"Recollections of one of the grand masters of science fiction, on his storied career as a celebrated author and on his relationships with other luminaries in the field. This memoir is filled with all the humor and irreverence Harry Harrison's readers have come to expect from the New York Times bestselling author of the uproarious Stainless Steel Rat series. This also includes black and white photos spanning his sixty-year career"--

Confessions of a Serial Biographer is the story (or rather the stories) of a man who has mingled with celebrities since he was a teenage junior newspaper reporter. He has been involved with some of the iconic names of Hollywood and showbiz in general - people like Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck and Andre Previn, all of whom co-operated in his biographies. Then there was a wide spectrum that ranged from Morecambe and Wise to Ella Fitzgerald, to say nothing of Leonard Bernstein and Bob Hope. His most recent biography is a best-selling study of the life of Dean Martin, King of the Road. Here is an autobiography of a biographer of more than 30 books, who, while still at school, was captivated by the voice of a singer called Al Jolson. It is not just a story of smooth, friendly relations with his subjects. James Cagney sued him in the New York courts and Mr Peck tried to stop his book. Freedland won in both cases. But this is also the story of politicians like Harold Wilson, Alec Douglas Home ... and Tony Blair, to whom Michael Freedland gave some early media training. Not least of all, it is the tale of a radio programme called You Don't Have To Be Jewish, which after 23 years became the longest-running regional broadcast in Britain.

*Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography This is the story of the making of a world-famous sociologist. It is even more the story of a boy hustling to survive. Here in an astonishing and candidly written memoir by one of America's premier social scientists recounting the intensely personal story of his tormented youth in a ghetto within a ghetto. It etches the painful details of a boy's overcoming alienation and isolation in a hostile place in an unloving family. In the 1930s a small remnant community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants still resided in predominantly black Harlem. As shopkeepers trying to make out a marginal existence, Harlem's Jews were a minority within a minority. Into this restricted world the author of this book was born. Irving Louis Horowitz's parents had fled Russia, his father the victim of persecution in the Tsarist army during World War I. The boy's schoolmates were the children of black sharecroppers who had immigrated to the North. Poverty, language, and culture all cut off the Horowitz family from traditional community life, and the stress of a survival existence led to the trauma of a deteriorating family unit. Harlem and its environs, the Apollo and the Alhambra theaters, the Polo Grounds, and Central Park were the stage on which a youngster from this ghetto built a kind of self-reliance at the cost of social graces. The recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography, this new, augmented edition contains the author's reflection of the impact of the Great Depression on Harlem family life.

In 1964, in a daring night-time escape, the author and her husband fled Johannesburg and slipped across the border under the eyes of the security police. This autobiography documents her transformation from model school girl to saboteur, and her family's history of flight and exile through the generations.

Alfred Bader's achievements—as the founder of one of the most important companies in its field in the world, as a collector and dealer in Old Master paintings, and as a legendary philanthropist—make for fascinating reading. This book begins where Alfred Bader's first autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector, ended: with the boardroom coup in which he was dismissed from the chemical company he had built up from the ground. Bader now turns his enormous energy to Old Master paintings, in which he had become interested at a young age and in which he by now has the means to invest. The chapters that follow are roughly chronological, with some devoted to particularly meaningful paintings or groups of paintings, memorable auctions, mysteries, or discoveries relating to the artworks in the Bader Collection, while others are dedicated to friends, family, love, religion, charity, and, occasionally, chemistry.

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a memoir of coming-of-age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB’s persecution of refuseniks, a poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer’s remembrances are set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire’s collapse. His story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical and scientific upheavals of the twentieth century. In these recollections Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of the "third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," known as Logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War; and reflects on the celebrity brought by the publication of Man's Search for Meaning in 1945.

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. From Apes to Warlords, hardcover, Good, In good to very good condition. Some shelfwear, inscribed to free-end paper.

"A heartfelt account of how Rabbi Weinblatt confronts cancer after receiving this devastating diagnosis, this memoir traces his journey from beginning to end. It deals with his emotions, fears, and treatment and offers comfort, encouragement, and inspiration from a Jewish perspective. Using humor and coupling it with the wisdom of Jewish and Biblical sources as reflected in his sermons and other communications and writings, his words are a vehicle for sharing his experience and insights as he battles this disease. As a comforter to others, as well as a recipient of comfort, support, and love from family, friends, and members of his congregation, this book is also a valuable tool for clergy and health care professionals who interact with and counsel individuals in similar situations"--

"In 1966, at the ripe age of 22, Richard Goldstein approached The Village Voice with a novel idea. "I want to be a rock critic," he said. "What's that?" the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that changed our lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form. From his unique position in journalism, he saw the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s--and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, and dropped acid with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He was present for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the student uprising at Columbia, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer, and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends--Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two--and their early deaths came as a wrenching shock, fueling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite to a vast industry--and the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away. Another Little Piece of My Heart is the intimate memoir of the writer as a young man with profound ambition. It is also a sweeping personal account of a decade that no one else could provide--a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America"--

The autobiography of the late American radical civil rights lawyer William Moses Kunstler.

A master historian offers an eloquent and personal auto-history of his life and his ideas Twenty years ago, John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs in Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful--an auto-history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man. Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before. He includes also a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs's later studies. Last Rites is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations--an original book only John Lukacs could have written. Praise for Confessions of an Original Sinner: "[Lukacs] is an often witty and always fascinating--even entertaining--writer."--Washington Post

Don't Tell Sybil is a libidinous memoir by a master raconteur. George Melly (1926-2007) was impossible to ignore in London cultural circles between the 1950s and 90s. He first came to attention as a jazz singer, notable for risqué songs performed with verve rather than with great technical ability. An arresting personality, Melly dressed the part: his outrageous suits became a mark, and his talents as a raconteur soon brought him fame as a TV talkshow guest (usually late-night shows, for reasons of propriety). His cheerful bisexuality, recounted throughout his three volumes of autobiography, scandalized and then delighted a public whose own sexual attitudes changed over the decades they describe. Don't Tell Sybil is a supplementary volume of autobiography which treats in more detail Melly's youthful and long-lasting attraction to Surrealism, and his equally lengthy friendship with the contradictory character who headed up the English Surrealist group, E.L.T. Mesens. Their adventures form the core of this book--adventures of which Mesens did not want his wife, Sybil, to learn, hence the book's title. Mesens was a perfect subject, an artist and prankster who could be as punctilious and stingy as the most respectable bourgeois. Anecdotes of the artists who showed at Mesens' gallery, such as Schwitters and Magritte, pepper the narrative, a hugely affectionate memoir by a character who was truly larger than life. This new edition is augmented with previously unpublished photographs relating to Melly and English Surrealism.

The oral autobiography of the controversial Vienna Aktionist, with archival materials and additional writings by Nitsch A pioneer of Vienna's postwar avant-garde and the most notorious member of the Vienna Aktionist group, Hermann Nitsch (1938-2022) united performance, painting and musical composition in dramatic, often blood-soaked rituals. Newly translated into English from the original German, this oral autobiography offers the readers Nitsch's life story in his own words. Over the course of an in-depth interview with Austrian journalist Danielle Spera, he recounts his family history, early childhood, the evolution of his artistic practice and the fraught reception of his work, as well as his various romantic and financial struggles. The interview is illustrated with images of his work, in the studio and in action; archival photographs; and other ephemeral material, such as flyers and news clips. Excerpts from Nitsch's writings, including "Blood Organ Manifesto" and "Verbal Poetry of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre," punctuate the interview between Spera and the artist.

The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his older sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. Armed with these types of clues, Hemley quickly discovers that finding the truth in any life—even one’s own—is a fragmented and complex task. Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for finding and understanding God; it is also a quest to understand what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator. Upon its first release in 1998, Nola won ForeWord ’s Book of the Year Award for biography/memoir, the Washington State Book Award for biography/memoir, and the Independent Press Book Award for autobiography/memoir.

"Takes readers inside the life mind of Frank Mankiewicz, a man who was essentially 20th century America incarnate. Born into Hollywood royalty, Frank's father and uncle were responsible for such classic films as Citizen Kane and All About Eve. Growing up in Beverly Hills, guests at the dinner table included F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Marx brothers. At age eighteen Frank joined the Army, seeing action at the Battle of the Bulge. Returning home, he began work for Robert Kennedy's campaign, becoming the Senator's press secretary and a personal friend of the family. During a long career in media and politics Frank helped give birth to National Public Radio and served as a director for the nascent Peace Corps. Such a long and interesting life gave rise to a myriad of opinions, and, before he passed away at 92, Frank was not afraid to share them. In this intriguing, insightful, and often humorous memoir, Frank recalls his favorite memories while sharing his opinions on everything from Zionism to smartphones. Like story-time with the nation's most interesting grandfather, he will make you laugh, make you cry, and probably embarrass you. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way"--

For fifty years, Peter Brook's opera, stage, and film productions have held audiences spellbound. His visionary directing has created some of the most influential productions in contemporary theater. Now at the pinnacle of his career, Brook has given us his memoir, a luminous, inspiring work in which he reflects on his artistic fortunes, his idols and teachers, his philosophical path and personal journey. In this autobiography, the man 'The New York Times' has called "the English-speaking world's most eminent director" and 'The London Times' has named "theater's living legend" reveals the myriad sources behind his lifelong passion to find the most expressive way of telling a story. Whether in India's epic "Mahabharata" or a stage adaptation of Oliver Sak's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," South Africa's" Woza Albert" or "The Cherry Orchard," Brook's unique blend of practicality and vision creates unforgettable experiences for audiences worldwide.

"A young Jewish boy strolls through Vienna and witnesses acts of anti-Semitism during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. At night he dreams of a superhero, Judah Maccabee, who appears to defend Vienna's Jews. When he awakes, he knows there will be no Maccabean rescue and he weeps. Years pass, the boy, now an old man, returns to Vienna and sees the Jewish community and the Temple have been restored. He looks for the eternal light in his Temple and can't find it. Then suddenly it becomes clear to him: The light was there all the time; it was in his own heart"--

Pesach Bursrein, an old trouper from the Yiddish theater, recalls dramas both onstage and off in this memoir, which he dictated to his wife, Lillian Lux Burstein. The Story of Burstein's successful stage career is played out against the background of political turmoil in Europe, vignettes of life in small towns and big cities, friendships and rivalries among theater folk, family life, emigration to the United States, and tours through Europe, South America, Israel, and South Africa. Every personal anecdote tells the larger history: theater history and also the history of the Yiddish communities who were his audiences. While Burstein is a legend in Yiddish cheater, he was little known outside that world until he was celebrated in Arnon Goldfinger's acclaimed documentary Der Komedia11t. This memoir provides the first window for English readers into the other side of Yiddish culture—the Yiddish burlesque, the traveling Yiddish theater, and the music hall. It will not only delight readers but also reveal a social and cultural history never before described in such detail. Burstein's life is the story of popular Yiddish theater in the first half of the century.