George Best needs little introduction. A legend in his own lifetime, he is undoubtedly the greatest footballer the UK has ever produced. Blessed with an extraordinary gift he brought a beauty and grace to the game never before seen. But Best was unable to cope with the success and fame his football genius brought. His fabled story is littered with tales of women and sex and, of course, alcohol. Much has been written about Best, but very little substantiated by the man himself. That is until George Best opened his heart and engaged us in one of the most exhilarating life stories for years, Blessed . In his own words George recounts the halcyon days at Manchester United, the big games and European Cup win of '68. And then there's the heartbreaking truth about the death of his mother and his struggles with alcohol that forced him to face up to a life without drink. Blessed reveals the man behind the up-for-a-laugh, boozy, womanizing stereotype that had dogged George Best for so long. Open and honest about his mistakes, George is also incredibly candid about his triumphs, his regrets, and, only three years before his death, what he had hoped for the future. 'Don't coach him, he's a genius' Sir Matt Busby 'Unquestionably the greatest' Sir Alex Ferguson

"Good Things Happen Slowly is [Fred Hersch's] memoir. It's the story of the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz player; a deep look into the cloistered jazz culture that made such a status both transgressive and ground-breaking; and a profound exploration of how Hersch's two-month-long coma in 2007 led to his creating some of the finest, most direct, and most emotionally compelling music of his career."--Jacket.

Frank Bank's story is a sometimes wild, sometimes bawdy, often poignant, always funny account of a real-life Louie Louie who led a nation to California-dreamin'.

A meditation on the transforming nature of intimacy, stripped to its essentials in the relationship between patient and therapist." "When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself and fear. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, vulnerability, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world." "Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life - her responses to terminal illness, her close relationships to gay male friends, the risky terrain of sexual fantasies, and the grace of her engagement with Buddhism.

In Bad Boy , renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art—his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings. Bad Boy follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.

Examines Arendt's relationship with Heidegger before 1933 and from 1950, noting its problematic nature because of Heidegger's exploitative character, his Nazi sympathies, and his antisemitism. Although during the Nazi period Heidegger aided a few Jews, in general he collaborated with the Nazi drive to cleanse the universities of Jews, including his own teacher, Husserl. As early as 1929 he had written a letter to a high official in the Ministry of Education warning of the "Verjudung" of German intellectual life. Asserts that after the war Heidegger used Arendt as his advocate to exculpate him before the world.

His book is difficult for me to describe, I guess I can only say that along with 'Man's Search for Meaning' by Viktor E. Frankl, 'Souls on Fire' by Elie Wiesel is among the two books that have changed my life.In these powerful and beautiful stories of Jewish Hasidic masters Elie Wiesel teaches us to fight depression by deliberately cultivating joy, that we must enjoy life in spite of life, that death is never the answer, and that that life is sacred, so much so that in spite of anything we have suffered we must say yes to this life.

In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."

An autobiography by Zuroff (born in 1948 in New York), focusing on his relentless search for Holocaust perpetrators, both Nazis and their local collaborators, mainly in Eastern Europe, who after World War II found refuge in the USA and other Western countries. In 1978 Zuroff began to work at the newly established Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and from 1979 he worked with the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, created to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in the USA. In the late 1980s he launched a campaign on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center to prosecute Nazi criminals and collaborators who had entered Australia, Canada, Britain, and other Western countries posing as refugees. In the course of his activities, Zuroff was confronted with the reluctance of authorities in Western countries to punish citizens who had been Holocaust perpetrators; many of those who Zuroff was able to trace died unpunished. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he launched a similar campaign in formerly communist countries; his attempts to convince Latvian and Estonian governments to de-heroize mass murderers such as Herberts Cukurs and Evald Mikson, and to bring to trial numerous others, were in vain. In 1998-99, however, he was successful in achieving the extradition to Croatia from Argentina and then the trial and punishment of Dinko Šakić. Buoyed by the success, Zuroff began Operation Last Chance, aiming to trace and bring to trial former mass murderers from the Baltics, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, Romania, etc. Relates some achievements of this operation. Zuroff's activities have occasionally evoked antisemitic and neo-Nazi backlash in the Baltics, Croatia, and elsewhere.

"The fabulous life and times of one of our wittiest and most endearing and enduring caricaturists--in his own words and inimitable art. Alongside more than 150 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures--and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork--Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: a poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian-immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at the age of eight; his time as a student at New York's famed High School of Music & Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast and which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and four children; his many friends in New York's art and literary circles. Sorel charts the highlights of his remarkable career as the "young lefty becomes an older lefty," and, in magazines and newspapers, murals, cartoons, and comic strips, he steadily lampooned--and celebrated--American cultural and political life. He sets his story in the parallel trajectory of American presidents, from FDR to the present day--with the candor and depth of insight that could only come from someone who lived through it all--revealing the uproarious ways in which the personal and political collide in his mordant artwork"--

"In the 1920s, bored with teaching art to schoolkids, Edith Head bluffed her way into a job in the Paramount wardrobe department. Soon she rose to the position of Chief Costume Designer, and supervised virtually every Paramount film until the late 1960s. This book traces a career that spanned the history of 20th-century film"--Provided by publisher.

Including the True Story of the Remarkable Love Affair between Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis There has probably never been a less likely couple: she, an American divorcee and the mother of two young boys; he, an Oxford don and confirmed bachelor who inhabited an eccentric household with his brother, a retired Royal Army major. Yet the relationship of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, portrayed in this moving autobiography by her son Douglas Gresham, was destined to become of the most deeply moving love stories of our time.

Uses excerpts from letters, memoirs, and documents to recreate the life of Ada Byron, daughter of the English poet, and discusses her contributions to mathematics and her friendships with the leading mathematicians of the period

During Yoshimasa's reign, the aesthetic taste of the Japanese was shaped: the n› theater flourished, Japanese gardens were developed, and the tea ceremony had its origins in a small room at the Silver Pavilion. Flower arrangement, ink painting, and shoin-zukuri architecture began or became of major importance under Yoshimasa. Poets introduced their often barely literate warlord-hosts to the literary masterpieces of the past and taught them how to compose poetry. Even the most barbarous warlord came to want the trappings of culture that would enable him to feel like a civilized man. This long-neglected but critical period in Japanese history at last has the thorough treatment it deserves.

Journalist Dina Rabinovitch had just turned 40 when was diagnosed with breast cancer in September 2004. At that point she didn't know a thing about the disease. By the time of her death in autumn 2007, she was an expert. Her experience of the condition and its treatment, from diagnosis through mastectomy to remission and reoccurrence is recounted in this down-to-earth memoir, covering everything from trialling the last anti-cancer drugs to what to wear that's stylish after surgery. Warm, lively, at times irreverent, Rabinovitch's brave story of juggling a hectic career and a large, extended family while living - and dying - with cancer is essential reading.

Retired press spokesman Dickie Arbiter recounts his experiences as a Buckingham Palace press secretary for Queen Elizabeth II, beginning with his appointment in 1988 until his retirement in 2000.