This book is both a revelatory biography and an accessiblestudy of Leonardo's life and multi-faceted work as a scientist andengineer. It covers all aspects of the man's life but is also are-interpretation of the voluminous evidence to paint an originalpicture of Leonardo da Vinci not only as the archetypal polymath,but as the first true scientist. Topics include: * A detailedinvestigation of how Leonardo's manu*s and notebooks were lostto the world and kept secret during his own lifetime and how thisaltered the progress of science. * A thorough analysis of his workas a scientist and how he predated many of the great figures of the16th and 17th centuries, including Galileo, Kepler, William Harvey,Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. * Leonardo's legacy -- what didLeonardo leave in his notebooks and how may they be viewed in thelight of modern scientific understanding? What did he achieve inscience?

From the author of the best-selling biography Woody Allen—themost informative, revealing, and entertaining conversations fromhis thirty-six years of interviewing the great comedian andfilmmaker. For more than three decades, Woody Allen has been talkingregularly and candidly with Eric Lax, and has given him singularand unfettered access to his film sets, his editing room, and histhoughts and observations. In discussions that begin in 1971 andcontinue into 2007, Allen discusses every facet of moviemakingthrough the prism of his own films and the work of directors headmires. In doing so, he reveals an artist’s development over thecourse of his career to date, from joke writer to standup comedianto world-acclaimed filmmaker. Woody talks about the seeds of his ideas and the writing of hisscreenplays; about casting and acting, shooting and directing,editing and scoring. He tells how he reworks screenplays even whilefilming them. He describes the problems he has had casting Ameri

Here is the most important autobiography from RenaissanceItaly and one of the most spirited and colorful from any time orplace, in a translation widely recognized as the most faithful tothe energy and spirit of the original. Benvenuto Cellini was both a beloved artist in sixteenth-centuryFlorence and a passionate and temperamental man of action who wascapable of brawling, theft, and murder. He counted popes,cardinals, kings, and dukes among his patrons and was the adoringfriend of—as he described them—the “divine” Michelangelo and the“marvelous” Titian, but was as well known for his violent feuds. Atage twenty-seven he helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome,and his account of his imprisonment there (under a mad castellanwho thought he was a bat), his escape, recapture, and confinementin “a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms” is an adventure equalto any other in fact or fiction. But it is only one in a long lifelived on a grand scale. Cellini’s autobiography is n

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.

The 50th-anniversary edition of the German general's legendarymemoir. When published in 1952, Panzer Leader quickly became a bestseller, but over the half-decade that followed, it also establisheditself as a classic, lauded by Stephen Ambrose as "a mesmerizingread." A dramatic first-person account by the father of modern tankwarfare, it is also a searing group portrait of the Third Reich'sleading personalities as they turned imminent victory intoagonizing defeat.