The ultimate Eighties heart-throb Jason Donovan came close to destroying his body, mind, soul and career with drugs. Never one to shy away from the truth, Jason writes candidly about Kylie and winning the battle with his demons in the paperback of his bestselling bombshell autobiography. Jason Donovan burst onto our TVs in the 80s as Scott Robinson from Neighbours, one half of TV couple Scott and Charlene with Kylie Minogue. Kylie and Jason became the celebrity couple of the eighties and released the number one Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit Especially For You in 1988. But behind the squeaky-clean popstar image was a man increasingly addicted to recreational drugs and on a spiralling downwards path until the love of a good woman pulled him through. His pop career launched, Jason went on to sell over 30 million records worldwide and appeared in West End musicals such as Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat and, more recently, The Rocky Horror Show. But just as Jason reached the pinnacle of his career, everything collapsed around him. When Jason sued style magazine The Face for calling him gay, the press tore him apart. Years of binge drug taking and partying to excess followed. In his frank and honest account of his life, Jason talks candidly about the drugs that nearly saw the end of his career, about his relationship with the princess of pop, Kylie Minogue, and how he finally got his own very happy ending with the woman who saved him, his partner Angela and their two children.

James Salter's exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all. Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature's master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey. Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is "like a handful of radium"), Dreiser, Celine, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons. Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of "importance"? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away. -- Amazon.com.

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

The compassion of Reb Moshe-Leib, the vision of the Seer of Lublin, the wisdom of Reb Pinhas, the warmth of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the humor of Reb Naphtali–to their followers these sages appeared as kings, judges, and prophets. They communicated joy and wonder and fervor to the men and women who came to them in the depths of despair. They brought love and compassion to the persecuted Jews of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. For Jews who felt abandoned and forsaken by God, these Hasidic masters incarnated an irresistible call to help and salvation. The Rebbe combats sorrow with exuberance. He defeats resignation by exalting belief. He creates happiness so as not to yield to the sadness around him. He tells stories to escape the temptations of irreducible silence. It is Elie Wiesel’s unique gift to make the lives and tales of these great teachers as compelling now as they were in a different time and place. In the tradition of Hasidism itself, he leaves others to struggle with questions of justice, mercy, and vengeance, providing us instead with eternal truths and unshakable faith.

This biography presents a portrait of Lee Marvin warts and all. A very charismatic, seemingly outgoing and yet private man, Marvin was a decorated soldier, who enlisted at 18 in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, and served with the 4th Marine Division in the Pacific Theater during World War II. His service left its mark on him, but on film he was a man's man, playing hoods, bank robbers, assassins, and a long run of soldiers. But some of his greatest successes were when he played against type, as in Cat Ballou and Paint Your Wagon. Marvin entered the Hollywood food chain during a time of upheaval in both America and the film industry. Movie Star Marvin walked a sublime line between old-school masculinity and new-school subversive spirit. During this transitional period, armed with barely disguised and irresistible contempt, he does exactly what The Man tells him to, but still somehow does what he least expects or intends; as the box-office grosses indicated, there was something nearly every American could love about that. This book discusses his films, his life, and examines how unusual he was as both an actor, and a human being.

Diana Souhami's critically acclaimed biography of lesbian painter Hannah Gluckstein - the woman, the artist, the legend. To her family, Hannah Gluckstein was known as Hig. To Edith Shackleton Heald, the journalist with whom she lived for almost forty years, she was Dearest Grub. And to the art world, she was simply Gluck. She was born in 1895 into a life of privilege. Her family had founded J. Lyons & Co., a vast catering empire. From the beginning Gluck was a rebel. At a time when only men wore trousers, she scandalized society with her masculine clothing - though she always dressed with style and turned androgyny into high fashion. Her affairs with high-profile women shocked her conservative family, even while she achieved fame as an artist. During the 1920s and thirties, Gluck's paintings - portraits, flowers, and landscapes, presented in frames designed and patented by her - were the toast of the town. At the height of her success, when wounded in love, her own obsessions caused her to fade for decades from the public eye, but then, at nearly eighty, her return to the spotlight ensured her immortality.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something ). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

Bianca Bienenfeld was a seventeen-year-old lycee student when she was seduced both intellectually and sexually by her philosophy professor, Simone de Beauvoir, in 1938. The following year de Beauvoir passed Bianca on to her "essential partner", Jean-Paul Sartre. The three formed a menage a trois until 1940, when Bianca was suddenly abandoned by her dual mentors and lovers. Their lack of concern for Bianca's fate as a Jew in occupied France made the abrupt break even more shattering for her. She began to suffer periodic bouts of severe depression linked not only to the Nazi horrors, but to the betrayal by de Beauvoir and Sartre. After World War II, Bianca Bienenfeld (now married to Bernard Lamblin) resumed a platonic friendship with de Beauvoir that lasted more than forty years, but the pain of the old, perturbing affair flooded back when, in 1990, she read de Beauvoir's posthumously published Letters to Sartre and War Journal. The intimate content of these books referred directly to Bianca in a tone of ridicule and contempt, and she finally discovered the full extent of de Beauvoir's deception. Now Bianca explodes with the true story behind her earlier relationship with the high priests of existentialism. Published here in English for the first time, her memoir reveals what it was like to be a third party in the "contingent" affairs of de Beauvoir and Sartre. Bianca's compelling narrative is not written out of revenge or retaliation. Rather, it is an eloquent, candid account of how de Beauvoir and Sartre influenced the shape of her life and how she survived a disgraceful affair that, when broken, almost broke her. Bianca's unique perspective on de Beauvoir and Sartre is the centralfocus of the book, but not the sole one. She writes about her love for her husband Bernard, who helped her recover. She also describes life during the dark times of German occupation, and recounts witnessing the battle of Vercors during the French Resistance. Her well-crafted and poignant memoir will appeal to scholars and general readers alike.

What a century of life experience can teach us about happiness, ambition, courage, love and how to make the most of the lives we've been given. How many people do you know grew up as a poor immigrant in America during the Great Depression, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, landed on the beaches of Normandy on D Day, were present at the liberation of concentration camps including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, held leading Nazis to account at the Nuremberg trials and have fought for an International Criminal Court to hold war criminals to account the world over? Now you know one. Benjamin Ferencz turned 100 in 2020. In this extraordinary book, he shares his remarkable life story and the nine humble, compelling and life-affirming lessons he's learned along the way that we can all harness for ourselves.

Showing how history imprints itself on private lives, this memoir presents the author's sensuous, harrowing, and remarkable life. It moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Cote d'Azur, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to comfort in London's Chelsea.

"From a personal obsession with film, to an unorthodox mentorship with the legendary Pauline Kael, to establishing himself with the upstart Entertainment Weekly, Movie Freak is the memoir by veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman that will speak to anyone whose life has been changed by a great film. What molds a critic? Perhaps it takes parents willing to buy nine-year-old Gleiberman drive-in tickets for Rosemary's Baby. Like millions of us, Gleiberman loves movies, and in this frank and funny memoir he not only reveals the details of how he became a critic but attempts to show why we find cinema so defining as a society. As one of the premiere tastemakers for more than three decades, Gleiberman, a self-confessed movie freak, explains why he, and so many others, equate film with life. Readers will revel in the juicy details of the behind-the-scenes life of a critic, and cheer as he lifts the curtain on life along the red carpet"--

"As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?"--

Nearly a century and a half after his death, Abraham Lincoln remains an intrinsic part of the American consciousness, yet his intentions as president and his personal character continue to stir debate.Now, in The Lincoln Enigma, Gabor Boritt invites renowned Lincoln scholars, and rising new voices, to take a look at much-debated aspects of Lincoln's life, including his possible gay relationships, his plan to send blacks back to Africa, and his high-handed treatment of the Constitution. Boritt explores Lincoln's proposals that looked to a lily-white America. Jean Baker marvels at Lincoln's loves and marriage. David Herbert Donald highlights the similarities and differences of the Union and Confederate presidents' roles as commanders-in-chief. Douglas Wilson shows us the young Lincoln--not the strong leader of popular history, but a young man who questions his own identity and struggles to find his purpose. Gerald Prokopowicz searches for the military leader, William C. Harris for the peacemaker, and Robert Bruce meditates on Lincoln and death. In a final chapter Boritt and Harold Holzer offer a fascinating portfolio of Lincoln images in modern art.Acute and thought-provoking in their observations, this all-star cast of historians--including two Pulitzer and three Lincoln Prize winners--questions our assumptions of Lincoln, and provides a new vitality to our ongoing reflections on his life and legacy.

"Phoning Home is a collection of entertaining and thought-provoking essays featuring the author's quirky family, his Jewish heritage, and his New York City upbringing. Jacob M. Appel's recollections and insights, informed and filtered by his advanced degrees in medicine, law, and ethics, not only inspire nostalgic feelings but also offer insight into contemporary medical and ethical issues. At times sardonic and at others self-deprecating, Appel lays bare the most private aspects of his emotional life. "We'd just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the backseat of my mother's foul-tempered Dodge Dart," writes Appel of his family vacation with his two favorite rubber cat toys. Shortly thereafter Fat and Thin were lost forever--beginning, when Appel was just six years old, what he calls his "private apocalypse." Both erudite and full-hearted, Appel recounts storylines ranging from a bout of unrequited love gone awry to the poignant romance of his grandparents. We learn of the crank phone calls he made to his own family, the conspicuous absence of Jell-O at his grandaunt's house, and family secrets long believed buried. The stories capture the author's distinctive voice--a blend of a physician's compassion and an ethicist's constant questioning. "--

In the tradition of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love , an unforgettable account of fame, fandom, and the problem of making art in the twenty-first century In his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the musician who calls himself Juiceboxxx couldn't be more modern--you might call him a punk rock-rapper-DJ-record executive-energy drink-magnate. Journalist Leon Neyfakh has been something more than a fan of Juiceboxxx's since he was a teenager, when he booked a show for the artist in a church basement in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Juiceboxxx went on to the tireless, lonely, possibly hopeless pursuit of success on his own terms--no club was too dank, no futon too grubby, if it helped him get to the next, next level. And, for years, Neyfakh remained haunted from afar: was art really worth all the sacrifices? If it was, how did you know you'd made it? And what was the difference, anyway, between a person like Juiceboxxx--who devoted his life to being an artist--and a person like Neyfakh, who elected instead to pursue a stable career and a comfortable, middle-class existence? Much more than a brilliant portrait of a charismatic musician always on the verge of something big, The Next Next Level is a wholly contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition, and friendship--as well as viral videos, rap-rock, and the particulars of life on the margins of culture.

A clean, unmarked and unclipped copy in a Brodart jacket cover.

Zdenka Fantlova's peaceful life was changed forever when she was sent to Terezin concentration camp. Here she was given a humble engraved tin ring by her first love Arno. When he gave her the ring he said, "That's for our engagement. And to keep you safe. If we are both alive when the war ends I will find you." Arno was sent East on a penal transport later that same day. Zdenka survived six concentration camps including Auschwitz, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen and Belsen - the worst of all - risking her life for the tin ring. In the last chaotic days of the war in Belsen she crawled to a Red Cross post. There she was saved by an unknown British soldier to whom the book is dedicated. A unique and incredible story of love, human endurance and will power.

A vibrant, deeply human portrait of a woman dedicated to fierce protest against the tyranny of institutions over individuals, by the celebrated author Emma Goldman is the story of a modern radical who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first business of social revolution. Her politics, from beginning to end, was based on resistance to that which thwarted the free development of the inner self. The right to stay alive in one's senses, to enjoy freedom of thought and speech, to reject the arbitrary use of power--these were key demands in the many public protest movements she helped mount. Anarchist par excellence, Goldman is one of the memorable political figures of our time, not because of her gift for theory or analysis or even strategy, but because some extraordinary force of life in her burned, without rest or respite, on behalf of human integrity--and she was able to make the thousands of people who, for decades on end, flocked to her lectures, feel intimately connected to the pain inherent in the abuse of that integrity. To hear Emma describe, in language as magnetic as it was illuminating, what the boot felt like on the neck, was to experience the mythic quality of organized oppression. As the women and men in her audience listened to her, the homeliness of their own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope that things need not always be as they were. All you had to do, she promised, was resist. In time, she herself would become a world-famous symbol for the spirit of resistance to the power of institutional authority over the lone individual. In Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick draws a surpassingly intimate and insightful portrait of a woman of heroic proportions whose performance on the stage of history did what Tolstoy said a work of art should do: it made people love life more.

Roger Kahn is one of America's foremost sportswriters. After successful seasons as a newspaperman and magazine writer, he burst onto the national scene in 1972 with his memorable bestseller, The Boys of Summer, a work that went beyond sports and captured the minds and hearts of millions across the country. Now in his eighth decade, Kahn has again written a book for the hearts and minds of his readers. Chronicling his own life, Into My Own is Kahn's reflection on the eight people who shaped him as a man, a father, and a writer. In this poignant self-portrait, Kahn begins with his childhood in Brooklyn, reared on the verses of Homer, Shakespeare, Housman, and Millay---a curriculum set by his mother, and one that would influence his career with words. He combined his intellectual upbringing with his inherent passion for baseball, and began his sportswriting career under the legendary Stanley Woodward at the New York Herald Tribune . This lent Kahn the opportunity to interview and develop friendships with Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson--men he knew and admired for reasons far beyond their baseball abilities. Kahn's writing is by no means limited to his sports coverage, and on the political front he devotes chapters to Eugene McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, whom he interviewed for the Saturday Evening Post ---two diverse men in a turbulent era who championed their distinct versions of idealism. The Post had earlier sent Kahn to interview poet Robert Frost at his home in Vermont, a rare opportunity for any journalist, and one that resulted in the development of a marked friendship between two men of words. Perhaps most touching is his account, straightforward but abrim with love, of the life and death---at twenty-three---of his scholar-athlete son, Roger Laurence Kahn. Into My Own is the touching memoir of an unassuming man, whose great love of baseball and literature led him into extraordinary experiences, opportunities, and friendships. Even amidst great family tragedy and personal difficulty, Kahn has prevailed---amongst poets, writers, politicians, and most of all, ballplayers. Praise for Roger Kahn: "As a kid, I loved sports first and writing second, and loved everything Roger Kahn wrote. As an adult, I love writing first and sports second, and love Roger Kahn even more." ---Pulitzer Prize winner, David Maraniss "He can epitomize a player with a single swing of the pen." --- Time magazine "Roger Kahn is the best baseball writer in the business." ---Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books "A work of high moral purpose and great poetic accomplishment. The finest American book on sports." ---James Michener on The Boys of Summer "Kahn has the almost unfair gift of easy, graceful writing." --- Boston Herald