309 results for "Pulitzer Prize"

Lincoln's generals

Gabor S. Boritt
From the moment the battle ended, Gettysburg was hailed as one of the greatest triumphs of the Union army. Celebrations erupted across the North as a grateful people cheered the victory. But Gabor Boritt turns our attention away from the rejoicing millions to the dark mood of the White House--where Lincoln cried in frustration as General Meade let the largest Confederate army escape safely into Virginia. Such unexpected portraits abound in Lincoln's Generals, as a team of distinguished historians probes beyond the popular anecdotes and conventional wisdom to offer a fascinating look at Lincoln's relationship with his commanders. In Lincoln's Generals, Boritt and his fellow contributors examine the interaction between the president and five key generals: McClellan, Hooker, Meade, Sherman, and Grant. In each chapter, the authors provide new insight into this mixed bag of officers and the president's tireless efforts to work with them. Even Lincoln's choice of generals was not as ill-starred as we think, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark E. Neely, Jr.: compared to most Victorian-era heads of state, he had a fine record of selecting commanders (for example, the contemporary British gave us such bywords for incompetence as "the charge of the Light Brigade," while Napoleon III managed to lose the entire French army). But the president's relationship with his generals was never easy. In these pages, Stephen Sears underscores McClellan's perverse obstinancy as Lincoln tried everything to drive him ahead. Neely sheds new light on the president's relationship with Hooker, arguing that he was wrong to push the general to attack at Chancellorsville. Boritt writes about Lincoln's prickly relationship with the victor of Gettysburg, "old snapping turtle" George Meade. Michael Fellman reveals the political stress between the White House and William T. Sherman, a staunch conservative who did not want blacks in his army but who was crucial to the war effort. And John Y. Simon looks past the legendary camaraderie between Lincoln and Grant to reveal the tensions in their relationship. Perhaps no other episode has been more pivotal in the nation's history than the Civil War--and yet so much of these massive events turned on a few distinctive personalities. Lincoln's Generals is a brilliant portrait that takes us inside the individual relationships that shaped the course of our most costly war.
Oxford University Press 1994 248 pages

Earthborn

Dennis, Carl
"A timely new collection that sounds themes about the fragility of life and our duty to respect the planet in a time of climate change, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who work "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" (Carrie Fountain) The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its "integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry" (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species. The book succeeds in braiding together a recognition of our limits and of our responsibilities in ways that are deeply moving and revealing"--
Penguin Books 2022-03-01 102 pages

America in retreat: the new isolationism and the coming global disorder

Stephens, Bret
"A world in which the leading liberal-democratic nation does not assume its role as world policeman will become a world in which dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill the breach. Americans seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden--alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither good nor evil--will soon find themselves living within shooting range of global pandemonium." --From the Introduction In a brilliant book that will elevate foreign policy in the national conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens makes a powerful case for American intervention abroad. In December 2011 the last American soldier left Iraq. "We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq," boasted President Obama. He was proved devastatingly wrong less than three years later as jihadists seized the Iraqi city of Mosul. The event cast another dark shadow over the future of global order--a shadow, which, Bret Stephens argues, we ignore at our peril. America in Retreat identifies a profound crisis on the global horizon. As Americans seek to withdraw from the world to tend to domestic problems, America's adversaries spy opportunity. Vladimir Putin's ambitions to restore the glory of the czarist empire go effectively unchecked, as do China's attempts to expand its maritime claims in the South China Sea, as do Iran's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities. Civil war in Syria displaces millions throughout the Middle East while turbocharging the forces of radical Islam. Long-time allies such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, doubting the credibility of American security guarantees, are tempted to freelance their foreign policy, irrespective of U.S. interests. Deploying his characteristic stylistic flair and intellectual prowess, Stephens argues for American reengagement abroad. He explains how military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was the right course of action, foolishly executed. He traces the intellectual continuity between anti-interventionist statesmen such as Henry Wallace and Robert Taft in the late 1940s and Barack Obama and Rand Paul today. And he makes an unapologetic case for Pax Americana, "a world in which English is the default language of business, diplomacy, tourism, and technology; in which markets are global, capital is mobile, and trade is increasingly free; in which values of openness and tolerance are, when not the norm, often the aspiration." In a terrifying chapter imagining the world of 2019, Stephens shows what could lie in store if Americans continue on their current course. Yet we are not doomed to this future. Stephens makes a passionate rejoinder to those who argue that America is in decline, a process that is often beyond the reach of political cures. Instead, we are in retreat--the result of faulty, but reversible, policy choices. By embracing its historic responsibility as the world's policeman, America can safeguard not only greater peace in the world but also greater prosperity at home. At once lively and sobering, America in Retreat offers trenchant analysis of the gravest threat to global order, from a rising star of political commentary.
Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2015 269 pages

Spring and All

William Carlos Williams
Spring and All, a collection of poems and essays, was first published by William Carlos Williams in 1932. Williams was a true renaissance man - he was a doctor, an artist, and a poet. This collection contains many of his classics including Red Wheelbarrow. He wrote this while tending to a sick child. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Williams was well celebrated during his lifetime. He won the first National Book Award for Poetry. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Be inspired by his thought-provoking works! Note that Lisa Shea will also soon have an annotated and illustrated version, for those who would enjoy having notes on each poem.
Independently Published 2019-01-02 122 pages

Superman is Jewish? how comic book superheroes came to serve truth, justice, and the Jewish-American way

Brod, Harry
From a brilliant and witty comic book aficionado, this “scholarly but lively narrative” ( Kirkus Reviews ) reveals the links between Jews and the iconic superheroes of Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. Many of us know that the superheroes at the heart of the American comic book industry were created by Jews. But you’d be surprised to learn how much these beloved characters were shaped by the cultural and religious traditions of their makers. Superman Is Jewish? follows the “people of the book” as they become the people of the comic book. With great wit and compelling arguments, Harry Brod situates superheroes within the course of Jewish-American history: they are aliens in a foreign land, like Superman; figures plagued by guilt for abandoning their families, like Spider-Man; and outsiders persecuted for being different, like the X-Men. Brod blends humor and sharp observation as he considers the overt and discreet Jewish characteristics of these well-known figures and explores how their creators integrated their Jewish identities and their creativity. Captivating, poignant, and packed with historical insights, this guided tour travels from the Passover Haggadah’s exciting action scenes of Moses’s superpowers through the Yiddish humor of Mad magazine to two Pulitzer Prizes awarded in one decade to Jewish comic book guys Art Spiegelman and Michael Chabon. “A witty, insightful exposé” ( Publisher’s Weekly ), Superman Is Jewish? is an endlessly fascinating American saga about an immigrant group that used comic books to see itself in new, empowering—and laughable—ways. You don’t even have to be Jewish to get a kick out of it.
Free Press 2016-01-12 208 pages

Town House

Tish Cohen
New Page 1 "Its official title is Town House, but in Hollywood they're already calling Tish Cohen's novel About a Girl." --The Globe and Mail. Jack Madigan should be leading an enviable life. He's the sole heir of a '70s rock icon. He lives with his retro-obsessed teenage son, Harlan, in a once-magnificent Boston town house. But now 36, Jack's painting career is buckling under a raging case of agoraphobia. And when the foreclosure notice arrives, Jack must face losing the only home he's ever known--and his only safe zone. When Jack's ex-wife announces that Harlan would be better off living with her and her vitamin-enriched fiancé, Jack has to figure out how to deter the perky, inexperienced real-estate agent, hold on to his house, keep his son at home, and--through the tenacity of the little girl next door--finally step out onto the sidewalk. Fox 2000 swooped in to pre-empt the film rights while Town House was still on submission to publishers. Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions is set to produce the movie and Pulitzer Prize- winning screenwriter Doug Wright (Memoirs of a Geisha) is adapting the screenplay. A book with the ability to both entertain and move us, Town House is a smart, acerbic novel bursting with heart and quirky charm.
HarperCollins Publishers Limited 2007-04-26 274 pages

Seeing out louder: art criticism, 2003-2009

Saltz, Jerry
"Jerry Saltz, current senior art critic for "New York Magazine" and former senior art editor at "The Village Voice" for almost ten years, as well as a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, popular teacher, and coast-to-coast lecturer surveys the good, the bad, and the very bad in contemporary art. Saltz doesn't only address art objects in these essays, he considers the art world as an ever-mutating organism. He signals out mismanaged museums, out-of-control auction houses, misguided artists, the gossip pages of Artforum, and the tent-city casinos known as Art Fairs. Saltz has an unsparing eye, a deep love of the art world, respect for artists, self-deprecating humor, sweet skepticism, and one of the easiest writing styles of any critic working today. Tracking the most recent all-out orgy of art and money, Saltz considers what this did to art and asks, now that the money is gone, how might art and the art world put their house in order? Don't miss the twists and turns as he sorts out the answers. If books had credos, the one affixed to "Seeing Out Louder" would be: Art First. All Else Follows." --Book Jacket.
Hard Press Editions 2009 436 pages

Cleopatra's nose: essays on the unexpected

Boorstin, Daniel J.
This provocative new collection of essays by a Pulitzer Prize winner deals with the challenging themes of discovery and surprise in history. Cleopatra's Nose is not a miscellany but rather a selection of recent essays illustrating specific subjects that have preoccupied Boorstin for several decades. Tantalizing themes all: How sometimes discovery only increases our ignorance. What were the specific historical opportunities in the New World? How has the fourth kingdom - the kingdom of machines - contradicted Darwinian expectations, contributed to a confusion of statistics, created the need for the unnecessary, and highlighted the paradoxes of science and the politics of common sense? In a "personal postscript," Boorstin gives us a memorable and affectionate portrait of his father and optimistically celebrates the United States as the Land of the Unexpected.
Random House 1994-11-01 210 pages

Another reason

Dennis, Carl
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize The poems in Carl Dennis’s new collection Another Reason assume that our efforts to reason with ourselves and with others about what matters to us are necessary to escape the purely private point of view, to provide the houses we live in with doors and windows. These poems enact a drama of attempted persuasion, as the poet confers with himself, with intimates, and with strangers, if only in the hope that by defining differences more precisely one may be drawn into a genuine dialogue. As the poet asserts and questions his own authority, encountering a wide range of competing claims from other voices, we find ourselves included in a conversation that deepens our notion of the human community.
Penguin Books 2014-03-25 88 pages

Timebends A Life

Arthur Miller
The definitive memoir of Arthur Miller--the famous playwright of The Crucible , All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , A View from the Bridge , and other plays-- Timebends reveals Miller's incredible trajectory as a man and a writer. Born in 1915, Miller grew up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, developed leftist political convictions during the Great Depression, achieved moral victory against McCarthyism in the 1950s, and became president of PEN International near the end of his life, fighting for writers' freedom of expression. Along the way, his prolific output established him as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--he wrote twenty-two plays, various screenplays, short stories, and essays, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesman and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1947 for All My Sons . Miller also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe's final film. This memoir also reveals the incredible host of notables that populated his life, including Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, Clark Gable, Sir Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Leaving behind a formidable reputation in the worlds of theater, cinema, and politics, Arthur Miller died in 2005 but his memoir continues his legacy.
Grove Atlantic 2013-07-09 656 pages

The Lincoln enigma: the changing faces of an American icon

Gabor Boritt
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.
Oxford University Press 2001-02-08 324 pages

Bachelor girls

Wasserstein, Wendy
In plays such as Isn't It Romantic, Uncommon Women and Others, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein put her finger on the pulse of her past-modern, post-feminist sisters and delivered her diagnosis with shrewd good humor and an unerring sense of the absurd. That same engaging sensibility bubbles through the twenty-nine essays in Bachelor Girls, in which Wasserstein presents her observations on: -- Boyfriends -- "The worse the boyfriend, the more stunning your American Express bill." -- Role Models -- "In the forties emulating an ideal woman meant bobbing your hair like Betty Grable's. In the eighties, because of Jessica Lange, women have to get a Pulitzer Prize-winning actor-playwright to fall in love with them, have a child by one of the world's great dancers, be nominated for two Academy Awards, and enjoy doing the laundry alone on a farm." -- Success -- "I knew my friend Patti was a big-time Hollywood agent the first time I saw her dial a telephone with a pencil." Ranging from the dietary secrets of lemon mousse to the politics of the second marriage, with stopovers at a bar mitzvah in Westchester, a chess tournament in Rumania, and a Tokyo production of Isn't It Romantic, Bachelor Girls is pure Wasserstein, which is to say, pure joy. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Knopf 1990-04-07 209 pages

Dark harbor: a poem

Strand, Mark
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that—despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone—is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality: Is what exists a souvenir of the time Of the great nought and deep night without stars The time before the universe began? When we look at each other and see nothing Is that not a confirmation that we are less Than meets the eye and embody some of The night of our origins? A timeless pursuit of timeless questions, Dark Harbor centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets.
Knopf 1994-06-28 64 pages

Creative Nonfiction The Final Issue: The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction

Lee Gutkind,Leslie Rubinkowski
The very best writing from one of America's most groundbreaking literary magazines. When Creative Nonfiction debuted in 1994, the literary genre it championed was largely the target of skepticism or downright ridicule. But at a time when few editors were interested in the personal essay, the magazine doggedly explored new ideas and fresh modes of expression, and over the next three decades, its contributors pioneered what would come to be known as the "fourth genre." The thirty-two essays collected here bring together some of the finest work Creative Nonfiction published over its seventy-eight issues. Read Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic's boyhood remembrances of the bombing of Belgrade, Carolyn Forche's haunting, lyric catalog of her daily life as she faced down a cancer diagnosis, and John Edgar Wideman's meditation on the photo of a murdered boy his same age--Emmett Till--and how the image haunted him forever. Here, you'll find work by such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and John McPhee, but also essays from more contemporary voices like Brian Broome, Elizabeth Fortescue, and Anne McGrath. With an introduction by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction's founder and editor, this collection captures the evolution of a genre and the amazing work of the little magazine that helped make it all happen.
Belt Publishing 2024 375 pages

Into the Mirror The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen

Lawrence Schiller
"On February 18, 2001, the FBI finally arrested Hanssen and charged him with selling to the Russians - over a period of more than twenty years - top-secret, classified information. Nothing that has been reported to date about this ordinary-looking but tormented man has revealed the astonishing facts that Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer - collaborators on the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner's Song and Oswald's Tale-uncovered during their nine-month investigation into the life of this complex man. In seeking to solve this almost impenetrable mystery, Schiller and Mailer spent hundreds of hours interviewing members of Hanssen's family as well as his closest friends, colleagues, and fellow church members. They traveled to Moscow to interview a key member of the KGB who had handled the spy they knew only as "Ramon Garcia."".
HarperCollins Publishers 2002 317 pages