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Biography
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Book Riot
"Absorbing, meticulously researched.... [Sperber] succeeds in the primary task of all biography, re-creating a man who leaps off the page." --Jonathan Freedland, New York Times Book Review
KING OF ADOBE: REIES LÓPEZ TIJERINA, LOST PROPHET OF THE CHICANO MOVEMENT
This fascinating full biography of Tijerina (1926-2015) offers a fresh and unvarnished look at one of the most controversial, criticized, and misunderstood activists of the civil rights era. Basing her work on painstaking archival research and new interviews with key participants in Tijerina's life and career, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, as well as evidence of extreme religiosity and possible mental illness, Oropeza's narrative captures the life of a man--alternately mesmerizing and repellant--who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.
--Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Brutally honest and rich in detail, this posthumously published diary of a twenty-seven-year-old Vietcong woman doctor, saved from destruction by an American soldier, gives us fresh insight into the lives of those fighting on the other side of the Vietnam War. It is a story of the struggle for one's ideals amid the despair and grief of war, but most of all, it is a story of hope in the most dire circumstances. "As much a drama of feelings as a drama of war."
--Seth Mydans, New York Times "A book to be read by and included in any course on the literature of the war. . . . A major contribution."
--Chicago Tribune "An illuminating picture of what life was like among the enemy guerrillas, especially in the medical community."
--The VVA Veteran, official publication of Vietnam Veterans of America
LIFE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI: A NEW TRANSLATION
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568) is a classic of cultural history. In his monumental assembly of artists' lives, no life is more vivid than that of Leonardo da Vinci, a near-contemporary of Vasari. Illustrated with the works of art discussed by Vasari, and including a selection of Da Vinci's studies of science and technology, The Life of Leonardo da Vinci paints an intriguing picture of the progress of art in the hands of the master. Succinct notes also provide new insights in light of modern knowledge of Da Vinci's career.
This beautiful gift edition offers a literary translation by eminent scholar Martin Kemp that respects the sixteenth-century Italian, transposing Vasari's vocabulary into its modern equivalent. Translated in partnership with Lucy Russell, the text will be the first to integrate the 1550 edition and the expanded version of 1568. This fascinating and accessible read coincides with the five hundredth anniversary of Da Vinci's death.
MAD AT THE WORLD: A LIFE OF JOHN STEINBECK
The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Pulitzer Prize finalist William Souder explores Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty, fascinated by the guileless decency of the downtrodden denizens of Cannery Row, and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice--paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy--setting him apart from the writers of the so-called lost generation.
A man by turns quick-tempered, compassionate, and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck could be a difficult person to like. Obsessed with privacy, he was mistrustful of people. Next to writing, his favorite things were drinking and womanizing and getting married, which he did three times. And while he claimed indifference about success, his mid-career books and movie deals made him a lot of money--which passed through his hands as quickly as it came in. And yet Steinbeck also took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality, and the urgency of ecological collapse, all of which drive public debate to this day.
Steinbeck remains our great social realist novelist, the writer who gave the dispossessed and the disenfranchised a voice in American life and letters. Eloquent, nuanced, and deeply researched, Mad at the World captures the full measure of the man and his work.
MAIMONIDES: Life & World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds
MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW: MY LIFE AND TIMES
Now in his eighties and still touring, Ralph has at last grown into his voice and is ready to tell his story. In Man of Constant Sorrow, Ralph looks back on his career in what most call bluegrass but what he prefers to call old time mountain music. He recounts the creation of hundreds of classic tracks, including White Dove, Rank Stranger, and his signature song, Man of Constant Sorrow. He tells tales from a life spent on road with his band the Clinch Mountain Boys, explains his distinctive Stanley style of banjo-playing, crosses paths with everyone from Bill Monroe to Bob Dylan, and reflects on his late-career resurgence sparked by an unlikely Grammy win in 2002 for his song O Death. He also raises a dirge for Appalachia, his mountain home that is quickly disappearing. Harmonized with equal measures of tragedy and triumph, Man of Constant Sorrow is the stirring testament of a giant of American music.
MARK TWAIN: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
An engrossing, unadulterated biography of "Bloody Mary"--elder daughter of Henry VIII, Catholic zealot, and England's first reigning Queen
Mary Tudor was the first woman to inherit the throne of England. Reigning through one of Britain's stormiest eras, she earned the nickname "Bloody Mary" for her violent religious persecutions. She was born a princess, the daughter of Henry VIII and the Spanish Katherine of Aragon. Yet in the wake of Henry's break with Rome, Mary, a devout Catholic, was declared illegitimate and was disinherited. She refused to accept her new status or to recognize Henry's new wife, Anne Boleyn, as queen. She faced imprisonment and even death.
As not only the most powerful player in World War II, but also the most eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny, Churchill recounts this epic time in world history. Remarkable for his grand sweep and incisive firsthand observations, Memoirs of the Second World War is a vital and illuminating work that retains the drama, eyewitness details, and magisterial prose of his classic six-volume history.
Churchill's accounts offers an invaluable view of pivotal events of the twentieth century.
Andrzej Franaszek's award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz--the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980--offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology.
Franaszek recounts the poet's personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union's postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Milosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004.
Franaszek traces Milosz's changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Milosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Milosz's poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Milosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.
MISS STEPHEN'S APPRENTICESHIP: HOW VIRGINIA STEPHEN BECAME VIRGINIA WOOLF
A definitive biography of the great French essayist and thinker
One of the most important writers and thinkers of the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) helped invent a literary genre that seemed more modern than anything that had come before. But did he do it, as he suggests in his Essays, by retreating to his chateau and stoically detaching himself from his violent times? Philippe Desan overturns this long standing myth by showing that Montaigne was constantly connected to and concerned with realizing his political ambitions--and that the literary and philosophical character of the Essays largely depends on them. Desan shows how Montaigne conceived of each edition of the Essays as an indispensable prerequisite to the next stage of his public career. It was only after his political failure that Montaigne took refuge in literature, and even then it was his political experience that enabled him to find the right tone for his genre. The most comprehensive and authoritative biography of Montaigne yet written, this sweeping narrative offers a fascinating new picture of his life and work.
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle
Finalist for the George Washington Prize
Finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection
"An important book...[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." --Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books
MUHAMMAD HIS LIFE BASED ON THE EARLIEST SOURCES REVISED EDITION
MY TRAITOR'S HEART: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience
NJINGA OF ANGOLA: AFRICA’S WARRIOR QUEEN
"The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates "This fine biography attempts to reconcile her political acumen with the human sacrifices, infanticide, and slave trading by which she consolidated and projected power."
--New Yorker "Queen Njinga was by far the most successful of African rulers in resisting Portuguese colonialism... Tactically pious and unhesitatingly murderous...a commanding figure in velvet slippers and elephant hair ripe for big-screen treatment; and surely, as our social media age puts it, one badass woman."
--Karen Shook, Times Higher Education