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

A swashbuckling Texan, a teller of tall tales, a womanizer,and a renegade, Fred Cuny spent his life in countries rent by war,famine, and natural disasters, saving many thousands of livesthrough his innovative and sometimes controversial methods ofrelief work. Cuny earned his nickname "Master of Disaster" for hisexploits in Kurdistan, Somalia, and Bosnia. But when he arrived inthe rogue Russian republic of Chechnya in the spring of 1995,raring to go and eager to put his ample funds from George Soros togood use, he found himself in the midst of an unimaginably savagewar of independence, unlike any he had ever before encountered.Shortly thereafter, he disappeared in the war-rocked highlands,never to be seen again. Who was Cuny really working for? Was he a CIA spy? Who killedhim, and why? In search of the answers, Scott Anderson traveled toChechnya on a hazardous journey that started as as a magazineassignment and ended as a personal mission. The result is agalvanizing adventure story, a chilling pic

“You keep fighting, okay?” I whispered. “We’re in thistogether. You and me. You’re not alone. You hear me? You are notalone. ” 5:38 p.m. It was the precise moment Sean Manning was born and thetime each year that his mother wished him happy birthday. But justbefore he turned twenty-seven, their tradition collapsed. A heartattack landed his mom in the hospital and uprooted Manning from hislife in New York. What followed was a testament to a family’sindestructible bond—a life-changing odyssey that broke a boy andmade a man—captured here in Manning’s indelible memoir.

Christopher (Kit) Lukas’s mother committed suicide when hewas a boy. He and his brother, Tony, were not told how she died. Noone spoke of the family’s history of depression and bipolardisorder. The brothers grew up to achieve remarkable success; Tonyas a gifted journalist (and author of the classic book, CommonGround ), Kit as an accomplished television producer anddirector. After suffering bouts of depression, Kit was able toconfront his family’s troubled past, but Tony never seemed to findthe contentment Kit had attained–he killed himself in 1997. Writtenwith heartrending honesty, Blue Genes captures thedevastation of this family legacy of depression and details thestrength and hope that can provide a way of escaping itsgrasp.

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, AllSouls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie,the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration ofwhite poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemesand busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewncharacters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing singlemother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children.Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence,MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but movinghonesty.

In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best young writers inAmerica today transforms into a work of art the darkest passageimaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affairbetween father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison,twenty years old, was reunited with a parent whose absence hadhaunted her youth. Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifyingdream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power andbeauty of its creation. A story both of taboo and of familycomplicity in breaking taboo, The Kiss is also about love -- aboutthe most primal of love triangles, the one that ensnares a childbetween mother and father. From the Hardcover edition.

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.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insularNew Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by hermother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hidingher before they finally banish her altogether. After giving herbaby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the MiddleEast, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally herblood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life thatencircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one,her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in grittypoverty with an abusive father—in her own father's hometown. Theirreunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall'sparents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offersthem her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in whichloss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion intowisdom.

After two thousand years of flawed history, here at last is amagnificent new biography of Mary Magdalene that draws her out ofthe shadows of history and restores her to her rightful place ofimportance in Christianity.Throughout history, Mary Magdalene hasbeen both revered and reviled, a woman who has taken on manyforms—witch, whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, thedevoted companion (and perhaps even the wife) of Jesus. In thisbrilliant new biography, Bruce Chilton, a renowned biblicalscholar, offers the first complete and authoritative portrait ofthis fascinating woman. Through groundbreaking interpretations ofancient texts, Chilton shows that Mary played a central role inJesus’ ministry and was a seminal figure in the creation ofChristianity. Chilton’s de*ions of who Mary Magdalene was and what she didchallenge the male-dominated history of Christianity familiar tomost readers. Placing Mary within the traditions of Jewish femalesavants, Chilton presents a visionary figure who was fully imm

If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more thanonce, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fiftyyears, he’s taken the stuff of his life—the good and the bad—andmade from it a body of work that has become a permanent part of ourmusical heritage and kept us company through the good and the badof our own lives. So it’s fitting, and cause for celebration, thathe has finally set down in his own words a book that does justiceto his great gifts as a storyteller. In The Facts of Life ,Willie Nelson reflects on what has mattered to him in life and whathasn’t. He also tells some great dirty jokes. The result is a bookas wise and hilarious as its author.

It all started when Douglas Adams demolished planet Earth inorder to make way for an intergalactic expressway–and then invitedeveryone to thumb a ride on a comical cosmic road trip with thelikes of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and the other daft denizens ofdeep space immortalized in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.Adams made the universe a much funnier place to inhabit and foreverchanged the way we think about towels, extraterrestrial poetry, andespecially the number 42. And then, too soon, he was gone. Just who was this impossibly tall Englishman who wedded sciencefiction and absurdist humor to create the multimillion-sellingfive-book “trilogy” that became a cult phenomenon read round theworld? Even if you’ve dined in the Restaurant at the End of theUniverse, you’ve been exposed to only a portion of the offbeat,endearing, and irresistible Adams mystique. Have you met the onlyofficial unofficial member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? Thevery first person to purchase a Mac

A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irishreporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway.The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended somethinghad clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted herlife to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them throughbeloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them duringthe tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary,but in reality a confidante and sharer of the great man’s secretsand sorrows, Valerie literally came of age in the company of one ofthe greatest literary lions of the twentieth century. Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herselfwhen she married the writer’s estranged son Gregory. Now, at last,she tells the story of the incredible years she spent with thisextravagantly talented and tragically doomed family. In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokesthe magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway

In this richly detailed biography, Victoria Glendinning bringsalive the great Anglo-Irish novelist whose literary achievementswere equaled only by her unbounded gift for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen’sCourt, to Oxford where she met Yeats and Eliot, to her service asan air-raid warden in London during World War II, this penetratingbiography lifts the thin veil between Bowen's imaginative world andthe complex emotional life that fired her shimmering novels. We seeher at elegant parties, where such friends as Virginia Woolf,Eudora Welty, and Evelyn Waugh fell under her spell; in post-warVienna with Graham Greene; and in war-torn London, where she fellin love with a younger man who was unprepared for life at the pitchshe lived it. We see her bound through several affairs to acomfortable marriage, living "life with the lid on." The world ofElizabeth Bowen was akin to that of her novels: no one behavedshockingly, yet the passions that stirred within made her a mastero

As an actor, he seduces us with his tough-guy charm. As adirector and producer, he amazes us with his artistry and technicalsavvy. As a Hollywood icon, Clint Eastwood, one of film sgreatest living legends, represents some of the finest cinematicachievements in the history of American cinema. In American Rebel, bestselling author and acclaimed filmhistorian Marc Eliot examines the ever-exciting, often-tumultuousarc of Clint Eastwood s life and career. Unlike pastbiographers, Eliot writes with unflinching candor aboutEastwood s highs and lows, his artistic successes andfailures, and the fascinating, complex relationship between hislife and his craft. Eliot s prodigious research revealshow a college dropout and unambitious playboy rose to fame asHollywood s "sexy rebel," eventually and against all oddsbecoming a star in the Academy pantheon as a multiple Oscar winner.Spanning decades, American Rebelcovers the best ofEastwood s oeuvre, films that have fast become Americanclassics– Fistful of Doll

It is remarkable how infrequently, over a period of more thanfifty years, Alfred Hitchcock spoke about the legendary actresseshe directed–including Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, and Grace Kelly.But his leading ladies greatly enriched his films, and many of themachieved international stardom precisely because of their work forHitchcock. Rich with new material, anecdotes, andnever-before-told personal observations, this explosive portraitdetails Hitchcock’s outbursts of cruelty, the shocking humor, andthe odd amalgam of adoration and contempt that characterizedHitchcock’s obsessive relationships with women–and that also,paradoxically, fed his genius.

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

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Discoverersdemonstrates the truth behind the aphorism that if Cleopatra's nosehad been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed.Boorstin goes on to uncover the elements of accident, improvisationand contradiction at the core of American institutions andbeliefs.

After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomashearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became apublic figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debateon how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. Thatdebate led to ground-breaking court decisions and major shifts incorporate policies that have had a profound effect on ourlives--and on Anita Hill's life. Now, with remarkable insight andtotal candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, andafter the hearings, offering for the first time a complete accountthat sheds startling new light on this watershed event.Only afterreading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family'sOklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled herto withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings andfor years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative ofthe Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding ofhow Washington--and the media--rush to judgment. And only a

Born into the turmoil of mid-sixties San Francisco, the daughterof a flower child and a surfer, Joelle Fraser grew up with nobedtime, no boundaries, and no father. But “dads” she had inabundance, as her mother worked her way through boyfriends andhusbands, caught between the traditional rules of her upbringingand the new freedoms of the “me generation” and women’s lib. Movingevery few months, from houseboats and beach shacks to run-downapartments, Joelle came to learn that a woman’s life, free or not,is played out on men’s territory. Set in northern California, Hawaii, and the small coastal towns ofOregon, Fraser’s engrossing memoir captures this centerlesschildhood in wonderfully vivid, frank writing, then goes on to showhow a legacy like this affects a girl as she grows up. Pretty,blond, precociously aware of her own sexuality, Joelle was drawn tomen early, eager to unlock their mysteries. Working in bars,prisons, and firing ranges, she liked to hang out where theycongregated. To her the on

“Powerful. . . . A challenging, disturbing portrait of ademocratic hero, and an equally challenging case study of thedemocratic system.” —The New York Times “Rich in insight into Jackson’s personality. . . . Burstein makesfair on his promise to look dispassionately at this most passionateof presidents. . . . A very readable, insightful analysis into thecharacter and evolution of the American republic.” —PlainDealer “Excellent. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in thepresidency or early American history.” –Flint Journal “A useful, persuasively critical account of the development ofJackson’s self-image as an honorable patriarch and champion ofrighteous government..” —The Washington Post Book World “Impressive. . . . Persuasive. . . . Argues that the times shapedJackson and thrust him into the White House as the first ‘commoner’elected president because he so personified the young nation’sbold, brash spirit and s

In a masterly act of literary transformation, celebratednovelist Hanan al-Shaykh re-creates the dramatic life and times ofher mother, Kamila. Married at a young age against her will, Kamila soon fellhead-over-heels in love with another man—and was thus forced tochoose between her children and her lover. As the narrative unfoldsthrough the years—from the bazaars, cinemas and apartments of 1930sBeirut to its war-torn streets decades later—we follow thispassionate woman as she survives the tragedies and celebrates thetriumphs of a life lived to the very fullest.

Shortly after arriving on Cape Cod to spend a year by herself,Joan Anderson’s chance encounter with a wise, playful, andastonishing woman helped her usher in the transformations andself-discoveries that led to her ongoing renewal. First glimpsed asa slender figure on a fogged-in beach, Joan Erikson was not only afriend and confidante when one was most needed, but also a guide asAnderson stretched and grew into her unfinished self. Joan Erikson was perhaps best known for her collaboration withher husband, Erik, a pioneering psychoanalyst and noted author.After Erik’s death, she wrote several books extending their theoryof the stages of life to reflect her understanding of aging as sheneared ninety-five. But her wisdom was best taught through theirfriendship; as she sat with Anderson, weaving tapestries of theirlives with brightly colored yarn while exploring the strengthgathered from their accumulated experiences, Joan Erikson’s lessonstook shape on their small cardboard looms as well as in

In the spring of 1884 Ulysses S. Grant heeded the advice of MarkTwain and finally agreed to write his memoirs. Little did Grant orTwain realize that this seemingly straightforward decision wouldprofoundly alter not only both their lives but the course ofAmerican literature. Over the next fifteen months, as the two menbecame close friends and intimate collaborators, Grant racedagainst the spread of cancer to compose a triumphant account of hislife and times—while Twain struggled to complete and publish hisgreatest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Inthis deeply moving and meticulously researched book, veteran writerMark Perry reconstructs the heady months when Grant and Twaininspired and cajoled each other to create two quintessentiallyAmerican masterpieces. In a bold and colorful narrative, Perry recounts the early careersof these two giants, traces their quest for fame and elusivefortunes, and then follows the series of events that brought themtogether as friends. The reason Grant let Twain talk