124 results for "Memoir"

Dictionary of National Biography

Leslie Stephen,Sidney Lee
The "Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 16" is a comprehensive biographical reference work, offering detailed accounts of significant figures in British history. Compiled under the editorship of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, this volume continues the tradition of providing meticulously researched biographies, covering individuals from all walks of life who have made notable contributions to the nation's history, culture, and society. Each entry provides a detailed narrative of the subject's life, achievements, and legacy, making it an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, and anyone interested in British history. This volume is an essential addition to any library, preserving the stories of those who have shaped the British nation. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2025-05-22 436 pages

In an uncertain world: tough choices from Wall Street to Washington

Rubin, Robert Edward
Publisher's description: Robert Rubin was sworn in as the seventieth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in January 1995 in a brisk ceremony attended only by his wife and a few colleagues. As soon as the ceremony was over, he began an emergency meeting with President Bill Clinton on the financial crisis in Mexico. This was not only a harbinger of things to come during what would prove to be a rocky period in the global economy; it also captured the essence of Rubin himself--short on formality, quick to get into the nitty-gritty. From his early years in the storied arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs to his current position as chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, Robert Rubin has been a major figure at the center of the American financial system. He was a key player in the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.
Random House 2003 427 pages

Madoff The Final Word

Richard Behar
Renowned investigative journalist Richard Behar delivers the definitive account of history’s largest—and longest-running—financial fraud, “the scale of the deception…beggars belief” ( New York Post ). Some $68 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people were driven to suicide in the wake of the Ponzi Scheme’s exposure. Others went to prison. But there has never been a satisfying accounting for how Bernie got away with so much, for so long. Until now. Richard Behar’s relationship with Madoff began in 2011 with a simple email request from the conman. By the time Madoff died in 2021, he had sent Behar more than 300 emails and dozens of handwritten letters, participated in some fifty phone conversations, and sat for three in-person jailhouse interviews—a level of access provided to no other reporter. Behar also established relationships with hundreds of regulators, prosecutors, FBI agents, investors, Wall Street experts, ex-employees of Madoff’s, family members, school classmates, and others. The result is the final word on the criminal behind history’s most enduring fraud—and on those who believed him, covered for him, or locked him up. Behar illuminates not only the fraud’s origins—decades earlier than Madoff claimed in his confession—but also the complicity of investors, Wall Street insiders, family members, and some of the largest banks in the US and Europe. Shocking, infuriating, riveting (and at times absurdly funny), Madoff shows us how Bernie ensnared thousands of investors. As Behar’s dogged reporting over the last fifteen years makes clear, however, there aren’t many innocents left standing by the end of this tale. Just about everyone involved is guilty, at a minimum, of humanity’s most consistent weakness: greed.
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster 2025-07 384 pages

American Jewish women's history: a reader

Pamela S. Nadell
“It gives me a secret pleasure to observe the fair character our family has in the place by Jews & Christians,“Abigail Levy Franks wrote to her son from New York City in 1733. Abigail was part of a tiny community of Jews living in the new world. In the centuries that followed, as that community swelled to several millions, women came to occupy diverse and changing roles. American Jewish Women’s History , an anthology covering colonial times to the present, illuminates that historical diversity. It shows women shaping Judaism and their American Jewish communities as they engaged in volunteer activities and political crusades, battled stereotypes, and constructed relationships with their Christian neighbors. It ranges from Rebecca Gratz’s development of the Jewish Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 to protest the rising prices of kosher meat at the turn of the century, to the shaping of southern Jewish women's cultural identity through food. There is currently no other reader conveying the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available. The reader is divided into four sections complete with detailed introductions. The contributors include: Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna.
New York University Press 2003-04-05 326 pages

Yoni's Last Battle: The Rescue at Entebbe, 1976

Netanyahu, Iddo
On July 4, 1976, more than a hundred hostages, held at gunpoint in Entebbe, Uganda, were freed in a spectacular rescue operation and flown to safety in Israel, over 2000 miles away. Their captors were Arab and German terrorists, aided by the Ugandan army; their liberators were members of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, simply known as "the Unit." Lt.-Col. Yoni (Jonathan) Netanyahu, the Unit's commander, earned world-wide fame in the wake of the operation's stunning success. He was the only Israeli soldier killed in the Entebbe raid. As a brother of the rescue force's commander, and himself a member of the Unit, Iddo Netanyahu had ready access to the participants in the raid. He was able to obtain detailed accounts from the men of the Unit who, for the first time, described the planning and preparations for the mission and its near-perfect execution. What emerged from their accounts is a powerful and stirring story of how the daring undertaking was accomplished after only 48 hours of frantic preparations. Yoni's Last Battle portrays the men who carried out an incredibly hazardous operation in far-away Africa. Above all, it depicts the heroic - and tragic - figure of their commander, Yoni.
Independently published 2013-07-01 240 pages

INHERIT THE TRUTH 1939-1945 : THE DOCUMENTED EXPERIENCES OF A SURVIVOR OF AUSCHWITZ AND BELSEN

Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita
Told in her own words, this is the incredible true story of one young woman's survival of Auschwitz and Belsen because she happened to play the cello. Although my head was shaved and I had a number on my arm, I had not lost my identity totally. I may no longer have had a name, but I was identifiable ... I was 'the cellist'. When eighteen-year-old Anita arrived at Auschwitz, she found herself plucked from the Nazi death machine by a twist of fate: she played the cello, and the camp orchestra needed a cellist. Now the last living survivor of the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra, this is her story told in her own words. Like so many German Jewish schoolgirls, Anita had been busy with her studies and ambitions when her everyday life began to turn by degrees into one of unimaginable horror. School was cancelled, her parents were summoned for deportation, and when she and her sister, Renate, attempted to escape to France, they were arrested and imprisoned. Through her sharp-etched memories, alongside family letters, photos, and other historical documents, Inherit the Truth leads us into one of humanity's darkest chapters, where we are forced to confront the fragility of the line between civilisation and barbarity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of her arrival in the UK after her release from Belsen concentration camp, Anita Lasker-Fallfisch's account of her and her sister's survival of both Auschwitz and Belsen is a testament to their remarkable courage, resilience, ingenuity and luck. This edition includes a new foreword from Philippe Sands.
FABER AND FABER 2026-04-23 272 pages

The Inextinguishable Symphony A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany

Martin Goldsmith
NOW AN ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY, Winter Journey Set amid the growing tyranny of Germany's Third Reich, here is the riveting and emotional tale of Günther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert, two courageous Jewish musicians who struggled to perform under unimaginable circumstances--and found themselves falling in love in a country bent on destroying them. In the spring of 1933, as the full weight of Germany's National Socialism was brought to bear against Germany's Jews, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians, actors, and other artists found themselves expelled from their positions with German orchestras, opera companies, and theater groups, and Jews were forbidden even to attend "Aryan" theaters. Later that year, the Jüdische Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture Association, was created under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Providing for Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences, the Kulturbund, which included an orchestra, an opera company, and an acting troupe, became an unlikely haven for Jewish artists and offered much-needed spiritual enrichment for a besieged people--while at the same time providing the Nazis with a powerful propaganda tool for showing the rest of the world how well Jews were ostensibly being treated under the Third Reich. It was during this period that twenty-two-year-old flutist Günther Goldschmidt was expelled from music school because of his Jewish roots. While preparing to flee the ever-tightening grip of Nazi Germany for Sweden, Günther was invited to fill in for an ailing flutist with the Frankfurt Kulturbund Orchestra. It was there, during rehearsals, that he met the dazzling nineteen-year-old violist Rosemarie Gumpert--a woman who would change the course of his life. Despite their strong attraction, Günther eventually embarked for the safety of Sweden as planned, only to risk his life six months later returning to the woman he could not forget--and to the perilous country where hatred and brutality had begun to flourish. Here is Günther and Rosemarie's story, a deeply moving tale of love and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit in the face of terror and persecution. Beautifully and simply told by their son, National Public Radio commentator Martin Goldsmith, The Inextinguishable Symphony takes us from the cafés of Frankfurt, where Rosemarie and Günther fell in love, to the concert halls that offered solace and hope for the beleaguered Jews, to the United States, where the two made a new life for themselves that would nevertheless remain shadowed by the fate of their families. Along with the fate of Günther and Rosemarie's families, this rare memoir also illuminates the Kulturbund and the lives of other fascinating figures associated with it, including Kubu director Kurt Singer--a man so committed to the organization that he objected to his artists' plans for flight, fearing that his productions would suffer. The Kubu, which included some of the most prominent artists of the day and young performers who would gain international fame after the war, became the sole source of culture and entertainment for Germany's Jews. A poignant testament to the enduring vitality of music and love even in the harshest times, The Inextinguishable Symphony gives us a compelling look at an important piece of Holocaust history that has heretofore gone largely untold.
John Wiley & Sons Canada, Limited 2001-08 354 pages

Been There, Done That

Eddie Fisher,David Fisher
Eddie on his ex-wives: Debbie Reynolds : Debbie's whole life has been an act...When I left her for Elizabeth Taylor, she should have won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the wronged woman. [p. 83] Elizabeth Taylor : If I had known that first night we spent together how our love was going to help destroy my career and, for a time, my life, if I had known how much pain my love for Elizabeth was going to bring me, I still wouldn't have hesitated. [p. 144] Connie Stevens : I always wondered how she could work so hard, how she could accomplish to much. Then I took a couple of [her] pills... [p. 269] Read the explosive memoir everyone's talking about!
Macmillan 2000-07-15 408 pages

The Apple: Based on the Herman Rosenblat Holocaust Memoir

Holt, Penelope,Rosenblat, Herman
Oprah called the tale of love in a concentration camp that lies at the heart of Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat's controversial memoir "the greatest love story ever told." But when his story is attacked as the greatest lie ever sold and his memoir is canceled, Rosenblat must defend his narrative. The Apple is the story behind the story. It first recounts Herman's authentic account of surviving Nazi concentration camps with his family. It then explores his made-up story of a girl he says helped him by tossing apples over the fence of a work camp, a girl he would encounter again in New York after the war and marry. Why did an old man embellish his Holocaust account with a romantic fiction which won him appearances on the Oprah Show that touched and inspired many, but also ignited a firestorm of criticism when his fabrication was uncovered.
Independently published 2009-08-31 185 pages

Solidarity and Treason Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940

Lisa Fittko
Lisa Fittko's Escape through the Pyrenees (Northwestern, 1991) told the extraordinary true tale of her life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the Nazi invasion of 1940, when she and her husband smuggled small groups of refugees to safety along a tortuous route through the mountains. Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 is Fittko's equally gripping memoir of the preceding years in the underground and exile. The volume opens with Hitler's.
Northwestern University Press 1993 160 pages

A Friend Called Anne

Jacqueline van Maarsen,Carol Ann Lee
When Jacqueline met Anne on her way home from school in the 1940s, the two girls formed an instant friendship. But with every day came an increasing sense of fear, especially as the Nazis took over Amsterdam. Despite the impending war, the friendship between Anne Frank and Jacqueline van Maarsen would never be broken, even when Anne was forced into hiding. In this beautiful memoir, Jacqueline remembers Anne, their friendship, and the chilling Holocaust experience of barely escaping deportation by the Nazis, helplessly watching friends and family disappear, and starting her life again after the war. Through Jacqueline's memories and black-and-white photos, Anne Frank will come to life and continue to be remembered. "[A] fascinating account of Anne, her family, and her friends before she went into hiding . . . This absorbing book vividly portrays life in occupied Amsterdam and throws interesting sidelights on Anne Frank's story."— Booklist
Penguin Young Readers Group 2007-02-15 176 pages

Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman

Perechodnik, Calel
In this moving memoir, a young Polish Jew chronicles his life under the Nazis. In the vain hope of protecting himself and his family, Calel Perechodnik made the wrenching decision to become a ghetto policeman in a small town near Warsaw. The true tragedy of his choice becomes clear when during the Aktion he must witness his own wife and child forced to board a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. Filled with loathing for the Germans, the Poles, his Jewish brethren, and himself, Perechodnik fled the ghetto to shelter with a Polish woman in Warsaw. In the course of 105 terror-filled days in hiding, he poured out his poignant story. Written while Nazi boots pounded the streets of the neighborhood and while his tortured memory was painfully fresh, this memoir has a rare immediacy and raw power. Shortly before his death in 1944, he entrusted the precious diary to a Polish friend. The document was eventually deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. Left nearly forgotten for half a century, it was finally published in Poland in 1993. We owe a great debt to historian Frank Fox for bringing us this sensitive translation, which reminds us anew of the power and truth of historical memory.
Routledge 2019 256 pages

Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913

Newmark, Harris,Worden, J Perry,Newmark, Marco Ross
"Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913: Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark" offers a captivating glimpse into the formative years of Los Angeles and Southern California. This meticulously prepared reprint presents the memoirs of Harris Newmark, a prominent figure whose life intertwined with the region's dynamic growth during the 19th century. Dive into vivid accounts of pioneer life, social customs, and significant historical events that shaped Southern California. Newmark's recollections provide invaluable insights into the area's transformation from a sparsely populated territory to a bustling hub of activity. Explore the social fabric of the era through firsthand observations and personal anecdotes. This book stands as a significant historical document, chronicling the experiences of a man who witnessed and participated in the evolution of California. Discover the allure of a bygone era in this timeless narrative of community, change, and the enduring spirit of the American West. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Anson Street Press 2025-03-28 686 pages

Georges Seurat

Rewald, John
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. 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 the original work.
Kessinger Publishing, LLC 2010-09-10 146 pages

The Diary of Petr Ginz

Petr Ginz
Not since Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has such an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny come to light. As a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully kept a diary that captured the increasingly precarious texture of daily life. His stunningly mature paintings, drawings, and writings reflect his insatiable appetite for learning and experience and openly display his growing artistic and literary genius. Petr was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. His diaries--recently discovered in a Prague attic under extraordinary circumstances--are an invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life.
Grove Press 2008-09 192 pages

Behind the Secret Window

Nelly S. Toll
Illustrated with Nelly's original watercolors, this powerful memoir tells the true story of how a little girl's imagination helped her survive World War II. The Nazis come to Poland when Nelly is six. By the time she turns eight, the events of World War II have taken almost everyone she loves. Scared, lonely, and running from the Nazis, Nelly hides in the bedroom of a Gentile couple in Lwow, Poland. For over a year, she lives in fear of discovery, writing in her diary and painting pictures of a fantasy world filled with open skies and happy families. For 13 months during World War II, the author and her mother were hidden from the Nazis. Like Anne Frank, Nelly kept a diary and through that outlet transformed her grim reality into an enchanting fantasy world. "Without emphasizing horror and loss, Toll conveys the effects of human evil and human folly, summoning up the forces of tragedy and courage." -- Publishers Weekly "In Toll's remembrance, art equals hope: her happy family pictures, painted in the secret room where she and her mother hid from the Nazis and the Poles, show extraordinary preteen talent as well as the will to survive." -- Kirkus Reviews
National Geographic Books 2003-03-24 176 pages

Casanova The World of a Seductive Genius

Laurence Bergreen
“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” ( Huffington Post )—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni . And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life . Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” ( Kirkus Reviews ).
Simon & Schuster 2018-02-13 544 pages

The Children's House of Belsen

Hetty E. Verolme
Hetty Werkendam was 13 years old in 1943 when she was transported to the repatriation camp at Westerbork. From there she was sent to Belsen to live in the "Children's House," where she witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust. Her account of life in the Children's House-where the awfulness of Belsen was countered by the inspirational figure of the children's mentor Sister Luba-provides a painful but unusually uplifting Holocaust memoir.
ReadHowYouWant.com 2011 464 pages

Blue-Eyed Boy A Memoir

Robert Timberg
Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg's extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after. He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body. It would have been easy to give up. Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back--not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning. Remarkable as his return to health was--he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia--just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun . Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song , a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others--John McCain and Jim Webb--from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy , Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.
Penguin 2015-07-14 320 pages

Where Light and Shadow Meet A Memoir

Emilie Schindler,Erika Rosenberg
In plain eloquence, the woman who married Oskar Schindler tells the true story of their life together, what they did to save the Jews in their factories, and what led to "Schindler's list". It soon became clear that her marriage would have both its passions and its betrayals. Yet Emilie stayed with Oskar through his growing involvement with the Nazis, working for counterintelligence with him. She first, then he later, came to realize the costs of the Nazi takeover and became witnesses to its terrors. Their inward allegiance changed even as they needed to maintain patriotic appearances and close affiliations with the Nazis in power. Through their work together at their two factories, saving the Jews became paramount for the Schindlers. Emilie nursed the Jewish factory workers when they fell ill, often saving their lives. She risked imprisonment or worse for her activities in the black market to feed them. Her stubbornness kept her fighting for food, even daring to ask a wealthy mill owner to give them grain to feed her starving workers. Where Light and Shadow Meet chronicles the Schindlers' flight after the war, the loss of almost all their possessions, and their eventual emigration to Argentina. There they settled on a farm, but barely scraped together an existence. Oskar returned to Germany, leaving Emilie to manage on her own. This is the story of one woman's daily acts of bravery during Hitler's reign and why it mattered. It is also the story of a marriage and of survival. Finally, it is the story of Emilie's strength in continuing on one day at a time.
W. W. Norton 1997-08 176 pages