Biographies & Memoirs - Books

Musicians of To-Day

Biographies & Memoirs

According to Wikipedia: "Romain Rolland (29 January 1866 – 30 December 1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915… Rolland's most famous novel is the 10-volume roman-fleuve Jean-Christophe (1903–1912), which brings "together his interests and ideals in the story of a German musical genius who makes France his second home and becomes a vehicle for Rolland's views on music, social matters and understanding between nations".[12] His other novels are Colas Breugnon (1919), Clérambault (1920), Pierre et Luce (1920) and his second roman-fleuve, the 7-volume L'âme enchantée (1922–1933)."

Then Again

Biographies & Memoirs

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • People • Vogue ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARFinancial Times • Chicago Sun-Times •The Independent • Bookreporter •The Sunday Business PostMom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK. So begins Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir about her mother and herself. In it you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always-thinking Dorothy Hall. To write about herself, Diane realized she had to write about her mother, too, and how their bond came to define both their lives. In a remarkable act of creation, Diane not only reveals herself to us, she also lets us meet in intimate detail her mother. Over the course of her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals—literally thousands of pages—in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother—a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy, struggling to find an outlet for her talents—as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years. More than the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams. Diane will remind you of yourself, and her bonds with her family will remind you of your own relationships with those you love the most. Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

Heirs of General Practice

Biographies & Memoirs

Heirs of General Practice is a frieze of glimpses of young doctors with patients of every age—about a dozen physicians in all, who belong to the new medical specialty called family practice. They are people who have addressed themselves to a need for a unifying generalism in a world that has become greatly subdivided by specialization, physicians who work with the "unquantifiable idea that a doctor who treats your grandmother, your father, your niece, and your daughter will be more adroit in treating you."These young men and women are seen in their examining rooms in various rural communities in Maine, but Maine is only the example. Their medical objectives, their successes, the professional obstacles they do and do not overcome are representative of any place family practitioners are working. While essential medical background is provided, McPhee's masterful approach to a trend significant to all of us is replete with affecting, and often amusing, stories about both doctors and their charges.

Birdseye

Biographies & Memoirs

Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

Caminho

Biographies & Memoirs

Este livro nasceu para ajudar a fazer uma oração que leve a viver o dia a dia em união filial com Deus, tendo atingido uma tiragem global de milhões de exemplares, com edições em inúmeras línguas, pelo que se tornou um clássico da literatura espiritual.

La Muse démocratique

Biographies & Memoirs

Subtil analyste de l'ambiguïté des sentiments humains, excellant à multiplier les points de vue sur les êtres et à susciter la perplexité du lecteur, Henry James figure, à côté de Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Musil, dans le panthéon des très grands écrivains qui ont renouvelé le roman moderne. Ses livres les plus célèbres : Portrait de femme, Le Tour d'écrou, L'Image dans le tapis, Les Bostoniennes ; composent d'inoubliables variations sur le thème de l'insondable mystère qu'est la vie de chacun. « On ne peut dire le tout de rien », écrivait-il volontiers.Mais cet Américain qui avait adopté l'Angleterre comme patrie, cet inconditionnel de la démocratie du Nouveau Monde qui ne se sentait bien que dans l'Ancien, est aussi un témoin particulièrement lucide de l'époque qui finit et de celle qui commence. Avant les autres, il a vu que le mouvement de l'égalisation dans les sociétés modernes, irréversible et d'ailleurs souhaitable, préparait un monde qui verrait la confusion des rôles, le règne tout-puissant de la richesse, la religion triviale de la normalité ; il a pressenti que les sociétés de demain seraient inamicales à l'art, élitiste et hiérarchique par essence.C'est cette face jusqu'à présent cachée de l'oeuvre de James qu'explore ici Mona Ozouf, que sa connaissance de l'histoire de l'idée démocratique rend singulièrement apte à entendre, dans ces textes célèbres, un écho nouveau. La muse démocratique a-t-elle devant elle de beaux jours ? Le spectacle d'une humanité grégaire la rebute, le déclin de la vie privée la fait trembler ; les relations entre hommes et femmes la désespèrent. Pour éclairer son inspiration désenchantée, il y a, heureusement, la littérature.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Biographies & Memoirs

Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award [Biography]New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022 Winner of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson AwardPublishers Weekly • 10 Best Books of 2022 Best Books of 2022: NPR, Oprah Daily, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Chicago Public Library A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family. Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality. That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance. In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics. A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

Birth of a Dream Weaver

Biographies & Memoirs

One of Oprah.com's "17 Must-Read Books for the New Year" and O Magazine's "10 Titles to Pick up Now.""Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time. " —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Guardian, Best Books of 2016."Every page ripples with a contagious faith in education and in the power of literature to shape the imagination and scour the conscience."—The Washington PostFrom one of the world's greatest writers, the story of how the author found his voice as a novelist at Makerere University in Uganda In this acclaimed memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda—crucial years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born—under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of a literary giant—lauded for his "epic imagination" (Los Angeles Times)—the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.

My Father's Fortune

Biographies & Memoirs

For the first time, Michael Frayn, the "master of what is seriously funny,"* turns his humor and narrative genius on his own family's story, to re-create the world that made him who he is Whether he is deliriously funny or philosophically profound, as a novelist and a playwright Michael Frayn has concerned himself with the ordinary life lived by erring humans, which is always more extraordinary than people think. In My Father's Fortune, Frayn reveals the original exemplar of the extraordinary-ordinary life: his father, Tom Frayn. A clever lad, a roofing salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted from a childhood spent in two rooms with six other people, all of them deaf. And undaunted he stayed, through German rockets, feckless in-laws, and his own increasing deafness; through the setback of a son as bafflingly slow-witted as the father was quick on his feet; through the shockingly sudden tragedy that darkened his life. Tom Frayn left his son little more than three watches and two ink-and-wash prints. But the true fortune he passed on was the great humor and spirit revealed in this beguiling memoir. * Anthony Burgess

Napoleón

Biographies & Memoirs

Desde la muerte de Napoleón Bonaparte en 1821 se han escrito innumerables libros sobre su vida. Todas las editadas desde 1857 se han basado en la correspondencia que publicó su sobrino Napoleón III, distorsionada con fines políticos. Sin embargo desde 2004, la Fondation Napoléon de París ha sacado a la luz todas y cada una de las más de 33.000 cartas que firmó el propio Napoleón. La culminación de este ingente proyecto exige una reevaluación completa de la visión de este gran personaje, y esta es la primera tarea que Roberts realiza a fondo en este libro. El autor, premiado historiador inglés, no se ha detenido en esta complicada reconstrucción sino que se han involucrado vitalmente en esta biografía. Descubrió nuevos documentos cruciales, repitió siglos después el viaje en barco de Napoleón a Santa Helena e inspeccionó cincuenta y tres escenarios bélicos en los que combatió Napoleón. El resultado de esta titánica tarea es una obra maestra sobre este controvertido personaje. La biografía definitiva de un hombre que fue capaz de modificar la historia. "Una nueva biografía de escala épica... Roberts transmite brillantemente la energía y fuerza de Napoleón... articularmente en la dramática escenificación de batallas decisivas como Austerlitz, Jena, y Marengo, convirtiendo audaces maniobras militares en poderosos momentos políticos". -THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Una emocionante historia militar y política... Roberts es un escritor de talento poco común". -THE WASHINGTON POST ANDREW ROBERTS es autor de bestsellers como La tormenta de la guerra, Napoleón y Wellington, Masters and commanders, Hitler y Churchill: los secretos del liderazgo y Waterloo, entre otros libros. Miembro de la International Napoleonic Society (Francia) y de la Royal Society of Literature (Reino Unido), ha ganado numerosos premios, incluyendo el Wolfson History Prize y el British Army Military Book of the Year (ambos en el Reino Unido). Ha escrito para el diario estadounidense Wall Street Journal y ha presentado varios documentales, incluyendo uno basado en este libro. "Fantástico, rico en anécdotas... Robert es un maestro de la narración". -Max Hastings, WALL STREET JOURNAL "Un auténtico triunfo napoleónico en un libro en el que se galopa irresistiblemente con la fuerza de una carga de caballería... Aquí está, por fin, la biografía definitiva". -Simon Sebag Montefiore, EVENING STANDAR, BOOKS OF THE YEAR "Entretenido, incluso adictivo... Roberts escribe con gran vigor, estilo y fluidez". -THE SUNDAY TIMES "Una biografía enorme, rica, profunda, ingeniosa, humana y admirable que es un placer de leer". -THE TELEGRAPH "El Napoleón de Andrew Roberts es muy entretenido y proactivo, no defrauda con sus brillantes descripciones y juicios profundos". -Antony Beevor, THE MAIL ON SUNDAY, BOOKS OF THE YEAR "Roberts no solo nos acerca la historia de Napoleón a la actualidad, sino que, con documentación inédita y un planteamiento original, nos convence de porqué en el siglo XXI todos debemos volver a leer sobre el pequeño corso". -THE OBSERVER

All the Beauty in the World

Biographies & Memoirs

A best book of the year from New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and The Sunday Times (London).An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard.Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and your delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All the Beauty in the World is an “empathic” (The New York Times Book Review), “moving” (NPR), “consoling, and beautiful” (The Guardian) portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

Columbine

Biographies & Memoirs

Ten years in the works, a masterpiece of reportage, this is the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset. "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . ." So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. Expanded with a New Epilogue

Moj boj, 1. knjiga

Biographies & Memoirs

Po Stiegu Larssonu in Jonasu Jonassonu prihaja iz Skandinavije še ena »senzacija«, verjetno najbolj nenavadna od vseh. Norveški pisatelj Karl Ove Knausgaard (1968) je leta 2009 objavil prve tri dele za današnje razmere popolnoma nepredstavljivega avtobiografskega projekta, v katerem je v maniri sodobnega Prousta do najbanalnejših podrobnosti in popolnoma brez zadržkov rezimiral svoje dotedanje življenje, od otroških let, očetove smrti do očetovske izkušnje, ločitve, ponovne poroke itd. Leta 2010 sta sledila še dva in leta 2011 še zaključni, najobsežnejši šesti del – skupaj kar 3600 strani!

Los hermanos Wright

Biographies & Memoirs

Un día de invierno del año 1903 en el remoto paraje de Outer Banks, Carolina del Norte, dos hermanos de Ohio hasta entonces desconocidos, Wilbur y Orville Wright, cambiaron el rumbo de la historia iniciando la era del vuelo con la primera máquina a motor tripulada más pesada que el aire. Los hermanos Wright fueron hombres de excepcional talento, férrea determinación y gran curiosidad intelectual, cualidades que ellos atribuían a su educación. En este interesante libro, el magistral historiador David McCullough ahonda en la inmensa riqueza de los «Documentos Wright» —los diarios personales, los apuntes y las más de mil cartas que componen la correspondencia privada de la familia— para contarnos el lado humano de una historia genuinamente americana. David McCullough, dos veces ganador del Premio Pulitzer, nos cuenta la dramática historia de los intrépidos hermanos que enseñaron al mundo a volar.

Il paradiso delle piccole cose

Biographies & Memoirs

A quasi dieci anni dalla scomparsa, il nome di Paolo De Benedetti, teologo e biblista tra i più insigni, è ancora ben vivo. Questo libro è un dialogo confidenziale, a tratti intimo, tra racconto di vita e riflessione teologica. È anche la testimonianza di una stagione indimenticabile della cultura italiana: il lavoro con Valentino Bompiani e Umberto Eco nella Milano degli anni Sessanta, la stesura della Enciclopedia Europea in Garzanti, gli studi biblici e teologici, il dialogo interconfessionale. Ed è ancora la straordinaria storia della famiglia De Benedetti attraverso il Novecento e le persecuzioni razziali, di cui la sorella Maria aiuta a ricostruire un frammento. La sua voce si intreccia a quella di Paolo nell’ultima parte del volume: a testimonianza di uno straordinario rapporto di interessenza tra fratello e sorella, indispensabile per comprendere a pieno la loro vita e il loro impegno.

Bonhoeffer

Biographies & Memoirs

Who better to face the greatest evil of the 20th century than a humble man of faith?As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and author.In this New York Times bestselling biography, Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life--the theologian and the spy--and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil.In Bonhoeffer, Metaxas presents the fullest account of Bonhoeffer's life, including his:heart-wrenching decision to leave the safe haven of America to return to Hitler's Germanyinvolvement in the famous Valkyrie plot and in "Operation 7," the effort to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerlandlifelong dedication to sharing the tenets of his faith This edition, revised and with a new introduction from the author, shares the deeply moving story through previously unavailable documents, including personal letters, detailed journal entries, and firsthand personal accounts to reveal never-before-seen dimensions of Bonhoeffer's life and work.Praise for Bonhoeffer:"Metaxas has created a biography of uncommon power--intelligent, moving, well researched, vividly written, and rich in implication for our own lives. Or to put it another way: Buy this book. Read it. Then buy another copy and give it to a person you love. It's that good." --Archbishop Charles Chaput, author, First Things"Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer's story with passion and theological sophistication." —Wall Street Journal"Metaxas presents Bonhoeffer as a clear-headed, deeply convicted Christian who submitted to no one and nothing except God and his Word." --Christianity Today"Metaxas has written a book that adds a new dimension to World War II, a new understanding of how evil can seize the soul of a nation and a man of faith can confront it." --Thomas Fleming, author, The New Dealers’ War

My Own Country

Biographies & Memoirs

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist“A fine mix of compassion and precision . . . Verghese makes indelible narratives of his cases, and they read like wrenching short stories.”—Pico Iyer, TimeAbraham Verghese has garnered worldwide acclaim for his New York Times bestselling novel The Covenant of Water, selected as an Oprah’s Book Club Pick and spanning the years 1900 to 1977 in Kerala, India. In his first book, My Own Country, Verghese examined an American crisis from the vantage of a small town nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, which had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient in the 1980s, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” arrived in town to stay. At the time, Abraham Verghese was a young doctor specializing in infectious diseases at a Johnson City hospital. Of necessity, he became the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of patients, men and women whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: a doctor unique in his abilities; an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; and a writer who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency. Out of his experience comes a startling but ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland as it confronts—and surmounts—its deepest prejudices and fears.

A Woman in Berlin

Biographies & Memoirs

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFor eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.A Woman in Berlin stands as "one of the essential books for understanding war and life" (A. S. Byatt, author of Possession).

On the Banks of Holliday Creek

Biographies & Memoirs

After a tragic accident the Wrights find a new beginning moving from the city with all its conveniences to a forty acre farm on the banks of Holliday Creek. Told from the perspective of their nineyear- old son David, the Wrights meet the neighboring Jones family. Dick Wright is a rising star in the Fort Dodge public school system. Old Jim Jones introduces himself as a flunky who works for United States Gypsum. The two families send their children to Holliday Creek School two miles away. The one-room school thrives under the leadership of Miss Jordison, the teacher you always wished you had. Each One Teach One is her process as recalled by the author, David Wright, himself a published educator. Vivid family contrasts are woven into this narrative that shows America in the Truman Era witnessing the advent of electricity, the telephone, and the Baby Boom generation. This book depicts Progressive Republicans confronting forces of social change, Big Government, and Reaction. Underlying this story are the ideals of personal liberty and the challenges of living close to nature.

Bismarck

Biographies & Memoirs

"Bismarck", hier vorliegend in einer Ausgabe aller vier Bände, entwickelt sich von der Biographie des großen Otto von Bismarck zu einer Gesamtdarstellung des Ersten Weltkrieges. Teilweise eigentümlich in seinen Ansichten und Darstellungsweisen entlässt Bleibtreu den Leser aber nie aus der Spannung der damaligen Ereignisse.

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