194 results for "Autobiography"

The Disappearance of Émile Zola Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case

Michael Rosen
The incredible story of Émile Zola's escape to London in the aftermath of the scandalous Dreyfus Affair. It is the evening of July 18, 1898 and the world-renowned novelist Émile Zola is on the run. His crime? Taking on the highest powers in the land with his open letter "J'accuse"—and losing. Forced to leave Paris with nothing but the clothes he is standing in and a nightshirt wrapped in newspaper, Zola flees to England with no idea when he will return. This is the little-known story of Zola's time in exile. Rosen has traced Zola's footsteps from the Gare du Nord to London, examining the significance of this year. The Disappearance of Émile Zola offers an intriguing insight into the mind, the loves, and the politics of the great writer during this tumultuous era in his life.
Pegasus Books 2017-09-19 320 pages

Loomered How I Became the Most Banned Woman in the World

Laura Loomer
Laura Loomer is the most banned woman in America. An investigative journalist, activist, and truth-teller who has earned many powerful enemies in Silicon Valley and the media, Loomer has been banned from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, Periscope, Medium, and TeeSpring…so far. Loomer works tirelessly for Americans banned from essential online services for having the wrong political opinions. In addition to filing lawsuits against the companies that have wrongfully ostracized and defamed her, she is running for Congress in Florida’s 21st District. This is her story.
Bombardier Books 2021-10-19 408 pages

Jimmy Carter

Julian E. Zelizer
A peanut farmer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter rose to national power through mastering the strategy of the maverick politician. As the face of the "New South", Carter's strongest support came from his ability to communicate directly to voters who were disaffected by corruption in politics. But running as an outsider was easier than governing as one, as Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer shows in this examination of Carter's presidency.
Thorndike Press 2010 262 pages

An American Saga The Story of Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner

James T. Flexner
This tale of two families is set on a grand scale, as James Thomas Flexner brings his talents to bear on his own noteworthy heritage. An American Saga is an historical narrative, grounded on documentary sources, which ends with the marriage of Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner. The account deals equally with the lives and the backgrounds of husband and wife, the author's parents. Simon Flexner was the famous medical investigator, discoverer of the "Flexner vacillus" and the "Flexner serum," who became the creating director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) and eventually acknowledged leader of American medical science. The Kentucky-born son of impoverished German Jewish immigrants, he grew up in penury. As he never completed the eighth grade, he was almost completely self-educated when he appeared at the Johns Hopkins University before its celebrated medical school had been founded. Almost instantly he began making the discoveries that soon made him the leading younger medical scientist in the United States.
Fordham University Press 1993 494 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

One Soldier's War

Arkady Babchenko
An outstanding dispatch from the frontline of war - unsparing, unsentimental, blackly comic and brutally beautiful - by and ordinary soldier who tells it like it is. Arkady Babchenko was still a naove 18-year-old when he and his fellow teenage conscripts arrived in a camp just north of Chechnya. Fresh off the truck, the new recruit rapidly learned the meaning of savagery and fear, before he'd even been near the front line. By the time he started his active duty, he had developed a tough skin against the harsh treatments meted out by his seniors and grew hardened and cynical. With unblinking honesty, Arkady Babchenko traces his journey from innocence to experience, taking the raw and mundane reality of war and twists it into compelling, chilling - and eerily elegant - prose.
Portobello 2007 405 pages

No Pretty Pictures

Anita Lobel
The beloved Caldecott Honor artist now recounts a tale of vastly different kind -- her own achingly potent memoir of a childhood of flight, imprisonment, and uncommon bravery in Nazi-occupied Poland. Anita Lobel was barely five when the war began and sixteen by the time she came to America from Sweden, where she had been sent to recover at the end of the war. This haunting book, illustrated with the author's archival photographs, is the remarkable account of her life during those years. Poised, forthright, and always ready to embrace life, Anita Lobel is the main character in the most personal story she will ever tell.Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now. 00-01 Tayshas High School Reading List Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now.
HarperCollins 2000-02-02 193 pages

Laguardia in Congress

Howard Zinn
Fiorello LaGuardia is known best as the tempestuous mayor of New York City in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House. There had been, however, an earlier time, which matched his mayoralty years in sheer drama and perhaps surpassed them in lasting achievement-LaGuardia's years in Congress. He served in the House of Representative almost continuously from 1917 to 1933, representing two ethnically diverse congressional districts: the Fourteenth (Greenwich Village), from 1917 to 1919, and the Twentieth (East Harlem), from 1923 to 1933. Although barred from important committee posts because of his political independence and thus denied from playing a direct role in lawmaking, he was a tireless and vocal champion of Progressive causes, from allowing more immigration and removing U.S. troops from Nicaragua to speaking up for the rights and livelihoods of striking miners, impoverished farmers, oppressed minorities, and struggling families. A goad to the era's plutocrats and their enablers in government, LaGuardia fought for progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression. In this book, first published by Cornell University Press in 1959, Howard Zinn establishes LaGuardia's tenure in Congress as a vital link between the Progressive and New Deal eras, offering a lively and informative account of his many legislative battles, his political philosophy, and the distinctly urban (specifically, New York City) sensibilities he brought to the Progressive movement.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2012-05 302 pages

Simon Wiesenthal

Tom Segev
This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero--depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier--and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is as compelling as the fiction. "Simon Wiesenthal" is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2010-09 480 pages

Dead Certainties Unwarranted Speculations

Simon Schama
Like his The Embarrassment of Riches and the bestselling Citizens, Simon Schama's latest book is both history and literature of immense stylishness and ambition. But Dead Certainties goes beyond these more conventional histories to address the deeper enigmas that confront a student of the past. In order to do so, Schama reconstructs -- and at times reinvents -- two ambiguous deaths: the first, that of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759; the second, in 1849, that of George Parkman, an eccentric Boston brahmin whose murder by an impecunious Harvard professor in 1849 was a grisly reproach to the moral sanctity of his society. Out of these stories -- with all of their bizarre coincidences and contradictions -- Schama creates a dazzling and supremely vital work of historical imagination.
Alfred A. Knopf 1991 333 pages

Improv Nation How We Made a Great American Art

Sam Wasson
A finalist for the 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award "A compelling, absolutely unputdownable story . . . And, in case you're wondering, yes, the book is funny. In places, very funny. A remarkable story, magnificently told." -- Booklist In this richly reported, scene-driven narrative, Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv from its unlikely beginnings in McCarthy-era Chicago. We witness the chance meeting between Mike Nichols and Elaine May, hang out at the after-hours bar where Dan Aykroyd hosted friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, and go behind the scenes of cultural landmarks from The Graduate to The Colbert Report . Along the way, we befriend pioneers such as Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Alan Arkin, Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, and many others. Wasson shows why improv deserves to be considered the great American art form of the last half century. " One of the most important stories in American popular culture . . . Wasson may be the first author to explain [improv's] entire history . . . For that reason alone, it's a valuable book . " -- New York Times Book Review "A compelling history . . . It holds the element of surprise--true to the spirit of its subject." -- Entertainment Weekly
HarperCollins Publishers 2018-12-04 480 pages

Nero The End of a Dynasty

Miriam Griffin,Miriam Tamara Griffin
"Although Nero's personality has fascinated both historians and writers of fiction, it is the nature of his reign and its context within the Julio-Claudian dynasty that has even greater importance for historians of the Roman Empire. Nero's final collapse brought to an end the dynasty Augustus had founded and placed in jeopardy the political system he had devised. To what extent does Nero's failure reveal not only his own ineptitude but the tensions and problems inherent in that system? Why did this actor-emperor find the role of princeps so difficult to play? These are the questions confronted by Miriam Griffin in her wide-ranging study. Dividing her book into two distinct yet related parts, Griffin first analyzes the reign of Nero in terms of the Emperor's attitude and initiative and then provides a diagnosis of his fall in which his personality is seen interacting with the political institutions he inherited. The accent is on Nero, but he is never viewed in isolation: the example of his family and predecessors, the influence of his advisers and rivals, and the effect upon those who had to follow him--all give a broad focus to this work."--Jacket.
Yale University Press 1985 320 pages

Moving the Bar My Life As a Radical Lawyer

Michael Ratner
Michael Ratner (1943-2016) was one of America's leading human rights lawyers. He worked for more than four decades at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) becoming first the Director of Litigation and then the President of what Alexander Cockburn called "a small band of tigerish people." He was also the President of the National Lawyers Guild. Ratner handled some of the most significant cases In American history. This book tells why and how he did it. His last case, which he worked on until he died, was representing truth-telling whistleblower and now political prisoner Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. Ratner "moved the bar" by organizing some 600 lawyers to successfully defend habeas corpus, that is, the ancient right of someone accused of a crime to have a lawyer and to be brought before a judge. Michael had a piece of paper taped on the wall next to his desk at the CCR. It read: 4 key principles of being a radical lawyer: 1. Do not refuse to take a case just because it is long odds of winning in court. 2. Use cases to publicize a radical critique of US policy and to promote revolutionary transformation. 3. Combine legal work with political advocacy. 4. Love people. Compelling and instructive, Moving the Bar is an indispensable manual for the next generation of activists and their lawyers.
OR Books, LLC 2021 366 pages

Last Man Out The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster

Melissa Fay Greene
One evening in late October 1958, the deepest coal mine in North America "bumped"-its rock floors heaved up and smashed into rock ceilings. Most of the men on the shift perished. But nineteen men were trapped alive a mile below the earth's surface, struggling to survive without food, water, light, or fresh air. Almost a week passed without rescue. Hopes of finding life dwindled; then a miracle happened: Rescuers stumbled across a broken pipe that led to the cave of survivors. In the media circus that followed, the survivors' endurance was mythologized and twisted, and the state of Georgia's tourism ploy-inviting the survivors to recuperate on a Georgia beach-turned racist and pitted the miners against each other. Using long-lost stories and interviews with survivors, Greene has reconstructed an extraordinary drama of their struggle and miraculous rescue.
Harcourt 2004-05-03 342 pages

For Those I Loved

Martin Gray,Max Gallo
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --George Santayana We need only to look back to Rwanda, and now to Darfur, to see that once again we are living the worst of times. Who better to guide our understanding and give us hope than Martin Gray--a man who survived the worst of times, flourished, and still managed to find joy in living? Martin has come full circle since his boyhood world was turned upside down by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Overnight, the teenage Martin and his family were immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a nightmare of brutality, starvation, and death. Martin became a clever smuggler to help his family survive--until the "butchers" of Treblinka took his mother and brothers. Against impossible odds, Martin survived and returned to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As the Nazis incinerated the ghetto, he escaped to fight with the partisans, and then the Red Army. After the war, Martin made his way to New York. The cunning and skills he developed during the war enabled him to learn the language and create a successful business. At 35, he retired to France with a fortune and a beautiful Dutch wife, starting a family and living in happiness and peace. But his world was shattered once again by a forest fire that engulfed his fleeing family. In a tragic repeat of history, Martin alone survived. Martin Gray's past could be our future if we don't heed his call to be the change. In this 35th anniversary expanded edition of For Those I Loved, a book beloved by millions of readers worldwide, Martin reminds us that the past is connected to the present. Only we can ensure that history is not repeated.
Book Club Associates 1974 319 pages

Calculated Risk

Mark W. Clark
Mark W. Clark was a major figure in World War II. He was prominent as one of the top American commanders. Together with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, and George S. Patton, Jr., Clark was widely regarded as being responsible for victory on the European side of the conflict. One of the great World War II memoirs by a legendary American general in charge of operations in North Africa and Italy. General Mark W. Clark recounts his wartime exploits and tells the story of the battles in Tunisia and Italy with verve and attention to key detail. An unparalleled account by a great military leader.
Enigma Books 2007 399 pages