"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."--

The author relates the remarkable story of his pianist mother and her sister, child prodigies who escaped certain death when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, adopted new identities, and came under the protection of a Nazi commander who heard them play.

"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." -President Bill Clinton "Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." -Barbara Walters A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs-the Bronx-through some of its many success stories The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball; where J. Crew's CEO Millard ("Mickey") Drexler found his ambition; where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science; and where local music making inspired singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci and hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel. The parks, the pickup games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food-for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs-experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a filmlike portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.

Thomas Jefferson was wild about numbers. He was constantly counting, measuring, and observing things that caught his interest. He loved sharing his discoveries and reading the discoveries of others. But when a famous Frenchman published a book about America, Jefferson was appalled: all the information in the book was wrong. The author insisted that America was a wretched, dismal place, where birds could not sing, dogs could not bark, and everything and everyone was puny and weak. Thomas Jefferson resolved to set the record straight - with numbers - and prove to the world that the new nation was worthy of investment.

He has been one of the brightest stars in Hollywood, a hard-charging actor whose intensity on the screen has been mirrored in his personal life. As Kirk Douglas has grown older - he turned ninety in December 2006 - he has become less impetuous and more reflective. In this poignant and inspiring new memoir, Douglas contemplates what life is all about, weighing current events from his present frame of mind while summoning the passions of his younger days. Kirk Douglas is a born storyteller, and throughout Let's Face It he tells wonderful tales and shares favorite jokes and hard-won insights. In the book, he explores the mixed blessings of growing older and looks back at his childhood, his young adulthood, and his storied, glamorous, and colorful life and career in Hollywood. He tells delightful stories of the making of such films as Spartacus, Lust for Life, Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful, and many others. He includes anecdotes about his friends Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan, Ava Gardner, Henry Kissinger, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash. He reveals the secrets that have kept him and his wife, Anne, happily married for more than five decades, and talks fondly and movingly of times spent with his sons, Michael, Peter, Eric, and Joel, and his grandchildren. Douglas's life has been filled with pain as well as joy. In Let's Face It , he writes frankly for the first time about the tragic death of his son Eric from a drug overdose at age forty-five. Douglas tells what it was like to recover from several near-death episodes, including a helicopter crash, a stroke, and a cardiac event. He writes of his sadness that many of his closest friends are no longer with us; the book includes many moving stories such as one about a regular poker game at Frank Sinatra's house at which he and Anne have been fixtures along with Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, and their wives. Though many of the players are gone, the game continues to this day. In Let's Face It , Douglas reflects on how his Jewish faith has become more and more important to him over the years. He offers strong opinions on everything from anti-Semitism to corporate greed, from racism to Hurricane Katrina, and from the war in Iraq to the situation in Israel. He writes about the importance in his life of the need to improve education for all children and about how we need to care more about the world and less about ourselves. A must-read for every fan, this engrossing memoir provides an indelible self-portrait of a great star - while sharing the wit and wisdom Kirk Douglas has accumulated over a lifetime.

Having lived many lives when most of us only live one, the stories of Joan Collins' adventures on film sets around the world, the friendships she made, the triumphs and the near disasters could fill many books. Encounters with Princess Diana, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the romantic story of her courtship and marriage to Percy Gibson are among the new stories Joan shares, in this latest instalment of her witty, wise and revelatory memoirs. Following on from where Second Act left off, the screen icon reveals details of her life with her fifth (and final) husband Percy, her travels around the world, fun with family and friends, and shares more revealing anecdotes about the fascinating people she has met during her life. A Passion for Life is - quite literally - an expression of the joie de vivre which Joan exudes. Filled with fabulous never-before-seen images of her life, from childhood to recent holiday snaps with Percy and her children, this is the ultimate illustrated guide to the life of a British icon.

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

"The first middle-grade book from a picture book master-a harrowing, heartrending, illustrated account of his childhood escape from the terrors of war"--

"First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide--but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered."--Book flap.

The author describes the humorous and heartwarming moments from her and her husband's life as perpetual adoptive parents.

Traces the story of dancer-turned-magician's assistant Adelaide Herrmann, placing her achievements against a backdrop of period conventions about women in the arts and her determination to continue her work after the death of her husband.

Jacqueline van Maarsen's first book My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank ends in 1947, two years after the death of her close friend Anne Frank. But Anne's death did not spell the end of the friendship. Otto Frank clung desperately to his deceased daughter's dearest friend. Having remained silent about her friendship with Anne Frank for decades after the war, Jacqueline van Maarsen finally decided to tell her story, hoping to expose half-truths and fabrications surrounding her former friend and to respect Anne Frank's legacy for what it is. While her books have been written in close cooperation with the Anne Frank Foundation, there are times when she has felt obliged to disagree with the Foundation and she has not shied away from confrontation. In her second book, van Maarsen returns in detail to the most dominant person in her life, her French mother who died in 1992 at the age of 101. The aftermath of an inheritance question in France in which the author had an important role to play, takes on tragic proportions, although the hilarity of the sometimes grotesque situation surfaces now and then. Inheriting Anne Frank is the continuation of Jacqueline van Maarsen's My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank, and is an important documentary contribution to our knowledge of Anne Frank and what happened to and on account of her renowned diary. It is also a stirring portrait of a woman's turbulent life in the twentieth century

Ben Franklin is the most lovable of America's founding fathers. His wit, his charm, his inventiveness--even his grandfatherly appearance--are legendary. But this image obscures the scandals that dogged him throughout his life. In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Franklin's biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son William. When he was twenty-four, Franklin fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. He adopted the boy, raised him, and educated him to be his aide. Ben and William became inseparable. After the famous kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment, it was William who proved that the electrical charge in a lightning bolt travels from the ground up, not from the clouds down. On a diplomatic mission to London, it was William who charmed London society. He was invited to walk in the procession of the coronation of George III; Ben was not. The outbreak of the American Revolution caused a devastating split between father and son. By then, William was royal governor of New Jersey, while Ben was one of the foremost champions of American independence. In 1776, the Continental Congress imprisoned William for treason. George Washington made efforts to win William's release, while his father, to the world's astonishment, appeared to have abandoned him to his fate. A fresh take on the combustible politics of the age of independence, The Loyal Son is a gripping account of how the agony of the American Revolution devastated one of America's most distinguished families. Like Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, Epstein is a storyteller first and foremost, a historian who weaves together fascinating incidents discovered in long-neglected documents to draw us into the private world of the men and women who made America.

[A] searing memoir. . . . An enduring, indeed universal, story. Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe Summoned with her mother to Gestapo headquarters in 1943, fourteen-year-old Cordelia Edvardson was given a terrible choice: to acknowledge her secret Jewish heritage and suffer the consequences or to see her mother charged with treason. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the true story of the love between this mother and daughter, and a piercing example of the tragedies wrought by Nazi Germany. "A lacerating, beautifully translated memoir." Publishers Weekly , starred review "Mesmerizing. . . . [Has] the concise unreality of a horrifying fairy tale." Thomas Frick, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Behind [Edvardson's] deceptively simple prose is a complex and tragic story." Judith Bolton-Fasman, Newsday "Cordelia Edvardson's defiant tone challenges us to eschew simplified encounters with the literature and experiences of Holocaust survivors." Paul H. Hamburg, Jewish Book World "To see the horrors of the Holocaust through a child's eye is to experience hell. Cordelia Edvardson's astonishing story captures, with a terrifying reality, a child's response to the myriad atrocities of the Nazis and their murderous regime. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is compelling, horrifying, poetic in its intensity." Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter

Also has brief case studies of Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Buster Keaton, and Chaim Soutine.

In the 1990s, Pearl Lowe was a singer in the hugely successful pop group Powder, a fashion model, and a friend to some of the most famous people in the world. A beautiful woman with a glamorous career and a family she adored, Pearl had it all. But soon she began taking an increasingly potent string of drugs and drinking to excess. As her family and body crumbled around her, Pearl realized she had to make a choice: confront the demons, get clean, and have her life back, or give up and slip further into addiction. Pearl made her choice: these days she lives with her children and husband in the British countryside and designs her own clothing line. Inspiring and riveting, this is the autobiography of a woman who almost failed to escape a world that is relentless in its destructiveness despite its scintillating appearance.

"In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family. Beginning with her own long-suppressed secret, the story spirals through the hidden lives of her parents and relatives--revealing the truth about their origins, personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, religious transgressions, sexual identity, radical politics, and supposedly embarrassing illnesses. While unmasking their charades and disguises, Pogrebin also showcases her family's remarkable talent for reinvention in a narrative that is, by turns, touching, searing, and surprisingly universal." --

Earlier this year John Suchet revealed that his beautiful 67-year-old wife Bonnie, the love of his life, is suffering from Dementia. During the past three years he has gone from lover to carer, and he has found his new job exceptionally tough. In this moving and bitterly honest account, the newsreader reveals his loneliness and his despair. For John, it was love at first sight. For many years he had admired Bonnie from afar, hoping and dreaming one day she would feel the same way. Nearly a decade after they first met, their passionate and romantic love affair began. They married in 1985, head over heels in love, and have enjoyed more than 20 years of love and laughter. Both had been married before (she had two children and he had three) but both felt, the day they married, they finally joined their other half. In March 2004, John began to notice strange quirks in Bonnie's behavior. She underwent her first set of neurological tests in March 2005, which brought back no definite results. Then, in February 2006, following a second set of tests, she was diagnosed with Dementia. For three years John personally cared for his beloved wife, keeping her condition secret from all but family and close friends. But in the middle of September this year, more than 26 years after his life with Bonnie began, John made the agonizing decision to move his wife to a full-time care home. Written in passionate and vivid prose that captures both the warmth of the good times and the utter despair of the bad times, John weaves together a series of moving and heartfelt stories.

Golo Mann, noted German historian and the third of Thomas Mann's children, tells the story of his childhood and youth ; the narrative spans the years from his birth in 1909 to 1933.