Book De*ion In 336 b.c. Philip ofMacedonia was assassinated and his twenty-year-old son, Alexander,inherited his kingdom. Immediately quelling rebellion, Alexanderextended his father's empire throughout the Middle East and intoparts of Asia, fulfilling the soothsayer Aristander's predictionthat the new king "should perform acts so important and glorious aswould make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweatto describe and celebrate him." The Life of Alexander the Great is one of the first survivingattempts to memorialize the achievements of this legendary king,remembered today as the greatest military genius of all time. Thisexclusive Modern Library edition, excerpted from Plutarch's Lives,is a tale of honor, power, scandal, and bravery written by the mosteminent biographer of the ancient world. About Author VICTOR DAVIS HANSON has written extensively on both ancient Greekand military history; his ?fteen books include The Western Way ofWar and Between War and Peace. He is a senior fellow at
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.
Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, NathanBedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded asno more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge,mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Shermancalled him a "devil" who should "be hunted down and killed if itcosts 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury." And in a war inwhich officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forresthabitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy andoften intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at thenotorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South asthe first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in anexemplary biography that puts both Forrest's genius and hissavagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise fromfrontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general,Klansman to -- eventually -- New South businessman and racialmoderate. Unflinching in its analysis
Helen Keller' striumph over her blindness and deafness hasbecome one of the most inspiring stories of our time. Here, in abook first published when she was young woman, is Helen Keller'sown story- complex, poignant, and filled with love.
For Malcolm Jones, his parents’ disintegrating marriage was atthe center of life in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. Hisfather, charming but careless, was often drunk and away from home;his mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clung to thepast and hungered for respectability. In Little Boy Lost ,Jones—one of our most admired cultural observers—recalls achildhood in which this relationship played out against the largercracks of society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popularculture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. Herichly evokes a time and place with rare depth and candor, givingus the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who hewas, who he has become.
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island ofSri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat andintoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India,"Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of hisDutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and familymemoir by an exceptional writer.
