1644 results for "Biography"

Are you hungry, dear? life, laughs, and lasagna

Roberts, Doris
Warm, funny episodes, each complete with the perfect recipe from the life of America’s favorite mother-in-law from the hit comedy Everybody Loves Raymond In Are You Hungry, Dear? , Doris takes her signature line from the show and makes it her own in a program that pairs hilarious stories and dramatic turning points from her fascinating life with delicious recipes from her kitchen. She shares the lessons learned in two marriages and numerous love affairs, her struggles with her own family, and her heroic efforts to build a career and raise a son on her own. Those who love feisty, judgmental, opinionated Marie Barone will see how Doris is all that and more: tough, sweet, brave, direct, and vibrant. Listeners will embrace the unforgettable life of this very open star, and relate to the issues--like ageism in Hollywood, sex in the senior years, and her daughter-in-law’s imperfect meat sauce--that Doris cares about passionately. Are You Hungry, Dear? is for everyone who loves a laugh, a great recipe, and a true inside glimpse of a very approachable star.
St. Martin's Press 2003-05 322 pages

Ties that bind: stories of love and gratitude from the first ten years of StoryCorps

David Isay
A celebration of the relationships that bring us strength, purpose, and joy Ties That Bind honors the people who nourish and strengthen us. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay draws from ten years of the revolutionary oral history project’s rich archives, collecting conversations that celebrate the power of the human bond and capture the moment at which individuals become family. Between blood relations, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, in the most trying circumstances and in the unlikeliest of places, enduring connections are formed and lives are forever changed. The stories shared in Ties That Bind reveal our need to reach out, to support, and to share life’s burdens and joys. We meet two brothers, separately cast out by their parents, who reconnect and rebuild a new family around each other. We encounter unexpected joy: A gay woman reveals to her beloved granddaughter that she grew up believing that family was a happiness she would never be able to experience. We witness lifechanging friendship: An Iraq war veteran recalls his wartime bond with two local children and how his relationship with his wife helped him overcome the trauma of losing them. Against unspeakable odds, at their most desperate moments, the individuals we meet in Ties That Bind find their way to one another, discovering hope and healing. Commemorating ten years of StoryCorps, the conversations collected in Ties That Bind are testament to the transformational power of listening.
The Penguin Press 2013 202 pages

The trial of Henry Kissinger

Hitchens, Christopher
With the detention of Augusto Pinochet, and intense international pressure for the arrest of Slobodan Milosovic, the possibility of international law acting against tyrants around the world is emerging as a reality. In this incendiary book, Hitchens takes the floor as prosecuting counsel and mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambitions and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter. He investigates and reveals Kissingers' involvement in: the deliberate mass killings of civilian populations in Indochina; the deliberate collusion in mass murder and assassination in Bangladesh; the personal suborning and planning of a murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation that the USA was not war with - Chile; the incitement and enabling of a mass genocide in East Timor; and the personal involvement in the kidnap and murder of a journalist living in Washinton DC.
Verso 2001 159 pages

All out! an autobiography

Ellis, Albert
This candid autobiography, the last work by renowned psychologist Albert Ellis, is a tour de force of stimulating ideas, colorful descriptions of memorable people and events, and straightforward, no-nonsense talk. Ellis, the creator of one of the most successful forms of psychotherapy―Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)―recounts the memorable episodes of his life; discusses how he coped with emotional problems at different stages of life; describes his love life; and subjects his own self-description to a ruthlessly honest critique. The heart of Ellis's book is his analysis of the psychological leitmotifs that have appeared again and again throughout his life. He describes the aim of this autobiography as follows: "As far as I can, I shall present my bad and good, stupid and intelligent, weak and strong points. Why? Because, following H. G. Wells's recommendation, I want to go as all-out as I can. I want to acknowledge my idiocies―and use REBT to feel sorry about but unashamed of them. I want to make the point―again a central tenet of REBT―that all humans are fabulously fallible―including, of course, me. We have no real choice about this, but we can unconditionally accept ourselves―our so-called essence or being―with our fallibility. That will momentously help us, probably encourage us to acquire unconditional self-acceptance (USA) and possibly inspire other people to give it to themselves, too." With a concluding chapter by Ellis's widow, Debbie Joffe Ellis, describing the final years of his life, this is the definitive summation of the life and work of one of psychology's most successful thinkers and practitioners.
Prometheus Books 2010 668 pages

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

David Leavitt
A "skillful and literate" ( New York Times Book Review ) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide. With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity?his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor?and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
W. W. Norton & Company 2006-11-17 336 pages

Sharuko: Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello = El arqueólogo Peruano Julio C. Tello

Brown, Monica
"A picture biography of Julio C. Tello, considered to be the founder of modern Peruvian archaeology, that traces his life from an early interest in Peru's ancient cultures to his rise as the most distinguished Indigenous social scientist of the twentieth century. A map and an afterword with additional information, photograph, and source list are included."--
Children's Book Press, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, Inc 2020 32 pages

Quantum man: Richard Feynman's life in science

Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell
Perhaps the greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman changed the way we think about quantum mechanics, the most perplexing of all physical theories. Here the author, himself a theoretical physicist, offers a scientific biography: a narrative coupled with clear and novel expositions of science at the limits. An immensely colorful persona in and out of the office, Feynman revolutionized our understanding of nature amid a turbulent life. The author presents that life, from the death of Feynman's childhood sweetheart during the Manhattan Project to his reluctant rise as a scientific icon, seen through the science, providing a new understanding of the legacy of a man who has fascinated millions. A reflection on the issues that drive physics today, this work captures the story of a man who was willing to break all the rules to tame a theory that broke all the rules.
W.W. Norton 2011 350 pages

Abraham Joshua Heschel: a life of radical amazement

Zelizer, Julian E.
""When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying." So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. In this new biography, author Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel's early years and foundational influences-his childhood in Warsaw and early education in Hassidism, his studies in late 1920s and early 1930s Berlin, and the fortuitous opportunity, which brought him to the United States, to study at Hebrew Union College and teach at the Jewish Theological Seminary. This deep and complex portrait places Heschel at the crucial intersection between religion and progressive politics in mid-twentieth-century America. To this day Heschel remains a symbol of the fight to make progressive Jewish values relevant in the secular world"--
Yale University Press 2021-01-01 297 pages

Beethoven: the man revealed

Suchet, John
You know the music... but do you know the man? Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the world's best loved and most influential composers. His life - its dramas, conflicts, loves and losses - is played out in his music. Now John Suchet shows us the man behind the music in this compelling biography of a musical genius. He reveals a difficult and complex character, struggling to continue his profession as musician despite increasing deafness, alienating friends with unprovoked outbursts of anger one moment, overwhelming them with excessive kindness and generosity the next, living in a city in almost constant disarray because of war with France. This is the real Beethoven, and Suchet brings him faithfully and vividly to life.
Elliott and Thompson Limited 2020 443 pages

Raised by wolves: the turbulent art and times of Quentin Tarantino

Charyn, Jerome
When Quentin Tarantino was eight years old, and all the regular kids were lining up to see the latest from Disney, Tarantino's mother took him to see Carnal Knowledge. Sound about right? A high-school dropout who never attended film school, Tarantino got all the education he needed while working the register at Los Angeles's fabled Video Archives. His enthusiasms — for pop culture (foreign and domestic), eye-popping aesthetics, and genre films — would become notorious and infectious. The outrageous success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction essentially killed off Tarantino the man, and gave birth to Tarantino the myth. Here, from legendary novelist and historian Jerome Charyn, is a portrait of both the man AND the myth — and the mind behind them both. More than a biography, more than a critical study, Raised by Wolves is a feisty and astute reckoning with Tarantino en toto.
Thunder's Mouth Press 2006-05-24 195 pages

Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewish woman

Arendt, Hannah
"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany with unusual determination. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, was, Hannah Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive... and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life--having been born a Jewess--this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Hannah Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity.""--
New York Review Books 2021 236 pages

Icon of evil: Hitler's Mufti and the rise of radical Islam

Dalin, David G.
A political biography of Haj Amin al-Husaini (1895-1974), the Palestinian Arab nationalist leader and one-time Mufti of Jerusalem. Husaini adopted aggressive antisemitism in his youth, while studying in Cairo. He bears responsibility for the bloody anti-Jewish riots in the Land of Israel in 1920, 1921, and 1929, and was an instigator of the Arab revolt of 1936-39 in the country. In the 1930s he was close with Nazi leaders, with whom he shared extreme antisemitism and the goal of annihilation of the Jews. In the 1940s Husaini was instrumental in the establishment of pro-Nazi Muslim military formations in Europe, among them the Bosnian SS division "Handschar", which killed 12,600 Bosnian Jews. Argues that Husaini's legacy is alive in the modern Muslim world. He was the link between World War II antisemitism and the modern Islamic one, as well as a founding father of radical Islamic antisemitism. Dwells on the latter, which adopted from the West belief in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", blood libels, Holocaust denial, etc.
Transaction Publishers 2009 227 pages

Madiba A to Z: the many faces of Nelson Mandela

Schechter, Danny
From the makers of the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a completely unique biography and thematic telling of the story of Nelson Mandela. This book, which provided key source material for the film, is an unexpurgated collection of the views and opinions of South Africa's first Black president, and it draws on Danny Schechter’s forty-year relationship with "Madiba," as Nelson Mandela is known in his native South Africa. Each chapter of this unique portrait corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, and the letters cover major and minor, unexpected and fascinating themes in Mandela’s life and his impact on others: Athlete, Bully, Comrade, Forgiveness, Indigenous, Jailed, Militant, and President, to name a few. The book quotes liberally from Mandela himself, his ex-wives and other family members, global leaders, Mandela's cellmates and guards on Robben Island, the team behind Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom , former president F. W. de Klerk, members of the South African Police, and his comrades including his successor Thabo Mbeki. Madiba A to Z reveals sides of Nelson Mandela that are not often discussed and angles of the anti-apartheid movement that most choose to brush under the table in order to focus on the happy-ending version of the story. As Schechter reports in the book, according to Mandela's successor as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, “the fundamental problems of South Africa, poverty, inequality, have remained unchanged since 1994.” This is partly because, as Schechter writes, “six months before the 1994 elections, when South Africa was being governed jointly by the ANC and the National Party under a Transitional Executive Council (TEC), there were secret negotiations about the economic future.” There are many rarely spoken of revelations in Madiba A to Z , a book about Mandela’s brilliance, his courage, his tremendous impact in saving his country and its people of all races, but one that also shows how far South Africa still has to go.
Seven Stories Press 2013-11-26 272 pages

Growing: seven years in Ceylon

Woolf, Leonard
Growing is a portrait of a young man sent straight out from university to help govern Ceylon. It is doubtful that any Empire at any time has been served by such an intelligent, dutiful, hardworking and incorruptible civil servant as the young Leonard Woolf. He was determined to do what was good but discovered for himself that colonial rule, be it ever so high-minded, is fated to do wrong. Growing is also a deeply affectionate account of the mystery, magic and savage beauty of Ceylon at the turn of the century, an island whose diverse beliefs and cultures Woolf had the time and wit to explore in detail.
Eland 2015 206 pages