Here are the life stories of three women who connect us to ournational past and provide windows onto a social and politicallandscape that is strangely familiar yet shockingly foreign. Berkin focuses on three “accidental heroes” wholeft behind sufficient records to allow their voices to be heardclearly and to allow us to see the world as they did. Though theyheld no political power themselves, all three had access to powerand unique perspectives on events of their time. Angelina Grimké Weld, after a painful internaldialogue, renounced the values of her Southern family’s way of lifeand embraced the antislavery movement, but found her voice silencedby marriage to fellow reformer Theodore Weld. Varina Howell Davishad an independent mind and spirit but incurred the disapproval ofher husband, Jefferson Davis, when she would not behave as anobedient wife. Though ill-prepared and ill-suited for her role asFirst Lady of the Confederacy, she became an expert politicallobbyist for her husband’s release
Starred Review. With this massive opus, veteran musicjournalist Spitz (Dylan: A Biography) tells the definitive story ofthe band that sparked a cultural revolution. Calling on books,articles, radio programs and primary interviews, Spitz follows theband from each member's family origins in working-class Liverpoolto the band's agonizing final days. Spitz's unflinching biographyreveals that not only did the Beatles pioneer a new era of rock butthey also were on the cutting edge of rock star excess, from their1961 amphetamine-fueled sets in the clubs of Hamburg to theireventual appetites for stronger drugs, including marijuana, LSD,cocaine and, eventually for John Lennon, heroin. Sex was also partof the equation; in 1962, when the band cut its first audition forSir George Martin, all four members had a venereal disease, andboth John's and Paul McCartney's girlfriends were pregnant. Spitzdetails the tangled web of bad business deals that flowed fromnovice manager Brian Epstein (though the heavily conflicted
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.
A wild, lyrical, and anguished autobiography, in which CharlesMingus pays short shrift to the facts but plunges to the verybottom of his psyche, coming up for air only when it pleases him.He takes the reader through his childhood in Watts, his musicaleducation by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, andCharlie Parker, and his prodigious appetites--intellectual,culinary, and sexual. The book is a jumble, but a glorious one, bya certified American genius.
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
