, after a frustrating day performing tediousmathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that thebinary number system and electronic switches, com?bined with anarray of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, couldyield a computing machine that would make his life and the lives ofother similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back andbuilt the machine. It worked. The whole world changed. Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we knowthose of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he neverpatented the device, and because the developers of thefar-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas fromhim. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that SperryRand device was invalid, opening the intellectual
Charles I waged civil wars that cost one in ten Englishmentheir lives. But in 1649 Parliament was hard put to find a lawyerwith the skill and daring to prosecute a king who claimed to beabove the law. In the end, they chose the radical lawyer JohnCooke, whose Puritan conscience, political vision, and love ofcivil liberties gave him the courage to bring the king to trial. Asa result, Charles I was beheaded, but eleven years later Cookehimself was arrested, tried, and executed at the hands of CharlesII. Geoffrey Robertson, a renowned human rights lawyer, provides avivid new reading of the tumultuous Civil War years, exposinglong-hidden truths: that the king was guilty, that his executionwas necessary to establish the sovereignty of Parliament, that theregicide trials were rigged and their victims should be seen asnational heroes. Cooke’s trial of Charles I, the first trial of ahead of state for waging war on his own people, became a forerunnerof the trials of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic
Universally known and admired as a peacemaker, DagHammarskj?ld concealed a remarkable intense inner life which herecorded over several decades in this journal of poems andspiritual meditations, left to be published after his death. Adramatic account of spiritual struggle, Markings has inspiredhundreds of thousands of readers since it was first published in1964. Markings is distinctive, as W.H. Auden remarks in hisforeword, as a record of "the attempt by a professional man ofaction to unite in one life the via activa and the viacontemplativa." It reflects its author's efforts to live his creed,his belief that all men are equally the children of God and thatfaith and love require of him a life of selfless service to others.For Hammarskj?ld, "the road to holiness necessarily passes throughthe world of action." Markings is not only a fascinating glimpse ofthe mind of a great man, but also a moving spiritual classic thathas left its mark on generations of readers.
