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

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.

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

I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!) is Stephen Colbert's attempt to wedge his brain between hardback covers. In plain conversational language, not to mention the occasional grunt and/or whistle, Stephen explains his take on the most pressing concerns of our culture: Faith, Family, Politics...Hygiene.

George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful.

"This man will either go insane or leave us all far behind," prophesied the great Impressionist Camille Pissarro. The man was Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), a vicar's son born at Groot-Zundert near Breda in Holland, who at that time was struggling to find buyers for his paintings. Van Gogh did indeed go at least to the brink of insanity. And he has long been recognised as one of the greatest modern artists.Van Gogh, who followed a variety of professions before becoming an artist, was a solitary, despairing and self-destructive man his whole life long. His truest friend was his brother Theo, who supported him unstintingly throughout and followed him to the grave just six months later.This richly illustrated study by two experts on van Gogh follows the artist from the early gloom-laden paintings in which he captured the misery of peasants and workers in his home parts, through the bright and colourful paintings he did in Paris, to the work of his final years under a southern sun in Arles, where he at last found

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 .

A majestic literary biography, a truly new, surprisingly freshportrait. -- Newsday A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. .. . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant andmercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none hasseemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribingto Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness ofidentity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude ofperspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer andthe woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictionsintact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicideare brought into balance with the immensity of her literaryachievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity andwit, and her sanity and strength. It

They called him Neutron Jack. They called him the world's toughest boss. And then Fortune called him "The Manager of the Century." In his twenty-year career at the helm of General Electric, Jack Welch defied conventional wisdom and turned an aging behemoth of a corporation into a lean, mean engine of growth and corporate innovation. In this remarkable autobiography--now updated with a special new afterword by the author--Jack Welch takes us on the rough-and-tumble ride that has been his remarkable life. From his working-class childhood to his early days in G.E. Plastics to his life at the top of the world's most successful company, JACK is ultimately a story about people--from a man who based his career on demanding only the best from others and from himself. ... 作者简介： "JACK is about something so rarely encountered in American life today. That something is called getting it right The point of this book is to help us understand how Jack Welch got it done."--Michael M. Thomas, Financial Obse

The Outsider is an unsentimental yet profoundly moving look atone family’s experience with mental illness. In 1978, CharlesLachenmeyer was a happily married professor of sociology who livedin the New York suburbs with his wife and nine-year-old son,Nathaniel. But within a few short years, schizophrenia–adevastating mental illness with no known cure–would cost himeverything: his sanity, his career, his family, even the roof overhis head. Upon learning of his father’s death in 1995, Nathanielset out to search for the truth behind his father’s haunted,solitary existence. Rich in imagery and poignant symbolism, TheOutsider is a beautifully written memoir of a father’s struggle tosurvive with dignity, and a son’s struggle to know the father helost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him todeath. The Outsider is a recipient of the Kenneth Johnson MemorialResearch Library Book Award and is the winner of the 2000 Bell ofHope Award, presented annually by the Mental Health Associatio

From the author of the national best seller Chaos comes an outstanding biography of one of the most dazzling and flamboyant scientists of the 20th century that "not only paints a highly attractive portrait of Feynman but also . . . makes for a stimulating adventure in the annals of science." ( The New York Times ).

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, aswell as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinkanow follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with anequally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in(and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland. In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified hisplays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit ofNigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family whobolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneeringtheater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not onlyrecounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha,but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes–including hisimprobable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and thetime he smuggled a frozen wildcat into America so that his studentscould experience a proper Nigerian barbecue. More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinkais a courag

He squared off against Caesar and was friends with youngBrutus. He advised the legendary Pompey on his somewhat botchedtransition from military hero to politician. He lambasted MarkAntony and was master of the smear campaign, as feared for his witas he was for exposing his opponents? sexual peccadilloes.Brilliant, voluble, cranky, a genius of political manipulation butalso a true patriot and idealist, Cicero was Rome?s most fearedpolitician, one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen of all times.Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth, John Adams and Winston Churchill allstudied his example. No man has loomed larger in the politicalhistory of mankind. In this dynamic and engaging biography, Anthony Everittplunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancientRome in its most glorious heyday. Accessible to us through hislegendary speeches but also through an unrivaled collection ofunguarded letters to his close friend Atticus, Cicero comes to lifein these pages as a witty and cunning political ope

With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, Ipresume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformedinto one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. Butthe true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist HenryMorton Stanley is one that has escaped telling. Into Africa is anextraordinarily researched account of a thrilling adventure—definedby alarming foolishness, intense courage, and raw humanachievement. In the mid-1860s, exploration had reached a plateau. The seasand continents had been mapped, the globe circumnavigated. Yet onevexing puzzle remained unsolved: what was the source of the mightyNile river? Aiming to settle the mystery once and for all, GreatBritain called upon its legendary explorer, Dr. David Livingstone,who had spent years in Africa as a missionary. In March 1866,Livingstone steered a massive expedition into the heart of Africa.In his path lay nearly impenetrable, uncharted terrain, hostilecannibals, and deadly predators. W