The extraordinary story of Andrew Jackson—the colorful,dynamic, and forceful president who ushered in the Age of Democracyand set a still young America on its path to greatness—told by thebestselling author of The First American. The most famous American of his time, Andrew Jackson is a seminalfigure in American history. The first “common man” to rise to thepresidency, Jackson embodied the spirit and the vision of theemerging American nation; the term “Jacksonian democracy” isembedded in our national lexicon. With the sweep, passion, and attention to detail that made TheFirst American a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller,historian H.W. Brands shapes a historical narrative that’s asfast-paced and compelling as the best fiction. He follows AndrewJackson from his days as rebellious youth, risking execution tofree the Carolinas of the British during the Revolutionary War, tohis years as a young lawyer and congressman from the newly settledfrontier state of Tennessee

In The Cubist Rebel, 1907–1916 , the second volume of his Life of Picasso , John Richardson reveals the young Picassoin the Baudelairean role of “the painter of modern life”—a rolethat stipulated the brothel as the noblest subject for a modernartist. Hence his great breakthrough painting, Les Demoisellesd’Avignon , with which this book opens. As well as portrayingPicasso as a revolutionary, Richardson analyzes the morecompassionate side of his genius. The misogynist of posthumouslegend turns out to have been surprisingly vulnerable—more oftensinned against than sinning. Heartbroken at the death of hismistress Eva, Picasso tried desperately to find a wife. Richardsonrecounts the untold story of how his two great loves of 1915–17successively turned him down. These disappointments, as well as hishorror at the outbreak of World War I and the wounds it inflictedon his closest friends, Braque and Apollinaire, shadowed hispainting and drove him off to work for the Ballets Russes in Romeand Naples—

From the author of the best-selling biography Woody Allen—themost informative, revealing, and entertaining conversations fromhis thirty-six years of interviewing the great comedian andfilmmaker. For more than three decades, Woody Allen has been talkingregularly and candidly with Eric Lax, and has given him singularand unfettered access to his film sets, his editing room, and histhoughts and observations. In discussions that begin in 1971 andcontinue into 2007, Allen discusses every facet of moviemakingthrough the prism of his own films and the work of directors headmires. In doing so, he reveals an artist’s development over thecourse of his career to date, from joke writer to standup comedianto world-acclaimed filmmaker. Woody talks about the seeds of his ideas and the writing of hisscreenplays; about casting and acting, shooting and directing,editing and scoring. He tells how he reworks screenplays even whilefilming them. He describes the problems he has had casting Ameri

This first fully documented biography of SimonWiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliantcharacter study of a man whose life was part invention but whollydedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible fortheir crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never beforgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve ofHitler’s invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthaldid not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later,when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentrationcamp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis.Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi warcriminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over alifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthalwas also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, whenothers preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historianand journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s

The true story of a mathematical mystery, a million-dollarprize, and the fate of genius in today's world. In 2006, an eccentric Russian genius named Grigori Perelman solvedPoincare's Conjecture, one of seven great unsolved mathamaticalmysteries, the solution to any of which the Clay Institute, foundedby Boston businessman Landon Clay in 2000 to promote mathematics,promised a million-dollar prize. It is widely expected that thefirst Clay Prize will be awarded to Perelman in October 2009, andit is equally widely expected that he will decline it. Why? Masha Gessen set out to find out. In the manner of Nabokov's Real Life of Sebastian Knight , or more recently andaccessibly, Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind , or evenElizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man , Gessen exploresthe nature of Perelma's mind and the reasons for his unusual,increasingly isolated behavior. Drawing on interviews with Perelman's teachers, classmates,coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the US, Gessen hasconstructed a gripp

The first dual biography of two of the world’s most remarkablewomen—Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots—by one ofBritain’s “best biographers” ( The Sunday Times ). In a rich and riveting narrative, Jane Dunn reveals theextraordinary rivalry between the regal cousins. It is the story oftwo queens ruling on one island, each with a claim to the throne ofEngland, each embodying dramatically opposing qualities ofcharacter, ideals of womanliness (and views of sexuality) anddivinely ordained kingship. As regnant queens in an overwhelmingly masculine world, they weredeplored for their femaleness, compared unfavorably with each otherand courted by the same men. By placing their dynamic andever-changing relationship at the center of the book, Dunnilluminates their differences. Elizabeth, inheriting a weak,divided country coveted by all the Catholic monarchs of Europe, isrevolutionary in her insistence on ruling alone and inspired in heruse of celibacy as a political tool—yet also possessed of