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Since he followed it all of his life, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek philosopher Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." In his books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but the lives of others - present and past - and the human and natural world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography Life and Shape, first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life. As opposed to Survival Through Design (1954), his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a different tack in Life and Shape, following a lighter and more deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, Life and Shape concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America. While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuw Research House (1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House (1933). Life and Shape also confirms Neutra's obsession with the passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it. Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle, and - at the age of 70 - composed instead a meditation on the aspects of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of his life. In writing my own Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture [Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I relied on Life and Shape when I wanted an account of Neutra's experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of architects, historian, and readers, it is good to have it back. - Thomas S. Hines, UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture

From Kennedy to Khrushchev, from Castro to Onassis by way of Mitterand and Bardot, Begin and Arafat, Pierre Salinger has known them all. In this guided tour through modern American history, a man who was at the center of it--former presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger--looks back over the journey that has been his life. of photos.

Waiting for Daisy is about doing all the thinsg you swore you'd never do to get something you hadn't even been sure you wanted. It's a real-life journey of loss, love, anger and redemption. Told with raw candour and a rare wit that marks Waiting for Daisy as a future classic, Peggy Orenstein's story begins when she tells her new husband that she's not certain she ever wants to be a mother. It ends six years later after she's done almost everything humanly possible to have a baby. Along the way she visits an ex-boyfriend who now has fifteen children, encounters 'parasite singles' in Tokyo (women who are rejecting marriage and motherhood in favour of shopping sprees and foreign travel), and shares stories with women survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The world's professional women are only now beginning to become aware of the risks and realities of 'having it all', and Orenstein's poignant saga unfolds as infertility is developing scarily into a boom industry, with many thousands of women a year seeking treatment.

P.F. Sloan was one of the most prolific and influential geniuses to emerge from the golden age of the 60s. From his little studio at Dunhill Records, Sloan was a veritable hit-machine, writing and playing guitar for The Mamas & The Papas (that's Sloan's infectious guitar lick on 'California Dreamin'), Barry McGuire (the brilliant and controversial 'Eve Of Destruction'), Johnny Rivers (the iconic 'Secret Agent Man'), The Turtles, The Grass Roots, Herman's Hermits, The Fifth Dimension, The Searchers, and more. P.F. Sloan was everywhere. And then he disappeared. With a foreword by British singer-songwriter Rumer and an afterword by Creed Bratton, the Grass Roots guitarist turned star of The Office, What's Exactly The Matter With Me? is a revelatory memoir of an extraordinary life through the most fascinating years of American and British musical and pop culture. Beginning with a chance meeting with Elvis Presley, this is the story of a boy whose only love was music--of dreams, success, destruction, and miraculous resurrection. Along the way we encounter The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, The Beach Boys, and more, as well as UFOs and psychiatric hospitals. This is the dangerous ride and inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in popular music--and also one of the most elusive and mysterious.

"With the same candor that has characterized his life, Otto Preminger--actor, director, producer, and now writer--exposes himself (in writing) as well as an impressive line-up of show business folk in this engrossing memoir. As one of Hol1ywood's pre-eminent directors with 36 films and 32 stage productions to his credit, Preminger reveals the funny, outrageous, and often exasperating moments of his career, and his association with the eccentric, the gracious, the wealthy, the egomaniacal--'the stars.' Beginning his career as an apprentice of Max Reinhardt, Preminger became an instant success as an actor and then as a director. Hollywood called and he went there in 1935. His outspoken manner clashed with the autocratic studio moguls. He was forced to return to New York and find work directing plays on Broadway. He rebounded in 1944 to begin his stormy and remarkably creative period in Hollywood with Laura, his first all-out hit, starring Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews. Preminger gives an inside glimpse at shooting such films as Daisy Kenyon with Joan Crawford (whom he considers a remarkable, independent, and generous woman); River of No Return, starring Marilyn Monroe; the all-black productions of Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, both accused of being racist; The Man With the Golden Arm, with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak; plus such legendary films as Anatomy of a Murder (James Stewart, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott), Exodus (Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint), Advise and Consent (Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton), The Cardinal (Tom Tryon, Romy Schneider), Hurry Sundown (Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Diahann Carroll and Faye Dunaway), and In Harm's Way (John Wayne). Making no bones about naming enemies or exalting his friends, Preminger elaborates on the blacklisting during the fifties and includes his own critique of the critics. Preminger gives us a little more insight into his friend Tallulah Bankhead and her affinity for shocking behavior (with a few choice examples), as well as his opinion of Howard Hughes (a fascinating man, but not all that eccentric). He sets the record straight on a number of his love affairs and marriages, and divulges the story of his relationship with Gypsy Rose Lee and their child, who after Gypsy's death emerged as Erik Preminger. Leaving few stones unturned, this unique "Otto-biography" zooms in on Hollywood through the eyes of one of its most active and highly creative personalities--Preminger!"--Jacket.

An entertaining account of Lloyd's career as actor, director, and producer.

A portrait of the Berrigan brothers cites their influence on American religion and the anti-Vietnam War protest scene during the 1960s, citing how they have been mimicked ever since by demonstrators, the religious right, and various militia movements.

Son of pioneer movie producer Harry Rapf, Maurice Rapf grew up in Hollywood in that city's golden age. After moving from independent filmmaking to Warner Bros., in 1924 the senior Rapf joined Louis Mayer and became one of the founding members of MGM. Hence, movies were a huge influence in Maurice Rapf's early life. After graduating from college, Rapf worked as a screenwriter for major Hollywood studios, but, in 1947, he left Hollywood, never to work for a major studio again. On numerous occasions, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged communist, although he never made a public confession or denial. As a result he was blacklisted from the industry and forced to begin a new career in the East. He eventually became a movie critic and film studies professor. Maurice Rapf knows movies and the movie business as an insider, from first-hand experience, not from books. His autobiography is the story of one person's interaction with an evolving Hollywood. Rapf witnessed the historical progression of movie production: from silents to sound, from a fun-loving frontier community to a huge and fiercely competitive industry, from an apolitical never-never land to a community very much aware of-and nervous about-its social responsibility in a period of economic depression and in a period of world peace seriously threatened by the aggression of fascism. Of interest to students and teachers of film studies, of American history, and of American popular culture, as well as anyone who loves movies.

In this beautifully written and almost compulsively readable book - in turn vindictive and joyful, painful and amusing - Mark Matousek writes of his struggle to live an enlightened life in a desacralised and brutal age ‘where God is dead and Madonna rules in crotchless leather panties'.

"Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, only to find when she came to the United States that racism was as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. Moving first to New York and then to Washington, DC, Marione joined the burgeoning civil rights movement, protesting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and other aspects of life in the nation's capital, including the denial of voting rights. She was a volunteer in the legendary March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, and she was an organizer of an extended sit-in to support the Mississippi Freedom Party. In 1964, at the urging of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Marione went south to Mississippi. There, she worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and taught African American youth at one of the country's controversial freedom schools. With her boldness came threats--white supremacists made ominous calls and left a blazing cross in front of her school--and an arrest and conviction. She narrowly escaped a three-month prison sentence. As a white woman and a Holocaust escapee, Marione was perhaps the most unlikely of heroes in the American civil rights movement; and yet, her core belief in the equality of all people, regardless of race or religion, did not waver and she refused to be quieted, refused to accept bigotry. This empowering, true story offers a rare up close view of the civil rights movement. It is a story of conviction and courage--a reminder of how far the rights movement has come and the progress that still needs to be made."--Page 2 of book jacket.

This book tells the story of Trinidad-born Claudia Jones, a key figure in the movement for racial justice in Britain. Exiled in 1955 from the US for her affiliation to the Communist Party, she arrived in London penniless and became active in civil rights campaigns among the capital's West Indian communities. She set up the newspaper West Indian Gazette and in 1958, following racist violence in Notting Hill, launched an annual indoor carnival to showcase Caribbean culture. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile was the first book to chart the work of this visionary and pioneer, focusing on her time in Britain. Part of the Radical Black Women series, this new edition features a preface by Black feminist researcher Lola Olufemi and an appendix compiled by Marika Sherwood.

Leonard Lavin epitomizes the American Dream. In this book Lavin reveals how his instinct-driven vision led him to build the Alberto Culver Corporation from a tiny beauty supply company into a revered Fortune 500 buisness.

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Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

Renowned harmonica player tells the spellbinding story of his charmed life among legends like Al Capone, Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, and Elton John.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.