Joachim Prinz (1902-1988) was one of the most extraordinary and innovative figures in modern Jewish history. Never one for conformity, Prinz developed and modeled a new rabbinical role that set him apart from his colleagues in Weimar Germany. Provocative, strikingly informal and determinedly anti-establishment, he repeatedly stirred up controversy. During the Hitler years, Prinz strove to preserve the self-respect and dignity of a Jewish community that was vilified on a daily basis by Nazi propaganda. After immigrating to the United States in 1937, he soon became a prominent rabbi in New Jerse... View More...
Martha Gellhorn was one of the most extraordinary of all female war correspondents. Her career tracked many of the flashpoints of the 20th century: she witnessed at first hand the Depression in the south of the United States; the Spanish Civil War; and more. This book features a selection of her intimate letters. View More...
No one knew the Mississippi Delta more intimately or told its story more eloquently than did David L. Cohn (1894-1960). Between 1935 and 1960 he produced ten books including his best known, God Shakes Creation, later expanded into Where I Was Born and Raised -- and scores of articles and essays, including more than sixty such pieces in the Atlantic Monthly alone. One of his greatest frustrations, however, was not finding time to organize and prepare for publication the memoir he began in 1953.James C. Cobb discovered Cohn's memoir in 1985 in the David L. Cohn Collection at the University of Mi... View More...
Samples of the author's works serve to illustrate his procedures for processing, enlarging, toning, and mounting black-and-white photographs. View More...
She just wouldn't get up--and with that simple, courageous act Rosa Parks struck a blow against injustice. Parks showed what one person, without guns or violence, could do to change the course of history forever. Nelson Mandela claimed "she is who inspired us...to be fearless when facing our oppressors." As a volunteer secretary for the NAACP, Parks chronicled racial injustices and fought for desegregation. Then, on December 1, 1955, she made a stand on a Montgomery, Alabama bus: she refused to relinquish her seat for a white man. Her arrest mobilized the black community for a citywide bus boy... View More...
The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas's first subject, the "self-doomed" poe... View More...
From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of "The Lost Weekend"--a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other. Charles Jackson's novel "The Lost Weekend"--the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam--was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Libra... View More...
A memoir of the upstate New York getaway where the icons of the Beat Generation gathered.During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of the Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was "a haven for comrades in distress" in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, including the graves of its first residents, East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg's brilliance and gener... View More...
The legendary explorer of the Titanic shares inside stories of danger, suspense, and discovery--plus previously untold stories about his own dyslexia and how it has shaped his life.Best known for finding the doomed ship Titanic, celebrated adventurer Robert Ballard has a lifetime of stories about exploring the ocean depths. Now he gets personal, telling the stories behind his most exciting discoveries--including how a top-secret naval mission provided the opportunity for his Titanic discovery--and opens up about his private tragedies. He frankly recounts the struggles he has worked through, ... View More...
In this inspirational and moving memoir--reminiscent of When Breath Becomes Air and The Bright Hour--activist Ady Barkan explores his life with ALS and how his diagnosis gave him a profound new understanding of his commitment to social justice for all. Ady Barkan loved taking afternoon runs on the California coast and holding his newborn son, Carl. But one day, he noticed a troubling weakness in his hand. At first, he brushed it off as carpal tunnel syndrome, but after a week of neurological exams and two MRIs, he learned the cause of the problem: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known a... View More...
The first behind-the-scenes look at the life of the most enigmatic First Lady in U.S. history Melania Trump is an enigma. Regardless of your political leanings, she is fascinating--a First Lady who, in many ways, is the most modern and groundbreaking in recent history. A former model whose beauty in person leaves people breathless, a woman whose upbringing in a communist country spurred a relentless drive for stability, both for herself and for her family. A reluctant pillar in a controversial presidential administration who speaks five languages and runs the East Wing like none of her predece... View More...
For seven decades Katharine Hepburn played a leading role in the popular culture of the twentieth century -- reigning as an admired actress, a beloved m ovie star, and a treasured icon of the modern American woman. She also remained one of the most private of all the public figures of her time. In 1983--at the age of seventy-five, her career cresting--the four time Academy Award winner opened her door to biographer A. Scott Berg--then thirty-three--and began a special friendship, one that endured to the end of her illustrious life. From the start, Scott Berg felt that Katharine Hepburn intende... View More...
Bestselling author and National Book Award-winner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives -- more than two thousand boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries -- and to be allowed freely to interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a brilliant biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth.From the moment he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh found himself thrust on an ... View More...
In this New York Times bestseller, acclaimed actress Candice Bergen "shows how to do a memoir right...The self-possessed, witty, and down-to-earth voice that made Bergen's first memoir a hit when it was published in 1984 has only been deepened by life's surprises" (The New York Times Book Review). "Candice Bergen is unflinchingly honest" (The Washington Post), and in A Fine Romance she describes her first marriage at age thirty-four to famous French director Louis Malle; her overpowering love for her daughter, Chloe; the unleashing of her inner comic with Murphy Brown; her trauma over Malle's ... View More...
