This comprehensive biography uses extensive theater and film archives to reveal Mamet's ideas on writing, acting, and directing, covering his beginnings in Chicago, his relationship to Judaism and reputation for machismo, as well as discussions of and excerpts from early plays and stories that have never before been referenced in print.

Many books in Japanese have been devoted to the poet and critic Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912). Although he died at the age of twenty-six and wrote many of his best-known poems in the space of a few years, his name is familiar to every literate Japanese. Takuboku's early death added to the sad romance of the unhappy poet, but there has been no satisfactory biography of his life or career, even in Japanese, and only a small part of his writings have been translated. His mature poetry was based on the work of no predecessor, and he left no disciples. Takuboku stands unique. Takuboku's most popular poems, especially those with a humorous overlay, are often read and memorized, but his diaries and letters, though less familiar, contain rich and vivid glimpses of the poet's thoughts and experiences. They reflect the outlook of an unconstrained man who at times behaved in a startling or even shocking manner. Despite his misdemeanors, Takuboku is regarded as a national poet, all but a saint to his admirers, especially in the regions of Japan where he lived. His refusal to conform to the Japan of the time drove him in striking directions and ranked him as the first poet of the new Japan.

A commander in the Israeli Army from its inception in 1948, and a politician whose tenure bridged numerous governments, as both a general and a politician Ariel Sharon championed the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. But in his later years, as prime minister, he took a dramatic turn, and became the driving force behind Israel’s unilateral disengagement. In this first truly comprehensive biography, David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, paints a vivid picture of the most dramatic and imposing Israeli political and military leader of the last forty years—and takes a penetrating look at how Sharon transformed his country like no one else.

Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel's underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist movement. A powerful orator, Begin was imprisoned by the Soviets in 1940, joined the Free Polish Army in 1942, and arrived in Palestine as a Polish soldier shortly thereafter. Joining the underground paramilitary Irgun in 1943, he achieved instant notoriety for the organization's violent acts. Intentionally left out of the new Israeli government, Begin's right-leaning Herut party became a fixture of the opposition, until the surprising parliamentary victory of his political coalition in 1977 made him prime minister. Welcoming Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and cosigning a peace treaty with him on the White House lawn in 1979, Begin accomplished what his predecessors could not. His outreach to Ethiopian Jews and Vietnamese "boat people" was universally admired, and his decision to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 is now regarded as an act of courageous foresight. But the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, combined with his declining health and the death of his wife, led Begin to resign in 1983. He spent the next nine years in virtual seclusion, until his death in 1992. Begin was buried not alongside Israel's prime ministers, but alongside the Irgun comrades who died in the struggle to create the Jewish national home to which he had devoted his life. Daniel Gordis's perceptive biography gives us new insight into a remarkable political figure whose influence continues to be felt throughout the world.--From publisher description.

"According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophy is a 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cult-like following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna. Gottlieb's meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him."--from the inside front flap.

General Clark became a major figure on the political scene when he was drafted by popular demand to run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2003. Here, General Clark uses his unique life experience--from his rough childhood in segregated Arkansas, through the horrors of Vietnam to the difficulties of negotiating peace and rebuilding national security after the Cold War--as a springboard to reveal his vision for America, at home and in the world, addressing the current state of our nation, the direction in which we are headed, and what we should hope to achieve.--From publisher description.

This book traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Born in 1905 in Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. But his life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity--until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. He was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer--until the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest, he wrote his last book, helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound. As he tracks down the pieces of Lev's deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds--of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists--that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century--of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism

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.

The Year That Keeps Returning is Goldstein's astonishing historical memoir of that fateful year--when the Ustasha, the pro-fascist nationalists, were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia. On April 10, when the German troops marched into Zagreb, the Croatian capital, they were greeted as liberators by the Croats. Three days later, Ante Pavelić, the future leader of the Independent State of Croatia, returned from exile in Italy and Goldstein's father, the proprietor of a leftist bookstore in Karlovac--a beautiful old city fifty miles from the capital--was arrested along with other local Serbs, communists, and Yugoslav sympathizers. Goldstein was only thirteen years old, and he would never see his father again. More than fifty years later, Goldstein seeks to piece together the facts of his father's last days. The moving narrative threads stories of family, friends, and other ordinary people who lived through those dark times together with personal memories and an impressive depth of carefully researched historic details. The other central figure in Goldstein's heartrending tale is his mother--a strong, resourceful woman who understands how to act decisively in a time of terror in order to keep her family alive.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

"An alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from "our finest living example of [the American civic poet]" (New York Times). In late-1940s Long Branch, an historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high-school C-student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write. Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. Jersey Breaks offers a candid self-portrait and, underlying Pinsky's notable public presence and unprecedented three terms as poet laureate of the United States, a unique poetic understanding of American culture"--

Now in paperback Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships–most of them undeniably fraught with “idiosyncratic complexities.” From Anna Akhmatova’s dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky’s account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have made The New York Review of Books into what Esquire magazine calls “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.”

"Poetic spaces, surreal structures and dramatic visions. The extraordinary career of Ricardo Bofill is collected in this monograph, which reveals his inspiring approach to architecture, and to life. Ricardo Bofill is one of the 20th century's most unique architects and radical visionaries. His visions for urban and communal life challenged preconceived notions of shared space and proposed alternative styles of living. This monograph explores his revolutionary approach by profiling his greatest projects like La Fábrica, Walden 7, La Muralla Roja or Abraxas." -- Amazon.

In 1934, American writer Rebecca Hourwich Reyher recorded the remarkable life story of Christina Sibiya, the first of sixty-five wives of the uncrowned king of the Zulus. What Reyher faithfully recorded — and then crafted into a moving narrative — is the riveting story of a South African woman who entered life among the Zulu royal family and then, after enduring psychic and physical abuse, found the courage to leave. In 1915, fifteen-year-old Christina Sibiya leaves teaching at a mission school to become the first wife of Solomon ka Dinuzulu. While at the royal household, Sibiya successfully adjusts to the expectations of her new position: finding her place among the other wives, and negotiating Zulu and Christian tradition. The royal headquarters, however, becomes increasingly plagued by diviseness, dissolution, and ill health. After a series of hardships, climaxing in a beating by Solomon, Sibiya, at the age of twenty-eight, escapes to Durban. Although pursued by Solomon's representative, Sibiya successfully resists Solomon's authority by testifying first in a European magistrate's court and then at the royal headquarters that her marriage was invalid. First published in 1948, Zulu Woman is placed in new context by an introduction and afterword which consider the book's relationship to other African literature and oral history, attend to questions of power and authorship, and draw upon newly available archival materials.

Autobiography by Sir Peter Ustinov. spans his career as actor, playwright, film star and director.

Whether talking about her own writing, interpreting the works of others, or giving us a window on the world that "we in South Africa are attempting to reconstruct," Nadine Gordimer has much to tell us about the art of fiction and the art of life. In this deeply resonant book Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life's experiences and narrative creations. She asks first, where do characters come from--to what extent are they drawn from real life? We are touching on this question whenever we insist on the facts behind the fiction, Gordimer suggests, and here she tries to unravel the mysterious process that breathes "real" life into fiction. Exploring the writings of revolutionaries in South Africa, she shows how their struggle is contrastingly expressed in factual accounts and in lyrical poetry. Gordimer next turns to three writers linked by their search for a life that transcends their own time and place: in distinctive and telling ways, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz defy accepted norms of loyalty to the mores and politics of their countries. Their search in Egypt, Nigeria, and Israel for a meaningful definition of home testifies to what it must be: the destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries. Ending on a personal note, Gordimer reveals her own experience of "writing her way out of" the confines of a dying colonialism.

...[U]npredictable in the way that only the best nonfiction can be....I found myself thinking of the Bhagavad-Gita...What struck me was the idea of non-attachment....Weschler writes, One works and works at something, which then happens of its own accord....its happening cannot be said to have resulted from all that work, the way effects are said to result from a series of causes."-M.G. Lord, The New York Times Book Review An excerpt A few months ago, a friend I was talking with began to tell me about a friend of his named Gary Isaacs, who was working at the downtown headquarters of one of the city's top investment houses as an executive in the division monitoring the savings-and-loan crisis. Though Isaacs was just thirty-two years old, my friend recounted, he had previously worked on the Street in several other capacities as well, and before that he'd had a notably successful career in an entirely different field; what's more, it seemed he was about to quit this one, too, and to head off in yet another direction. When I asked my friend what the previous career had been, and, for that matter, what the new one was going to be, he replied that it would be far more entertaining for me to hear the whole story from the man himself, which is how, a few days later, I came to find myself in the sleek elevator of one of downtown's better-known headquarters zooming up towards I didn't have the faintest idea what. "Mr. Weschler has an extraordinary power to catch the crucial moment in people's lives--that moment (of passion or conviction) which suddenly alters the course of a life. Such 'conversions' may be absurd or tragic, or delightful, or sublime--we see all of these, and more, in these sometimes very odd, but intensely human, and beautifully told tales." -Oliver Sacks

"The facts and legends of New York's famed artistic hub told by one of its key participants"--

HONORABLE MENTION, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Autobiography & Memoir! Lifelong activist Judy Gumbo, an original member of The Yippies, a 1960s anti-war satirical protest group, offers an insider feminist memoir of her involvement with the Yippies, Black Panthers, women's rights, environmental actions, and a life of activism. In 1968, a 24-year-old woman moved to Berkeley, California and immediately became enmeshed in the Youth International Party, aka The Yippies, an anti-war satirical protest group. In the next few years, Judy Gumbo (a nickname given her by Eldridge Cleaver), was soon at the center of counter-cultural activity-from protests in People's Park, to meetings at Black Panther headquarters, to running a pig for President at the raucous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a protest that devolved into violent attacks by the police and arrests that led to the notorious Chicago Conspiracy Trial. In this historical account, Gumbo reveals intimate details of--and struggles with--her fellow radicals Jerry Rubin, Anita & Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Krassner, Stew Albert, and more, detailing their experiences in radical protests. This deep dive into her activism includes details of her organization of a national women's rights group, her visit to North Vietnam during the war, her travels around the globe to promote women's liberation and anti-war protest, and her environmental activism. It also includes extensive excerpts from illegal wiretaps and surveillance by the FBI. "A welcome addition to the literature of radical activism." --Kirkus Reviews "A fun read and a valuable political document, long overdue." --Counterpunch Yippie Girl explores Gumbo's life as a protester to show that, while circumstances always change, protesters can stay loyal to the causes they believe in and remain true to themselves. She also reveals how dogmatism, authoritarianism, and interpersonal conflict can damage those same just causes, offering a timeless and strategic guide for activists today protesting against injustice in all its forms.