5053 results for "Biography"

The secrets of grown-ups: an autobiography

Caspary, Vera
Vera Caspary, the celebrated author of Laura , tells her own story in this captivating autobiography. With a career that spanned from the 1920s through 1970s, one that produced over twenty novels, in addition to her many credits for film and theater, Caspary centered her life around a passion for writing. From her early experiences at an advertisement agency--where she developed a correspondence school and invented its "famed" instructor--to the struggles of being gray-listed in the McCarthy Era, Caspary constantly found a way to turn her creative needs into viable work. Caspary recalls the rest of a full life, too, including her flirtation with communism, travels across Europe, and a marriage. Caspary's skillful writing makes her incredible depictions of people, and the times in which they lived, jump off the page.
Open Road Media 2016-01-26 237 pages

Forbidden city: the golden age of Chinese nightclubs

Robbins, Trina
From the late 1930's to the early 1960's, Chinese nightclubs fourished in San Francisco's Chinatown. They were the first, and in those days the only venues for talented Asians who sang or danced professionally. Asian entertainers came from everywhere to perform in Chinatown, and they all found a home in the Chinese Nightclubs. For publicity purposes, many of the entertainers were compared to famous Caucasian stars. They were billed as "The Chinese Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers," "the Chinese Frank Sinatra", the "Chinese Sophie Tucker." They sang and danced for the GIs during the war, and Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman came to their shows. In this book the men and women who performed in the nightclubs from 1937 to 1964, tell their stories in their own words. Forbidden city brings back to life an age of glamour and a long neglected slice of Asian-American history.
Hampton Press 2010 156 pages

Impossible city: Paris in the 21st century

Kuper, Simon
"An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian cliches"--
PublicAffairs 2024 258 pages

Rescued images: memories of childhood in hiding

Jacobsen, Ruth
Memoirs of a Jew, intended for children. Jacobsen was born as Ruth Katzenstein in the village of Frankenberg, Germany. In 1937 the family moved to Düsseldorf; in 1939 they fled to the Netherlands. Under the German occupation, the family first lived in the village of Oud Zuylen; in 1941 the Dutch resistance movement hid Ruth in Amsterdam and her parents in Roermond. Jacobsen describes the people who hid and helped her. Several years after the war her parents committed suicide; in 1953 she emigrated to the USA. Includes illustrations, and collages made by Jacobsen from family photographs.
Mikaya Press 2001 92 pages

Counsel in the crease: a big league player in the hockey wars

Swados, Robert O.
""A lively set of insights on the sports world as a whole makes Counsel in the Crease a highly recommended pick indeed." - Internet Bookwatch "Swados's Buffalo love seeps from every page...The book covers everything a Sabres fan could desire...It's all here...Written with wit, warmth, and an often surprising level of honesty, the book is a success for hockey freaks and even those with just moderate interest in the game...for a long-time Sabres fan, Counsel in the Crease is damn near un-missable, offering some of the juiciest views of the franchise's backroom dealings a fan will ever see." - Buffalo Spree "...an in-depth, detailed look at the Sabres' franchise through the eyes and ears of Swados....pro-Buffalo, pro-Sabres, pro-Knox group, a man who spills his blue and gold blood all over these pages. He takes the reader into the board rooms, into the locker rooms, into negotiations, everywhere but in the faceoff circles and the corners of the rink...This is the definitive history - or at least one version - of the first 35 years of the Sabres' franchise, told as oral history, by a man who was there. Many of the principals from the first 30 years of the franchise have taken these conversations and negotiations to their graves; Bob Swados has made sure the history will survive...this is a fascinating read for those who want to hear one man's version of what happened in the board rooms and behind the scenes." ." - The Buffalo News "[Swados] uses an obsession with detail in a sophisticated way to reveal the complexity behind his subject....fans of [the Buffalo Sabres] will thoroughly enjoy Swados's insider views of the Sabres and its various owners. General hockey fans will be enlightened by Swados's insights into the sport's various financial and legal imbroglios." - Publishers Weekly
Prometheus Books 2006 492 pages

Namedropping: mostly literary memoirs

Elman, Richard M.
In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people--how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway's small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, "Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?" We're on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer's bald forehead. Singer's great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool," has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They're both still a long way from Stockholm. "Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?" he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer's motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.--from the Preface These are Richard Elman's candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist--among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman's teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject's art. To many readers, these persons are just "names"; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.
State University of New York Press 1998-01-01 277 pages

Almost utopia: the residents and radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont 1950

Lepkoff, Rebecca
In the summer of 1950, Rebecca Lepkoff and her husband Gene bought land in Jamaica, Vermont, a small, south-central Green Mountain town on the West River. A 34-year-old photographer, Rebecca had already made a name for herself as a member of the Photo League, which viewed photography as a tool for social change. Her photographs of her native Lower East Side in the 1930s and ‘40s were already becoming renowned. The Lepkoffs were drawn to the communitarian homesteaders who populated the Pikes Falls area of Jamaica, clustered near Scott and Helen Nearing. Published here for the first time are some 60 photographs that Rebecca Lepkoff took of natives and transplants at work and play during that summer of 1950, as the Korean War engulfed the nation’s headlines. These intimate images are the work of an artist at the peak of her craft and they portray a rural Vermont town at a moment in time just before paved roads and postwar development would alter its character forever.
Vermont Historical Society 2008 109 pages

Writing as resistance: four women confronting the Holocaust : Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum

Brenner, Rachel Feldhay
Examines the personal values and philosophies of Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum in relation to the pressures and conditions under which they lived in the Nazi era. All had "strong Christian affinities." Under the challenge of terror they were "Christians by choice, Jews by decree." Each responded to her Jewishness in a distinct way: Stein felt close to the Jews; Weil had a hateful attitude toward them and tried to obliterate herself as a Jew; Frank and Hillesum both affirmed their Jewish identities. In the face of Hitler, each, in her own way, resisted.
Pennsylvania State University Press 1997 216 pages

Peiresc's Orient: antiquarianism as cultural history in the seventeenth century

Miller, Peter N.
The ten essays published in this volume were written over the space of a decade, but they were conceived from the start as a coherent whole, presenting Peiresc's study of discrete languages and literatures of the Near East and North Africa. For Peiresc the student of the Classical past, this described the eastern and southern space in which the Greeks and Romans lived and strove. For Peiresc the Christian, this was the world of the Bible that impacted upon the Greeks and Romans. And for Peiresc of the Mediterranean (for he was born in Aix, spent much time in Marseille, and lived outside of the region for only 6 of his 57 years), this was the territory that his friends and colleagues sailed to, lived in and, usually, came back from. The convergence of these axes in the life of one man, and a man of singular intellectual power and charm whose vast personal paper arsenal had survived, makes this such a compelling project. The essays are arranged in a roughly chronological order. They follow the course of Peiresc's own projects from his early encounter with the ancient Near East in Greek and Roman literature, through his engagement with Arabic to his deepening kowledge of rabbinic texts to the wider world of the new oriental studies of the seventeenth century which he helped create: Samaritan, Coptic and Ethiopic.
Ashgate Pub. Limited 2012 360 pages

Stalin's captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet race for the bomb

Riehl, Nikolaus
After World War II, German scientist Nikolaus Riehl and his family were held captive in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1955. His story is uniquely interesting in part because of its historical content, in part because he was bilingual in German and Russian, having grown up in St. Petersburg as the son of a German father and a Russian mother, and as a result of his warm human interest in the Russian people. He tells his story in Ten Years in a Golden Cage. Frederick Seitz has written a detailed introduction that provides a historical context for his translation (from German) of Riehl's book.
American Chemical Society 1996 218 pages

The end of major combat operations

McDonell, Robert Nick
Novelist and Time correspondent Nick McDonell brings this stunning account back from the latest iteration of the War in Iraq--an engrossing, ground-level report on the conflict still unfolding under its second commander-in-chief. Traveling to Baghdad and then to Mosul with the 1st Cavalry Division, McDonell offers an unforgettable look at the way things stand now--at the translators stranded in a country that doesn't look kindly on their cooperation, at the infantrymen struggling to make something out of the soft counterinsurgency missions they call chai-ops , at the commanders inured to American journalists and Iraqi officials both--and what the so-called "end of major combat operations" means for where they're going.
McSweeney's Books 2010 163 pages