Biographies & Memoirs - Books

Recollections of My Youth

Biographies & Memoirs

A leading French scholar tells of his extraordinary life in this 1883 memoir. Born to a family of fishermen, Renan was educated at the ecclesiastical seminary in his home town; developed a questioning mind and a passion for philosophy, Catholicism, and mathematics; helped define the modern notion of nationhood; and published his controversial Life of Jesus.

I legionari

Biographies & Memoirs

I legionari? Una brutta razza. Fatta di ladri, assassini, stupratori e millantatori, molti millantatori. Millantano un passato che non esiste, per darsi un ruolo, un ruolo che non esiste. Perché cambia giorno dopo giorno, sotto il sole d’Africa. Sono uomini, con tutti i difetti degli uomini e nessun pregio, nemmeno quello dell’amicizia. In questo libro ci sono storie di individui che vogliono sopravvivere. Soprattutto ai loro difetti. Individui che corrompono e si lasciano corrompere, uccidono e si lasciano uccidere. Tradiscono e si lasciano tradire. Nessuno è da medaglia. Condividono poco. Qualche puttana, una borraccia di vino, storie inventate nelle notti di luna piena. Poi sono soli. Ed è la solitudine, non la paura di morire in una terra che non è la loro, che li spinge uno nelle braccia dell’altro o nelle braccia di donne che barattano affetto con un pugno di riso.

Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4

Biographies & Memoirs

The opinion universally entertained of the extraordinary abilities of Thomas Jefferson, and the signal evidence given by his country, of a profound sense of his patriotic services, and of veneration for his memory, have induced the Editor, who is both his Executor and the Legatee of his Manuscript Papers, to believe that an extensive publication from them would be particularly acceptable to the American people. The Memoir, contained in the first volume, commences with circumstantial notices of his earliest life; and is continued to his arrival in New York, in March, 1790, when he entered on the duties of the Department of State, of which he had been just appointed Secretary.

Sir Vidia's Shadow

Biographies & Memoirs

The acclaimed writer shares an intimate portrait of his former mentor V.S. Naipaul in this memoir of their thirty-year friendship and sudden falling out.Paul Theroux was a young aspiring writer when he met the legendary V.S. Naipaul in Uganda in 1966. There began a friendship that would span continents as both men ascended the ranks of literary stardom. Naipaul’s early encouragement of Theroux’s talent had a profound impact on him—yet the apprenticeship was not always easy.This heartfelt and revealing account of Theroux's thirty-year friendship with Naipaul explores the unique effect each writer had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life.A New York Times Notable Book

叛國英雄.雙面諜O.A.G.【比爾蓋茲2020推薦選書】

Biographies & Memoirs

出身蘇聯KGB,投奔英國MI6,還險遭美國CIA出賣! 冷戰時期最偉大的雙面間諜──歐列格.戈傑夫斯基他是間諜,也是叛國者,更是英雄!一翻開就停不下來的間諜傳記他改變了歷史走向!避免第三次世界大戰、促進英蘇和談冷戰時期的英美蘇三方對峙,同樣可以做為今日世界局勢的參照

Tomber sept fois se relever huit

Biographies & Memoirs

« C'est arrivé en douce, subrepticement, sournoisement, sans prévenir, une vraie saloperie, une lente et insidieuse pénétration. Je suis l'esclave d'une chose indéfinissable qui est en train de me détruire et je lui obéis sans aucune résistance... » La dépression nerveuse : ça peut tomber sur n'importe qui, même sur un homme au sommet de la réussite. Philippe Labro revient de l'enfer. Il le dit. Il dit surtout qu'on peut en sortir, que tout le monde peut remonter la pente.

Mornings on Horseback

Biographies & Memoirs

The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough.Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review).A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.

On Leopard Rock

Biographies & Memoirs

The first ever memoir from the Number One global bestselling adventure authorWilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. I've been writing novels for over fifty years. I was lucky enough to miss the big wars and not get shot, but lucky enough to grow up among the heroes who had served in them and learn from their example. I have lucked into things continuously. I have done things which have seemed appalling at the time,disastrous even, but out of them have come another story or a deeper knowledge of human character and the ability to express myself better on paper, write books which people enjoy reading. Along the way, I have lived a life that I could never have imagined. I have been privileged to meet people from all corners of the globe, I have been wherever my heart has desired and in the process my books have taken readers to many, many places. I always say I've started wars, I've burned down cities, and I've killed hundreds of thousands of people - but only in my imagination! From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal schooldays to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction. Always candid, sometimes hilarious, and never less than thrillingly entertaining, On Leopard Rock is testament to a writer whose life is as rich and eventful as his novels are compellingly unputdownable.

Pensées de Mark Twain

Biographies & Memoirs

Une peinture drôle et implacable de la nature humaine. Si l'on vous parle aujourd'hui d'un très grand romancier, d'un insatiable aventurier, d'un journaliste très talentueux, d'un humoriste exceptionnel, d'un pamphlétaire virulent, cinq noms vous viendront certainement à l'esprit. Mark Twain nous facilite les choses : il fut tout cela à la fois. Non content d'avoir autant de lauriers à sa couronne, l'auteur des Aventures de Tom Sawyer bénéficie en plus d'une jeunesse éternelle. Il suffit de lire les pensées réunies dans ce volume pour constater qu'elles n'ont pas pris une ride. Peut-être les travers de la comédie humaine n'ont-ils guère changé au fil des siècles, mais on les a rarement épinglés avec autant de finesse et de drôlerie. Que la plume de Mark Twain s'intéresse à la société, à la politique, au sexe, à l'argent, à la religion, elle fait mouche à chaque fois. Je n'aime pas le travail, même quand c'est un autre qui l'accomplit.Dieu a créé la guerre afin que les Américains apprennent la géographie.Peu m'importe qu'il soit blanc, noir, jaune ou indien. Il suffit qu'il soit un homme, il ne peut rien être de pire.

Leo Castelli

Biographies & Memoirs

"Che fine avremmo fatto se non ci fossero stati i mercanti d'arte?", si chiedeva un tempo Pablo Picasso. In pochi casi la domanda è così calzante come per Leo Castelli: il gallerista italiano che reinventò l'arte in America accanto a espressionisti astratti dell'Action Painting come Jackson Pollock e Willem De Kooning, a neodadaisti come Robert Rauschenberg e Jasper Johns, con protagonisti della Pop Art come Roy Lichtenstein e Andy Warhol, e artisti del calibro di Frank Stella e Cy Twombly. Dandy, poliglotta dalle mille sfaccettature, brillante e raffinato seduttore, Leo scrisse più di un importante capitolo della storia dell'arte del Novecento nelle sue gallerie newyorkesi: prima sulla Settantasettesima Strada Est, e poi al leggendario 420 di West Broadway. La storia comincia dalla sua città di origine, la Trieste di inizio secolo, per passare al rarefatto ambiente surrealista di Parigi, con i suoi vernissage a mezzanotte, in cui la femme fatale Leonor Fini si incontrava con i maîtres-à-penser André Breton e Marcel Duchamp. Arrivando alla New York degli anni Cinquanta, tra le icone pop e i loft degli artisti di SoHo, fino al clima arrivista e rampante degli anni Ottanta. La vita di Leo Castelli è il "viaggio incantato" verso l'essenza di ogni uomo: la sua creatività, la sua vocazione, la sua missione nel mondo. (Introduzione di Gillo Dorfles)

Latin America Diaries

Biographies & Memoirs

The sequel to The Motorcycle Diaries, this book is Ernesto Che Guevera's journal documenting the young Argentine's second trip through Latin America, revealing the emergence of a committed revolutionary.These letters, poetry, and journalism document young Ernesto Guevara's second Latin American journey following his graduation from medical school in 1953. Together, these writings reveal how the young Argentine is transformed into a militant revolutionary.After traveling through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Central America, Ernesto witnesses the 1954 US-inspired coup in Guatemala, which has a profound effect on his political awareness. He flees to Mexico where he encounters Fidel Castro, marking the beginning of a political partnership that profoundly changes the world and Che himself. Includes a foreword by Alberto Granado, Che's companion on his first adventures in Latin America on a vintage Norton motorcycle, and features poems written by young Ernesto inspired by his experiences along with facsimiles of pages from his diary.

Oswald's Tale

Biographies & Memoirs

In perhaps his most important literary feat, Norman Mailer fashions an unprecedented portrait of one of the great villains—and enigmas—in United States history. Here is Lee Harvey Oswald—his family background, troubled marriage, controversial journey to Russia, and return to an “America [waiting] for him like an angry relative whose eyes glare in the heat.” Based on KGB and FBI transcripts, government reports, letters and diaries, and Mailer’s own international research, this is an epic account of a man whose cunning, duplicity, and self-invention were both at home in and at odds with the country he forever altered. Praise for Oswald’s Tale “America’s largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter.”—The Washington Post Book World “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection.”—Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books “A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form.”—Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times “The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.”—Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London) Praise for Norman Mailer “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books “The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post

Decade of Tyranny

Biographies & Memoirs

This is a tale of a common man trying to change government from within. However, what he finds out is after 11 years it is time to move on and fact the fact government has to collapse before it will ever change. What he describes as the real issues in American government and today's American culture is nothing more than a choice Americans have made to cripple it's own economy.

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1

Biographies & Memoirs

Volume is not chronologically continuous with the first. Again, in the third volume, the botanical work, which principally occupied my father during the later years of his life, is treated in a separate series of chapters. Of letters addressed to my father I have not made much use. It was his custom to file all letters received, and when his slender stock of files ("spits" as he called them was exhausted, he would burn the letters of several years, in order that he might make use of the liberated "spits." This process, carried on for years, destroyed nearly all letters received before 1862. After that date he was persuaded to keep the more interesting letters, and these are preserved in an accessible form.

Too Much to Dream

Biographies & Memoirs

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston and raised on secular Judaism, Cocoa Puffs, and Gilligan’s Island, Peter Bebergal was barely in his teens when the ancient desire to finding higher spiritual meaning in the universe struck. Already schooled in mysticism by way of comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and Carlos Castaneda, he turned to hallucinogens, convinced they would provide a path to illumination.Was this profound desire for God—a god he believed that could only be apprehended by an extreme state of altered consciousness—simply a side effect of the drugs? Or was it a deeper human longing that was manifesting itself, even on a country club golf course at the edge of a strip mall?Too Much to Dream places Bebergal’s story within the cultural history of hallucinogens, American fascination with mysticism, and the complex relationship between drug addiction, popular culture, rock ‘n’ roll, occultism, and psychology. With a captivating foreword by Peter Coyote, and interviews with writers, artists, and psychologists such as Dennis McKenna, James Fadima, Arik Roper, Jim Woodring, and Mark Tulin, Bebergal offers a groundbreaking exploration of drugs, religion, and the craving for spirituality entrenched in America’s youth.

Through A Mother's Eye

Biographies & Memoirs

When we are faced with the unknown, we turn to others for help. Then we find ourselves on a journey of hard times. When we face those times with the right one, it gets easier. I faced that time, and learned what I needed to do. Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

A Day in Tuscany

Biographies & Memoirs

This second book from Dario Castagno is a delightfully honest mix of memoirs from life in the hills of Tuscany’s legendary Chianti region. Set on the day the author arrived home after a three-month tour of the United States promoting his first book, A Day in Tuscany compels readers to experience this enchanted corner of Italy through the heart and mind of a true Tuscan. As Castagno sees his beloved hills with fresh eyes and reacquaints himself with the rhythms of home, a flood of recollections of its people and places come to him. Through his engaging narrative, we are transported as well.The sights he sees and people he meets as he takes a one-mile walk through his village during the course of this noteworthy day trigger memories of his childhood and adolescence in Tuscany during the seventies, his experiences as a tour guide in Chianti, and some of the more remarkable people he has known. In addition to stories from his own past, included are oral histories from several village elders. History and the present mingle in this part of the world, and these stories bring both alive. Sometimes funny, often poignant, A Day in Tuscany weaves a magical spell and offers a candid insider’s look at the people and culture of a fascinating land.

Kobieta, którą jestem

Biographies & Memoirs

Pierwsza, wyczekiwana na całym świecie autobiografia Britney Spears.Kobieta, którą jestem to odważna i zdumiewająco poruszająca opowieść o wolności, sławie, macierzyństwie, przetrwaniu, wierze i nadziei.W czerwcu 2021 r. cały świat słuchał, jak Britney Spears przemawiała w sądzie. Wpływ podzielenia się swoim głosem był niezaprzeczalny i zmienił bieg jej życia oraz losów niezliczonych innych osób. Kobieta, którą jestem po raz pierwszy ujawnia niesamowitą historię Britney Spears – i siłę tkwiącą w sercu jednej z największych artystek w dziejach muzyki pop.Napisana z niezwykłą szczerością i humorem, przełomowa książka Spears rzuca światło na nieprzemijającą siłę muzyki i miłości oraz na to, jak ważne jest móc wreszcie opowiedzieć swoją historię, na własnych warunkach.Zdobywczyni nagrody Grammy, ikona muzyki pop. Britney Spears jest jedną z najbardziej utytułowanych i cenionych artystek w historii muzyki, z ponad 100 milionami sprzedanych płyt na całym świecie. W 2021 roku znalazła się na liście 100 najbardziej wpływowych osób magazynu Time. Album „Blackout” został dodany do biblioteki i archiwów Rock & Roll Hall of Fame w 2012 roku. Piosenkarka mieszka w Los Angeles w Kalifornii.

Life of Robert Burns

Biographies & Memoirs

This is a biographical history book. Robert Burns is the best loved Scottish poet, admired not only for his verse and great love-songs, but also for his character, his high spirits, 'kirk-defying', hard drinking and womanising! He came to fame as a poet when he was 27 years old, and his lifestyle of wine, women and song made him famous all over Scotland. He was the son of a farmer, born in a cottage built by his father, in Alloway in Ayr. This cottage is now a museum, dedicated to Burns. As a boy, he always loved stories of the supernatural, told to him by an old widow who sometimes helped out on his fathers' farm and when Burns reached adulthood, he turned many of these stories into poems. After the death of his father in 1784, Burns inherited the farm but by 1786 he was in terrible financial difficulties: the farm was not successful and he had made two women pregnant. Burns decided to emigrate to Jamaica so to raise the money required for this journey, he published his 'Poems in the Scottish Dialect' in 1786, which was an immediate success. He was persuaded not to leave Scotland by Dr Thomas Blacklock and in 1787 an Edinburgh edition of the poems was published. He married Jean Armour in 1788 - she had been one of his many women during his early life. A very forgiving wife, she accepted and took responsibility for all Burns' children, legitimate and illegitimate alike. His eldest child, the first of three illegitimate daughters all called Elizabeth, was greeted with the poem 'Welcome to a Bastard Wean'.

Lettres à son frère Théo

Biographies & Memoirs

Ces {Lettres, }écrites entre 1873 et 1890, sont le témoignage déchirant d'un homme sur sa peinture. Van Gogh en sa genèse, Van Gogh en ses couleurs, travaillant sans relâche. L'homme à qui s'adresse un tel déchaînement de lucidité se prénomme Théodore, marchand de tableaux "apôtre" qui envoie à son grand frère tubes, brosses, toiles et argent -- quand c'est possible.

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