For over fifty years, in radio, on multiple stages, in scores of movie soundtracks, and tête-à-tête performances with the rich and famous, Artie Kane's music has touched and inspired millions of people. His memoir is the story of a pianist, film composer, and conductor whose credits span the industry and reveal the enduring bond between a gifted musician, his piano, and the people who crowd around it. Music to My Years captures the romantic as well as the rough-hewn and unrelentingly perfectionist sides of the world of professional entertainment. For the love of music, and in quest of love through eight marriages, Artie reimagines his dreams, and with characteristic candor and acerbic wit, proves that the American landscape thrives as a place for misfits who follow their dreams to success. Music to My Years is also the story of the ever-changing world of professional entertainment, told by an artist whose talents helped to define the transformative era. This memoir will delight and inform lovers of music, fans of Hollywood culture and films, and devotees of TV shows of the last five decades. This story will resonate with anyone who has pursued a dream or struggled to find true love.

A fascinating read of personal experiences from the famed fashion designer that showcases the lives and contributions of iconic women -- from Jackie Kennedy to Elizabeth Taylor to Laura Bush to Princess Diana Arnold Scaasi has been dressing legends for almost five decades. His enduring tenure as one of the world's premier fashion designers and tastemakers has afforded him vast stores of insider knowledge and firsthand perspectives on an array of illustrious personalities who -- in their disparate arenas of high-wattage celebrity and influence -- have defined our contemporary notions of female power and glamour. Here, for the first time, Scaasi invites readers into his glittering A-list realm as he recounts his intimate experiences and interactions with larger-than-life female icons who made their mark in spheres as varied as politics, Hollywood, the music industry, and high society. Scaasi devotes each chapter to a specific woman or to a group of women, including "Broadway Girls," "New York Girls," and "Hollywood Girls." He shares dozens of behind-closed-doors anecdotes exploring what makes these women tick. In candid prose, he recalls what they said and how they acted, and most important, offers keen observations of who they really are underneath his creations. Using a privileged entrée into their private and public lives, Scaasi takes the measure of their impact on the world at large. Here, readers will Joan Crawford's fetish for cleanliness; the dazzling Barbra Streisand's famous Oscar night outfit and her obsession with perfection; Mamie Eisenhower's staunch refusal to wear a bra; the bountiful charms of Joan Sutherland, the opera legend; Mary Tyler Moore's and Sophia Loren's unique glamour; Rose Kennedy's prediction of a future woman president; Aretha Franklin's fear of flying; Scaasi's visits to the White House to his good friend and client Barbara Bush; his confrontations with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe; and much more! Scaasi dresses only women he genuinely likes, so his tales are never mean-spirited. Instead they spotlight the designer's surprising interactions and often poignant perceptions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Joan Rivers, Louise Nevelson, Natalie Wood, Hillary Clinton, and many others. The book is filled with photographs from the author's personal scrapbooks and fond recollections of some of the world's most beautiful, accomplished, and powerful women. Women I Have Dressed (and Undressed!) is a trove of irresistible insider dish and a tender, humorous memoir of the most influential women of our time.

The classic memior of Betty Jean Lifton's search for her secret past that helped open the way for so many others. Betty Jean Lifton, acclaimed author of several books on the psychology of the adtoped that have helped open the field, tells her own story of growing up adtoped in the closed adoption system. Calling Twice Born both an autobiography and a psychological journey into the past, Lifton takes the reader with her as she describes the loneliness and islolation of an adopted child cut off from the knowledge of her heritage. She explores the ambivalence and guilt that she feels toward her adoptive parents when she awakens as an adult to her need to ask: Who am I? With the mounting suspense of a detective novel, Twice Born explores not only the difficulty of searching for one's past when one's records are sealed, but also the complexity of trying to reunite with the birth mother from whom one has been separated by social taboos--and by time. More than a vivid and poinant memior, Lifton has given hs a story of mothering and mother-loss attachment and bonding, secrets and lies, and the human need for origins. Important reading for anyone touched by these issues and by the experience of adoption--which is everyone.

In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn't satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today. Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother's Tale is about family members who love each other but who can't seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her--using logic, of all things--that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course. A Mother's Tale is about something primal and universal: the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. they came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. there were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled from them. the epic voyage lasted almost three months and was marked by conflict and controversy until it seemed as though this hellship had absorbed the traumas of its passengers. As the conditions on board deteriorated, tension and violence simmered above and below decks. But romances and seductions also flourished, and lifelong bonds were formed. Diane Armstrong set sail on the Derna with her parents when she was nine years old. Like a detective searching for clues, she has located over a hundred of the passengers. through their recollections and memorabilia, as well as archival documents, she has recreated the voyage and traced what became of their hopes and dreams. the result is the unique portrayal of a migrant ship and its passengers.

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman's generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a "biobibliography" of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman's unapologetic scholar's tale.

Hang on for a Wild Journey through the Political and Spiritual Adventures of the Baby-Boom Generation Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies and the birth of the modern environmental movement, and the surge of Buddhism in the West.

The rabbi came from the Slobodka Yeshiva; his congregation came from Broadway. The synagogue was a modest brick building a block from Broadway in the middle of that colorful New York neighborhood known fifty years ago as Hell's Kitchen. Between prayers on Yom Kippur you could hear a chorus of would-be Ruby Keelers tap-dancing in the rehearsal hall next door. This is the exuberant story of Bernard Birstein—his immigrant travels and travails in America, his ever-increasing family of five children and countless poor relations, and his adventurous rabbinical life. The narrator is his youngest daughter, Ann, the blond-haired enfant terrible who grew up to write six novels and now this captivating book.

Eleanor Farjeon first met Edward Thomas in the late autumn of 1912, when her brother invited him to tea. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the painfully shy 31-year-old woman and the reserved writer known for his prose works and literary criticism. Though he died at the Battle of Arras in April 1917, it was a friendship which for Eleanor did not end with his death, but lived beyond it in his letters, and his poems, many of which Edward had sent to her from the trenches of the First World War for her comments. This double memoir uses Edward's letters and Eleanor's diaries and linking commentary to provide an extraordinarily candid account of their developing friendship, and of the enthusiasms they shared - both loved walking, and it was during this period that Edward first found his way into poetry. Edward was often deeply depressed, a man who found in nature something fundamental and ideal, a soldier-poet who wrote about the war in a new way, but Eleanor also shows us another side to his character, capturing moments of joy and humour. She also offers a unique account of Thomas's development as a poet, including the momentous meeting in 1913 with the American poet Robert Frost, whose encouragement led to Thomas's first poems. Thomas describes for her his family, his friendships with other writers, D H Lawrence among them, and also provides an exceptionally detailed account of his experiences in the First World War with the Artists' Rifles. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, was widely acclaimed on its first publication in 1958 - this second edition, published on the 80th anniversary of Thomas's death, has an introduction by Anne Harvey, a selection of Eleanor's sonnets 'To E.T.', and 'Walking Tom', a hitherto little-known poem about Edward written by Clifford Bax and Herbert Farjeon. Also included are eight pages of black and white photographs.

This is Morton Shulman's own fast- moving story of his eight years in politics. It is sharp but full of public concern, opinionated but self-critical, serious in intent but often hilarious in the telling. It reflects perfectly the life-style of its author-- there is never a dull moment. During his eight years as a member of the provincial Legislature, Morton Shulman's name was rarely off the front pages. Here Shulman tells the dramatic stories behind the headlines, and the stories that never made the front page. For Shulman, an "unrepentant capitalist" millionaire, the decision to run for the NDP was a chance to get back at the Conservative government that had fired him as Coroner. But it became much more than that, as Shulman, the man who always was approachable, became an unofficial ombudsman for the province and the people. Shulman's career as a Member of the Legislature was as stormy as his record in office as Chief Coroner. He smuggled a camera into the House and took pictures of government members asleep during debates. Disguised as a workman, he walked into the INCO plant at Sudbury and spent the night measuring sulphur dioxide levels which proved that in spite of government inspectors' assurances the pollution levels were dangerously high. He exposed Mafia connections with union leaders, politicians and police, and ended up with a Mafia contract on his life and a full-time police guard. He put on a hard hat and walked unchallenged into the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant to show that there was virtually no security in this potentially dangerous area. All these capers had but one goal -- to expose the bureaucratic bungling that affected and sometimes even endangered the lives of the ordinary Canadians who paid the tax bill. One after another he took on the Departments of Labour, Health, Highways, Reform Institutions, Natural Resources, Energy, the Attorney General, Bell Canada and more. His eight years as a Member of the Legislature brought some changes in government policies, Royal Commissions and numerous editorials about the situations he brought to public attention. Sometimes he lost, but the degree of public trust in Morton Shulman brought him national attention. There's never been another Member like Shulman.

"So Morey was the family megastar. I was the also-ran, even something of a clan pariah... I was convinced that at root I was worthless, and maybe crazy.""The Sheik and the Shadow: A Memoir of Brotherly Bond, Celebrity, and Madness" imparts the intertwined accounts of Bob's intense relationship with his older brother, Morey; his experience as a certified-insane patient in a then-world-renowned mental hospital (Chestnut Lodge, the setting of the book, movie, and play "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"); and his brother's descent from extreme literary success and fame to a bizarre, reclusive end.In his mid-thirties, Morey capped his multi-millionaire business career with "The Search for Bridey Murphy," a book that sold over 6 million copies in 30 languages across 34 countries and became a movie starring an Academy Award winner. Meanwhile, Bob was labeled schizophrenic, and locked-up with a group of creatures from his most nightmarish snake-pit fantasies. Early readers have been alternately amazed, appalled, and beguiled by the account of his confinement in this macabre setting.

For ten weeks David Brudnoy, Boston's most popular and erudite conservativeradio-talk-show host, had been off the air. When he signed back on, hisfaithful following was prepared for the usual dose of wry humor, Clintonbashing, and brilliant banter. What they got instead was an electrifyinghourlong monologue, unprecedented in the freewheeling world of talk radio, during which Brudnoy confessed, I am a fifty-four-year-old homosexual...I wassuffering the first attack of HIV--the AIDS virus. What followed was an outpouring of support and devotion from an audience notknown for its tolerance of gay issues. With his story, Brudnoy has crossed thatgreat abyss where the personal and political meet. From his near-halcyon youthas an only child growing up in a small Minnesota town to his heady days as astudent at Yale, he recounts with equal doses of humor and candor a coming ofage that, in fits and starts, eventually recognized a sexual preference for menand a political tendency toward the right. Ruminating on matters that rangefrom his own mortality to TV, radio, friends, family, romance, and politics, Life Is Not a Rehearsal offers up the kind of trenchant and intelligentinsights that are Brudnoy's hallmark.A graduate of Yale with a major in Japanese, David Brudnoy went to graduateschool at Harvard (East Asian studies) before getting his Ph.D. in Americanintellectual history at Brandeis. In 1976 he won a full-time talk radio slot atBoston's WHDH, then moved to WRKO in 1981, finally going on to the region'spowerhouse, WBZ, in 1986. In addition to his hugely successful radio show onWBZ, he is a TV commentator, film critic, newspaper essayist on politics andtravel, and teacher ofjournalism at Boston University. Life Is Not a Rehearsal shows that conservatism is not conformity--or aprejudice or a mere establishmentarian life. Conservatism is about fighting forliberty and embracing responsibility, about war and love if you will. DavidBrudnoy is certainly a veteran of both. --P. J. O'Rourke, author of Give War a Chance David Brudnoy tells the personal story behind the public story of hisremarkable life and extraordinary career. He gives us a memoir that willbenefit many others across the country learning to live with AIDS. --Senator Edward M. KennedyThis is a book about love, loyalty, and the nurturing bonds of family andfriendship. And, it is also a book about the coming of age of a brave andhonorable man who has faced the looming spectre of death with the samecourageous honesty that so many of us have long admired in him. --Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., author of How We Die In this no-holds-barred memoir, Boston's outspoken, conservative, libertarian, gay, agnostically Jewish, living-with-AIDS, college professor and media iconproves once and for all the inadequacy of labels when it comes to defining alife. Life Is Not a Rehearsal is the story of David Brudnoy as only hecould tell it, with characteristic candor, humor, and the self-awareness of onewho has teetered on the edge, gone over the cliff, and lived to tell. And tellhe does --William F. Weld

The death of Barbara Frum stunned and sorrowed Canadians. After a heroic - and very private - 18-year battle with leukemia, she left behind a country that loved, and respected her. As an interviewer for CBC Radio's As It Happens and CBC TV's The Journal, she was able to go one-on-one with anyone. Now her daughter, Linda, shows us the woman behind the microphone. This is the story of a family and how they not only coped with Barbara's fatal disease, but made the best of it, living every day to its fullest. The lessons learned from Barbara Frum will inspire and move all those who have missed her so much.

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her. The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Her fantasies of reunion with her parents in New York kept her going but came to naught: she had not expected to fall from a wealthy childhood into the life of the working-class poor, as a millinery apprentice or a diamond cutter. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. Unhappy and anxious, she anticipated the social changes in America, and returned to Europe with her second husband and her two children. She arrived at the beginning of the Italian miracle--its post-war revitalization. In Milan she met many Americans as an active member of its community and of the British-American club. After personal tragedy she returned to New York, and only then pursued her early intellectual ambitions. The author eventually became a professor of sociology and quickly climbed up the academic ladder. Just as she had been as a little girl, she still "wanted to know everything," beginning with her study of Italian entrepreneurs and going on to European history and French thought, to psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Her early writings prompted William Phillips, co-founder and editor of Partisan Review, to invite her into the elite circle of New York intellectuals. She worked alongside him, first as a reader, then as executive editor, and took over the editorship of the legendary journal during its final period. Kurzweil's journey was one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth. Full Circle will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians, literary and Holocaust scholars, and American studies specialists.

In more than five decades as a reporter, editor and publisher, Peter Osnos has had an especially good view of momentous events and relationships with some of the most influential personalities of our time. As a young journalist for I.F. Stone's Weekly, one of the leading publications of the turbulent 1960s and in 18 years at The Washington Post , he covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Soviet Union at the height of Kremlin power, Washington D.C. as National Editor, "Swinging London" in the 60s and Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s. At Random House and the company he founded, PublicAffairs, he was responsible for books by four presidents -Carter, Clinton, Obama and Trump; celebrated Washington figures including Robert McNamara, House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Vernon Jordan, first ladies Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan, the billionaire George Soros, basketball superstars Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson, legendary spies, political dissidents and the writers, Molly Ivins and Peggy Noonan, among many others. In this unusually wide-ranging memoir, Osnos uses a reporter's skills to portray historic events and encounters beginning with his parents' extraordinary World War II experiences escaping Europe to India, where he was born, to the present day. He shares unique portraits of the famous people he worked with and an insider's perspective of the news and publishing businesses. As he charts the evolution of his career and recent history, he also explores the influence and impact of family, character, curiosity, luck, resilience, a well-pressed suit and some unexpected wrinkles. Also featuring a "virtual attic" of photographs, documents and video at anespeciallygoodview.com.

"Orenstein is such a breezy, funny writer, it's easy to forget she's an important thinker too."--People In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch--shearing, spinning, dyeing wool--and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone. The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater. Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn't expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women's rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home. With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker--and teaches us all something about creativity and connection.

"A compelling read, sad and wistful and breathtakingly forthright." —Chicago Magazine Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg loved his job, his wife, and his two young sons. But he also loved to drink. Drunkard is an unflinchingly honest account of one man's descent into alcoholism and his ambivalent struggle to embrace sobriety. Sentenced to an outpatient rehab program, Steinberg discovers that twenty-eight days of therapy cannot reverse the toll taken by decades of hard drinking. As Steinberg claws his way through recovery, grieves the loss of the drink, and tries to shore up his faltering marriage, he is confronted by the greatest test he has ever faced, and finds himself in the process. Steinberg's gripping memoir is a frank and often painfully funny account of the stark-yet-common realities of a disease that affects millions.

Through The Years: An Autobiography is a memoir written by Nathan S. Jonas, detailing his life from childhood to adulthood. The book offers a comprehensive account of Jonas' experiences, including his upbringing, education, career, and personal life. It covers his early years growing up in a small town, his academic pursuits, and his eventual rise to success in his chosen field. The book also delves into his personal relationships, including his marriage and family life. Throughout the book, Jonas reflects on the challenges he faced and the lessons he learned, offering readers a unique perspective on his life and the world around him. The book is a compelling read for anyone interested in personal memoirs and the journey of self-discovery.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.