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Biography

FOG OF WAR: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamma

FOG OF WAR: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamma

By: Lang, Janet M
$17.95
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The Fog of War provides the background behind the Academy Award-winning documentary by Errol Morris. In this intriguing work, editors James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, who served as academic advisors on the film, bring together film transcripts, documents, dialogues, and essays to explore the issues raised by Robert McNamara's life and work.
FORD MADOX FORD

FORD MADOX FORD

By: Saunders, Max
$19.00
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A critical biography of the great modernist editor and novelist.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) lived among several of the most important artists and writers of his time. Raised by Pre-Raphaelites and friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-WWI London, responsible for publishing Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. After the war, he moved to Paris, published Gertrude Stein, and discovered Ernest Hemingway. A prolific writer in his own right, Ford wrote the modernist triumph The Good Soldier (1915) as well as one of the finest war stories in English, the Parade's End tetralogy (1924-1928). Drawing on newly discovered letters and photographs, this critical biography further demonstrates Ford's vital contribution to modern fiction, poetry, and criticism.

FRANZ LISZT AND HIS WORLD

FRANZ LISZT AND HIS WORLD

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No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism.

The essays brought together in Franz Liszt and His World advance our understanding of the composer with fresh perspectives and an emphasis on historical contexts. Rainer Kleinertz examines Wagner's enthusiasm for Liszt's symphonic poem Orpheus; Christopher Gibbs discusses Liszt's pathbreaking Viennese concerts of 1838; Dana Gooley assesses Liszt against the backdrop of antivirtuosity polemics; Ryan Minor investigates two cantatas written in honor of Beethoven; Anna Celenza offers new insights about Liszt's experience of Italy; Susan Youens shows how Liszt's songs engage with the modernity of Heinrich Heine's poems; James Deaville looks at how publishers sustained Liszt's popularity; and Leon Botstein explores Liszt's role in the transformation of nineteenth-century preoccupations regarding religion, the nation, and art.


Franz Liszt and His World also includes key biographical and critical documents from Liszt's lifetime, which open new windows on how Liszt was viewed by his contemporaries and how he wished to be viewed by posterity. Introductions to and commentaries on these documents are provided by Peter Bloom, José Bowen, James Deaville, Allan Keiler, Rainer Kleinertz, Ralph Locke, Rena Charnin Mueller, and Benjamin Walton.

FROM MONK TO MONEY MANAGER: A Former Monk's Financial Guide To Becoming a Little Bit Wealthy-and Why That's Okay

FROM MONK TO MONEY MANAGER: A Former Monk's Financial Guide To Becoming a Little Bit Wealthy-and Why That's Okay

By: Lynam, Doug
$17.99
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Build a better financial future for yourself and the world. Former monk turned financial advisor, Doug Lynam, shares the rules of money management that will change your approach to earning, saving, and investing.

From Monk to Money Manager is an entertaining and self-deprecating journey through Lynam's relationship with the almighty dollar--his childhood in a rich family, the long-haired hippie days running away from materialism, time in the Marine Corps looking for selfless service, and his twenty years in the monastery under a vow of poverty that led to his current profession as a financial advisor. In this unique look at wealth from a spiritual perspective, Lynam shares his belief that God doesn't expect us to live in poverty. The truth is, we need financial peace so we can help others. When money becomes a part of our spiritual practice, used in love and service, it can bring us closer to our highest spiritual ideals.

With humor and humility, Lynam uses stories told through the lens of his own money mistakes, and those of counseling clients, to understand how our attitudes about money hold us back. He also provides clear, step-by-step guidance on how to grow a little bit wealthy. His insights include how to build a compassionate relationship to our finances; some of the good, bad, and ugly truths about money; and the tricks to unlocking financial freedom.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

By: Bird, Robert
$16.95
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Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, The Idiot--the complex and prolific Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) is responsible for some of our greatest literary works and most fascinating characters. Praised by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, he is also acknowledged by critics to be a preeminent writer of psychological fiction and a precursor of the twentieth-century existentialism. Set in the troubled political and social world of nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky's stories were shaped by the great suffering and difficult life the author himself experienced. Robert Bird explores these influences in this new biography of the prominent Russian author.

Bird traces Dostoevsky's path from his harsh childhood through his years as a political revolutionary and finally to his development into a writer, who fought his battles through the printed word. Delving into Dostoevsky's youth, Bird reveals his struggles with epilepsy and his despotic treatment at the hands of his father, a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. Bird reveals how Dostoevsky, who championed the downtrodden throughout his career, first came into contact with the poor and oppressed through the hospital. He then outlines the years after Dostoevsky's arrest and near-execution for being a member of an underground liberal intellectual group in 1849, detailing his subsequent exile with hard labor in Siberia and compulsory service in the army. As Bird illuminates how these grueling experiences contributed to the writing of novels like Notes from the Underground, he also describes how they instilled in the author a craving for social justice and quest for form that spurred his literary achievements. A fascinating look at this major writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky will pique the interest of any lover of literature.
G W F HEGEL THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYST

G W F HEGEL THE PHILOSOPHICAL SYST

By: Kainz, Howard P
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Among philosophical systems, Hegel's is unique in its dialectical-speculative approach, its non-foundational circularity, and its coordination with the history of philosophy. In this study, Howard P. Kainz emphasizes this uniqueness by focusing on Hegel's methodology, terminology, metaphorical and paradoxical language, interpretation of the history of philosophy, and special contributions to metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, philosophical anthropology, political philosophy, and other areas. Kainz forgoes customary paragraph-by-paragraph or section-by-section analysis in order to focus on Hegel's system as a whole and its seminal ideas, making generous use of representative texts. Kainz gives special attention to the interrelationship between dialectical methodology and paradoxical propositions; the prevalence of metaphor in the philosophy of nature; and the close interrelationship between Christian doctrine and Hegelian speculation. A rich assortment of diagrams and tables further elucidates Kainz's systematic and historical analyses.
GALILEO: WATCHER OF THE SKIES

GALILEO: WATCHER OF THE SKIES

By: Wootton, David
$22.00
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A provocative and penetrating new life of Galileo, placing the man, his achievements, and his failures in the broader history of the Scientific Revolution

Galileo (1564-1642) is one of the most important and controversial figures in the history of science. A hero of modern science and key to its birth, he was also a deeply divided man: a scholar committed to the establishment of scientific truth yet forced to concede the importance of faith, and a brilliant analyst of the elegantly mathematical workings of nature yet bungling and insensitive with his own family.

Tackling Galileo as astronomer, engineer, and author, David Wootton places him at the center of Renaissance culture. He traces Galileo through his early rebellious years; the beginnings of his scientific career constructing a "new physics"; his move to Florence seeking money, status, and greater freedom to attack intellectual orthodoxies; his trial for heresy and narrow escape from torture; and his house arrest and physical (though not intellectual) decline. Wootton reveals much that is new--from Galileo's premature Copernicanism to a previously unrecognized illegitimate daughter--and, controversially, rejects the long-established orthodoxy which holds that Galileo was a good Catholic.

Absolutely central to Galileo's significance--and to science more broadly--is the telescope, the potential of which Galileo was the first to grasp. Wootton makes clear that it totally revolutionized and galvanized scientific endeavor to discover new and previously unimagined facts. Drawing extensively on Galileo's voluminous letters, many of which were self-censored and sly, this is an original, arresting, and highly readable biography of a difficult, remarkable Renaissance genius.

GOETHE: LIFE AS A WORK OF ART

GOETHE: LIFE AS A WORK OF ART

By: Safranski, Rüdiger
$23.95
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A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and--as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes--a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe's entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a "fresh and authentic" (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending "artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings" of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, "[Safranski's] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy" of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe's greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.
GORBACHEV: HIS LIFE AND TIMES

GORBACHEV: HIS LIFE AND TIMES

By: Taubman, William
$24.95
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When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?

Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

GRANT

GRANT

By: Chernow, Ron
$22.00
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The #1 New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017

"Eminently readable but thick with import . . . Grant hits like a Mack truck of knowledge." --Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.

Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had ended dismally, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in war, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign, and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Along the way, Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. Grant's military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff members.

More important, he sought freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him "the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race." After his presidency, he was again brought low by a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, only to resuscitate his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

With lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as "nothing heroic... and yet the greatest hero." Chernow's probing portrait of Grant's lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America's greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of our finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.

Named one of the best books of the year by Goodreads - Amazon - The New York Times - Newsday - BookPage - Barnes and Noble - Wall Street Journal

GREAT CONTEMPORARIES: CHURCHILL REFLECTS ON FDR, HITLER, KIPLING, CHAPLIN, BALFOUR AND OTHER GIANTS OF HIS AGE

GREAT CONTEMPORARIES: CHURCHILL REFLECTS ON FDR, HITLER, KIPLING, CHAPLIN, BALFOUR AND OTHER GIANTS OF HIS AGE

By: Churchill, Winston
$22.00
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Churchill Sizes Up the Giants of His Age, Offers Wisdom for Our Own

Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the strength of "his mastery of historical and biographical description." Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries(1937), which features Churchill's brief lives of those he called "Great Men of our age." ISI Books is proud to publish a brand-new, illustrated edition of this neglected classic. Great Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia, and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. This edition--the first in twenty years--includes five essays that have never appeared in any previous version, some thirty black-and-white photographs, and an enlightening introduction and annotations by noted Churchill scholar James W. Muller. Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege. Churchill's keen observations take on new importance in our own age of roiling political change. Ultimately, Great Contemporaries provides fascinating insight into the statesman's perspective. Churchill's objective is clear: he tries to learn from these giants what makes a man great. He approaches his subjects with a measuring eye, finding their limitations at least as revealing as their merits. This handsome new edition of Great Contemporaries brings back Churchill's unmatched insights and unforgettable prose for a new generation of readers and leaders.
GREATEST KNIGHT: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF WILLIAM MARSHAL, THE POWER BEHIND FIVE ENGLISH THRONES

GREATEST KNIGHT: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF WILLIAM MARSHAL, THE POWER BEHIND FIVE ENGLISH THRONES

By: Asbridge, Thomas
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A renowned scholar brings to life medieval England's most celebrated knight, William Marshal--providing an unprecedented and intimate view of this age and the legendary warrior class that shaped it.

Caught on the wrong side of an English civil war and condemned by his father to the gallows at age five, William Marshal defied all odds to become one of England's most celebrated knights. Thomas Asbridge's rousing narrative chronicles William's rise, using his life as a prism to view the origins, experiences, and influence of the knight in British history.

In William's day, the brutish realities of war and politics collided with romanticized myths about an Arthurian "golden age," giving rise to a new chivalric ideal. Asbridge details the training rituals, weaponry, and battle tactics of knighthood, and explores the codes of chivalry and courtliness that shaped their daily lives. These skills were essential to survive one of the most turbulent periods in English history--an era of striking transformation, as the West emerged from the Dark Ages.

A leading retainer of five English kings, Marshal served the great figures of this age, from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart and his infamous brother John, and was involved in some of the most critical phases of medieval history, from the Magna Carta to the survival of the Angevin/Plantagenet dynasty. Asbridge introduces this storied knight to modern readers and places him firmly in the context of the majesty, passion, and bloody intrigue of the Middle Ages.

The Greatest Knight features 16 pages of black-and-white and color illustrations.

GREEK TO ME: ADVENTURES OF THE COMMA QUEEN

GREEK TO ME: ADVENTURES OF THE COMMA QUEEN

By: Norris, Mary
$15.95
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Mary Norris, The New Yorker's Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In Greek to Me, she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. Greek to Me is filled with Norris's memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine--and more than a few Greek men.

Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience

Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience

By: Meulders, Michel
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The first biography in English of a nineteenth-century German scientist whose experimental approach influences today's neuroscience.

Although Hermann von Helmholtz was one of most remarkable figures of nineteenth-century science, he is little known outside his native Germany. Helmholtz (1821-1894) made significant contributions to the study of vision and perception and was also influential in the painting, music, and literature of the time; one of his major works analyzed tone in music. This book, the first in English to describe Helmholtz's life and work in detail, describes his scientific studies, analyzes them in the context of the science and philosophy of the period--in particular the German Naturphilosophie--and gauges his influence on today's neuroscience.

Helmholtz, trained by Johannes Müller, one of the best physiologists of his time, used a resolutely materialistic and empirical scientific method in his research. His work, eclipsed at the beginning of the twentieth century by new ideas in neurophysiology, has recently been rediscovered. We can now recognize in Helmholtz's methods--which were based on his belief in the interconnectedness of physiology and psychology--the origins of neuroscience.

HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO

HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO

By: Gordon-Reed, Annette
$18.95
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This epic work--named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times--tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A LIFE

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A LIFE

By: Walls, Laura Dassow
$20.00
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"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.

Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau's life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and "America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next." By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?

Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.

"The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.

HIGHER THAN HOPE: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela

HIGHER THAN HOPE: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela

By: Meer, Fatima
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The only authorized biography of this world-famous and most distinguished political leader draws on letters and reminiscences from Mandela himself. And although the name and political message of Nelson Mandela are well known, the man behind them is not. Now Fatima Meer brings into sharp focus the background of this fascinating man. Photos.
HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER

HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER

By: Weiner, Jonathan
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Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.

The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this dramatic and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's -- diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more.

"The Heywoods' story taught me many things about the nature of healing in the new millennium," Weiner writes. "They also taught me about what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are human beings -- about what Lucretius calls 'the ever-living wound of love.'"

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
HYACINTH GIRL

HYACINTH GIRL

By: Gordon, Lyndall
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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon, while his essays influenced a school of literary criticism. Raised in St. Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church. Like the authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome of reserve. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters. She was the source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land. She was his hidden muse.

That correspondence--some 1,131 letters--released by Princeton University's Firestone Library only in 2020--shows us in exquisite detail the hidden Eliot. Gordon plumbs the archive to recast Hale's role as the first and foremost woman of the poet's life, tracing the ways in which their ardor and his idealization of her figured in his art. For Eliot's relationships, as Gordon explains, were inextricable from his poetry, and Emily Hale was not the sole woman who entered his work. Gordon sheds new light on Eliot's first marriage to the flamboyant Vivienne; re-creates his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, a wartime woman of action; and finally, explores his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher, whose devotion to Eliot and whose physical ease transformed him into a man "made for love."

This stunning portrait of Eliot will compel not only a reassessment of the man--judgmental, duplicitous, intensely conflicted, and indubitably brilliant--but of the role of the choice women in his life and his writings. And at the center was Emily Hale in a love drama that Eliot conceived and the inspiration for the poetry he wrote that would last beyond their time. She was his "Hyacinth Girl."

INTERVIEWS WITH ICONS: Flashing on the Sixties

INTERVIEWS WITH ICONS: Flashing on the Sixties

By: Law, Lisa
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In this engaging document of the times, award-winning photographer and documentary filmmaker Lisa Law uses 28 interviews with 1960s 'icons' to expand and explain the marching orders for a whole generation: 'make love not war, ' 'tune in, turn on, drop out, ' 'Question Authority.' Perhaps as much as anything, "Interviews with Icons" serves as a direct rebuttal to the revisionists of recent years who debate the relevance and legacy of the '60s and challenge the efficacy of the counterculture and the 'revolution' which it advocated and idealistically pursued. It would seem, now, looking back, that time, science, and history have substantiated the '60s advocates' claims. In almost every interview there is mention of ecology and expansion of consciousness; as Paul Krassner says, 'Sex, drugs and rock & roll were only the visible signs of what was basically a spiritual revolution', or as Lenny Bruce said: 'People are leaving the Church and going back to God.' The 'We' generation's representatives reminisce on everything from communes to the bomb, from Native Americans to LSD, from the death of JFK to the death of rock & roll- all singing the epoch's praises to the melodies of its songs while 'flying their freak flag high.' These through-lines, and the expanded soulful remembrances that support them, serve as a mirror held up to the era and its participants who witnessed the coming together of evolutionary and revolutionary forces. 'A social epiphany, ' as Ginsberg calls it. Or, as Ram Dass says, 'It was a time when we realized that process and product were the same thing, and that Love is a stronger power than fear. We were looking at the world with fresh-washed eyes.'

Collected here are not only philosophical musings, but some great personal stories such as Dennis Hopper's telling of Dylan's writing 'The Ballad of Easy Rider, ' or Viet Nam vet Craig Preston's account of his homeless life in Golden Gate Park. The book not only contains a gala of famous names (Leary, Fonda, Ginsberg, Taj Mahal...), but also chronicles many of the behind-the-scenes characters and movers-and -shakers from the flowerpower years (Mountain Girl, Jahanara Romney, Viola Spolin, Ron Thelin, Rick Klein...) who have equally integral stories

ISAAC MURPHY

ISAAC MURPHY

By: Mooney, Katherine C
$25.00
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The rise and fall of one of America's first Black sports celebrities

"Deeply and impressively researched. . . . Ms. Mooney pieces together a narrative with an arc so tight and clean that it's a wonder it actually happened. . . . It reads, in other words, like a novel, and that is because the author brought not just rigor, but craft."--Max Watman, Wall Street Journal

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes--and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.

At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences.

Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy's troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy's personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.

JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

JAMES BALDWIN: A BIOGRAPHY

By: Leeming, David
$17.95
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"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." --The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." --Boston Globe

James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon--Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen--he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference.

A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time.

In this biography, David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin's life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to "end the racial nightmare and achieve our country."

JANE AUSTEN: A BRIEF LIFE

JANE AUSTEN: A BRIEF LIFE

By: Stafford, Fiona
$12.95
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An elegant and accessible introduction to the life and works of one of England's greatest and most popular novelists

"I want to salute Fiona Stafford's brilliant [book]. . . . It tells one all one needs to know about Jane Austen, and, best of all, leaves one wanting to read the novels once more, and better."--Jane Aiken Hodge

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz?

In this graceful introduction to the author's life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen's six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron--full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.

JERSEY BREAKS

JERSEY BREAKS

By: Pinsky, Robert
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In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life's challenges, such as his mother's traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.

Candid, engaging, and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

JEW AMONG ROMANS: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS

JEW AMONG ROMANS: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS

By: Raphael, Frederic
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From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37-c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world.

Joseph ben Mattathias's transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Raphael brings a scholar's rigor, a historian's perspective, and a novelist's imagination to this project. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus's life and his singular literary achievements to examine how Josephus has been viewed by posterity, finding in him the prototype for the un-Jewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora. Raphael's insightful portraits of  Yehuda Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Kraus, Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt extend and illuminate the Josephean worldview Raphael so eloquently lays out.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

By: Adler, Jeremy
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This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe's major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe's greatest work, Faust, Jeremy Adler also provides many original readings of Goethe's poetry, beginning with the poems written in his early youth. Alongside Goethe's work, Adler analyzes the incidents of his life, including his love affairs and his meetings with the luminaries of his age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Uniquely, Adler also shows how Goethe's encyclopedic interest in literature, science, philosophy, law, and many other fields became important for a wide range of later scientists and thinkers. Among the figures he influenced were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns--a maker of modernity.
JOHN CAGE

JOHN CAGE

By: Haskins, Rob
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American writer, composer, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912-92) is best known for his experimental composition 4'33," a musical score in which the performer does not play an instrument during the duration of the piece. The purpose, Cage said, was for the audience to listen to the sounds of the environment around them while the piece was performed. Groundbreaking pieces such as 4'33", as well as Sonatas and Interludes not only established Cage as a leading figure in the postwar avant-garde movement, but also cemented the enduring controversy surrounding his work.

In this new biography, Rob Haskins explores Cage's radical approach to art and aesthetics and his belief that everyday life and art are one and the same. Scrutinizing Cage's emphasis on chance over intention, which rejected traditional artistic methods and caused an uproar among his peers, Haskins elucidates the ideas that lay behind these pillars of Cage's work. Haskins also demystifies the influence of Eastern cultures, particularly Zen Buddhism, on Cage, including his use of the Chinese text I Ching as his standard composition tool in all his work after 1951. Adding to our understanding of the art, music, and ideas of the twentieth century, this book provides an engaging look at a man who continues to challenge and inspire artists worldwide.
JUNG: A BIOGRAPHY

JUNG: A BIOGRAPHY

By: Wehr, Gerhard
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This carefully documented biography weaves the many colored threads of Jung's life into a unified pattern, giving the reader the most detailed picture available of this great psychologist's contribution to our understanding of human consciousness. Wehr unifies the biographical details and external developments of Jung's life with his internal development as seen in Jung's memoirs and work.
KAFKA

KAFKA

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An authoritative collection of essays celebrating Franz Kafka's life and work.

Franz Kafka died in 1924 when he was not yet forty-one years old. During his life, he published only seven small books, but he left behind three unfinished novels and a mass of stories, reflections, and personal writings that were published after his death. In particular, his novels, alongside short stories such as The Judgement and The Metamorphosis, have made him one of the most widely read, significant, and influential writers of the twentieth century.

Coinciding with the centennial of Kafka's death, this collection of essays, illustrated with manuscripts, archival material, postcards, and family photographs, contextualizes Kafka in his life and times while showing how his own experiences nourished his imagination. This book is a celebration not just of Kafka's achievements and creativity, but also of how--even a century after his death--he continues to inspire new literary, theatrical, and cinematic creations around the world.

KARL MARX

KARL MARX

By: Thomas, Paul
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He was relatively unknown in his lifetime, but Karl Marx's theories about society, economics, and politics changed the world, led to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union and the creation of the People's Republic of China, and inspired variants from Leninism and Stalinism to Trotskyism and Maoism. Marx is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age, but in recent times "Marxism" has become a vague, contestable, and uncertain term. In this concise, accessible book, Paul Thomas casts a clarifying light on Marx's life and writings, providing a cogent introduction to a contemporary audience.

Illuminating Marx's development as a critical thinker and revolutionary politician, Thomas explores how the events of Marx's life influenced his doctrines. Thomas follows Marx from his birth into a wealthy family in Prussia, to his period of study of philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and his subsequent work as a journalist for radical newspapers in Cologne and Paris, where he began to develop the concepts that would lead to Marxism. As Marx found himself exiled to Brussels and finally to London, Thomas illustrates how he was inspired by his relationships with other socialist thinkers, particularly Friedrich Engels, and the tumultuous and fluctuating state of the governments in Europe. These experiences and their influence on Marx inspired The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, along with the many other books and pamphlets that continue to be read and discussed today. A valuable resource for anyone trying to understand the governments, wars, and movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Karl Marx is an enlightening book about this potent thinker and the world that created him.