In a book that is both biography and the most exciting form ofhistory, here are eighteen years in the life of a man, AlbertEinstein, and a city, Berlin, that were in many ways the definingyears of the twentieth century. Einstein in Berlin In the spring of 1913 two of the giants of modern sciencetraveled to Zurich. Their mission: to offer the most prestigiousposition in the very center of European scientific life to a manwho had just six years before been a mere patent clerk. AlbertEinstein accepted, arriving in Berlin in March 1914 to take up hisnew post. In December 1932 he left Berlin forever. “Take a goodlook,” he said to his wife as they walked away from their house.“You will never see it again.” In between, Einstein’s Berlin years capture in microcosm theodyssey of the twentieth century. It is a century that opens withextravagant hopes--and climaxes in unparalleled calamity. These aretumultuous times, seen through the life of one man who is at oncewitness to and architect of his day--and
Marty Sklar was hired by The Walt Disney Company after hisjunior year at UCLA, and began his Disney career at Disneyland inJuly 1955, the month before the park opened. He spent his firstdecade at Disney as "the kid," the very youngest of the creativeteam Walt had assembled at WED Enterprises. But despite his youth,his talents propelled him forward into substantial responsibility:he became Walt's speech writer, penned Walt's and Roy's messages inthe company's annual report, composed most of the publicity andmarketing materials for Disneyland, conceived presentations for theU.S. government, devised initiatives to obtain sponsors to enablenew Disneyland developments, and wrote a twenty-four-minute filmexpressing Walt's philosophy for the Walt Disney World project andEpcot. He was Walt's literary right-hand man. Over the next forty years, Marty Sklar rose to become presidentand principal creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, andhe devoted his entire career to creating, enhancing, and expand
The only thing the writers in this book have in common is thatthey've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccermoms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos,and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to anunderrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled andworshipped. Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of shortmemoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetrycovering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gatherpieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributionsfrom art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoiristDavid Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man forRent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and menright off the streets, girls participating in the first-everNational Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and RuthMorgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work,Human Rights, and Migration Conference. Se
Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor with the legendary blueeyes, achieved superstar status by playing charismatic renegades,broken heroes, and winsome antiheroes in such revered films as TheHustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, TheVerdict, The Color of Money, and Nobody’s Fool. But Newman was alsoan oddity in Hollywood: the rare box-office titan who cared aboutthe craft of acting, the sexy leading man known for the stayingpower of his marriage, and the humble celebrity who madephilanthropy his calling card long before it was cool. The son of a successful entrepreneur, Newman grew up in aprosperous Cleveland suburb. Despite fears that he would fail tolive up to his father’s expectations, Newman bypassed the familysporting goods business to pursue an acting career. Afterstruggling as a theater and television actor, Newman saw his starrise in a tragic twist of fate, landing the role of boxer RockyGraziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me when James Dean was killedin a car a
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 .
Consuelo and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry met in Buenos Aires in1930—she a seductive young widow, he a brave pioneer of earlyaviation, decorated for his acts of heroism in the deserts of NorthAfrica. He was large in his passions, a fierce loner with achildlike appetite for danger. She was frail and voluble, exoticand capricious. Within hours of their first encounter, he knew hewould have her as his wife. Their love affair and marriage would take them from Buenos Airesto Paris to Casablanca to New York. It would take them throughperiods of betrayal and infidelity, pain and intense passion,devastating abandonment and tender, poetic love. The Tale of theRose is the story of a man of extravagant dreams and of the womanwho was his muse, the inspiration for the Little Prince’s belovedrose—unique in all the world—whom he could not live with and couldnot live without.