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 .
Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the secondcentury A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world byone of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In whatis by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch revealsthe character and personality of his subjects and how they ledultimately to tragedy or victory. Richly anecdotal and full ofdetail, Volume I contains profiles and comparisons of Romulus andTheseus, Numa and Lycurgus, Fabius and Pericles, and many morepowerful figures of ancient Greece and Rome. The present translation, originally published in 1683 inconjunction with a life of Plutarch by John Dryden, was revised in1864 by the poet and scholar Arthur Hugh Clough, whose notes andpreface are also included in this edition.
Readers of Princess Sultana's extraordinary autobiography, Princess, were gripped by her powerful indictment of women's lives within the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In Desert Royal she continues her story at a period of crisis in her life when she reveals her shameful secret - especially so in a Muslim country where alcohol is forbidden - that she has a drinking problem. The forced marriage of her niece to a cruel and depraved older man, and her discovery of the harem of sex slaves kept by another cousin, makes her more determined than ever to defend the rights of women in her country. Her cause is given an extra sense of urgency against the backdrop of increased dissent against the Al Sa'uds, and the looming spectre of Islamic Fundamentalism.
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.
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.
'It had happened again. Dad had shouted and yelled, thrown things and smashed things up. And then he had quietly cleaned everything away'. Leo's dad has changed. Since Mum died, his drinking is worse and now he's a different person, someone Leo doesn't recognize. The truth is that Leo is covering up for him and when things get bad Leo escapes into his own head, pretending everything's OK. Things need to change, but what can Leo do? No one understands, except maybe his friend Flora. Leo wants his old dad back so they can be happy again - because Dad is all he has left...
At sixteen, Edward Beauclerk Maurice impulsively signed upwith the Hudson's Bay Company -- the company of GentlemanAdventurers -- and ended up at an isolated trading post in theCanadian Arctic, where there was no communication with the outsideworld and only one ship arrived each year. But he was not alone.The Inuit people who traded there taught him how to track polarbears, build igloos, and survive ferocious winter storms. Helearned their language and became completely immersed in theirculture, earning the name Issumatak, meaning “he who thinks.” In The Last Gentleman Adventurer, Edward Beauclerk Mauricerelates his story of coming of age in the Arctic and transports thereader to a time and a way of life now lost forever.
So much has how been said and written about the life andcareer of Michael Jackson that it has become almost impossible todisentangle the man from the myth. This book is the fruit of over30 years of research and hundreds of exclusive interviews with aremarkable level of access to the very closest circles of theJackson family - including Michael himself. Cutting through tabloidrumours, J. Randy Taraborrelli traces the real story behind MichaelJackson, from his drilling as a child star through the blooming ofhis talent to his ever-changing personal appearance and bizarrepublicity stunts. This major biography includes thebehind-the-scenes story to many of the landmarks in Jackson's life:his legal and commercial battles, his marriages to Lisa MariePresley and Debbie Rowe, his passions and addictions, his children.Objective and revealing, it carries the hallmarks of all ofTaraborrelli's best-sellers: impeccable research, brilliantstorytelling and definitive documentation.
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who hasdesigned one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in theUnited States. She also lectures widely on autism—because TempleGrandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences theworld in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from thecountry of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of ascientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country isexperienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach itsboundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinaryhuman being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulfbetween her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of ourcommon identity.
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
In his acclaimed book Lincoln's Virtues , William LeeMiller explored Abraham Lincoln's intellectual and moraldevelopment. Now he completes his "ethical biography," showing howthe amiable and inexperienced backcountry politician wastransformed by constitutional alchemy into an oath-bound head ofstate. Faced with a radical moral contradiction left by thenation's Founders, Lincoln struggled to find a balance between theuniversal ideals of Equality and Liberty and the monstrousinjustice of human slavery. With wit and penetrating sensitivity, Miller brings together thegreat themes that have become Lincoln's legacy—preserving theUnited States of America while ending the odious institution thatcorrupted the nation's meaning—and illuminates his remarkablepresidential combination: indomitable resolve and suprememagnanimity.
Spanning 1979-1987, "The Fry Chronicles" charts Stephen'sarrival at Cambridge up to his thirtieth birthday. "Heartbreaking,a delight, a lovely, comfy book". ("The Times"). "Perfect prose andexcruciating honesty. A grand reminiscence of college and theatreand comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect anecdotes andgenuine readerly excitement. What Fry does, essentially, is tell uswho he really is. Above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppytoo, and funny, and marbled with melancholy". ("Observer")."Arguably the greatest living Englishman". ("Independent onSunday"). "Extremely enjoyable". ("Sunday Times"). "Fry'slinguistic facility remains one of the Wildean wonders of the newmedia age. The patron saint of British intelligence". ("DailyTelegraph").
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.
Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956. The photographs he brought back form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future. He saw the hope of the future in the faces of a couple at city hall in Reno, Nevada, and the despair of the present in a grimy roofscape. He saw the roiling racial tension, glamour, and beauty, and, perhaps because Frank himself was on the road, he was particularly attuned to Americans' love for cars. Funeral-goers lean against a shiny sedan, lovers kiss on a beach blanket in front of their parked car, young boys perch in the back seat at a drive-in movie. A sports car under a drop cloth is framed by two California palm trees; on the next page, a blanket is draped over a car accident victim's body in Arizona. Robert Frank's Americans reappear 40 years after they were initially published in this exquisite volume by Scalo. Each photograph (there are
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A German soldier during World War II offers an inside look atthe Nazi war machine, using his wartime diaries to describe how aruthless psychopath motivated an entire generation of ordinaryGermans to carry out his monstrous schemes.
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.
Now in paperback: the third volume of John Richardson’smagisterial Life of Picasso. Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples,producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’sBallets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuelhis obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his mostimportant sculpture and painting as part of a group that includedBraque, Apollinaire, Miró, and Breton; spending summers in theSouth of France in the company of Gerald and Sara Murphy,Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. These are the years of his marriage tothe Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the mother of his onlylegitimate child, Paulo—and of his passionate affair withMarie-Thérèse Walter, who was, as well, his model and muse. A groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of thegreatest artists of the twentieth century.
A gathering ofbrilliant and viciously funny recollections from one of thetwentieth century’s most famous literary enfants terribles. Written in 1980 but published here for the first time, thesetexts tell the story of the various farces that developed aroundthe literary prizes Thomas Bernhard received in his lifetime.Whether it was the Bremen Literature Prize, the Grillparzer Prize,or the Austrian State Prize, his participation in the acceptanceceremony—always less than gracious, it must be said—resulted inscandal (only at the awarding of the prize from Austria’s FederalChamber of Commerce did Bernhard feel at home: he received thatone, he said, in recognition of the great example he set forshopkeeping apprentices). And the remuneration connected with theprizes presented him with opportunities for adventure—of thenew-house and luxury-car variety. Here is a portrait of the writer as a prizewinner: laconic,sardonic, and shaking his head with biting amusement at the w
