A brilliant, idiosyncratic collection of introductions and afterwords (plus some liner notes) by New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon—“one of contemporary literature’s most gifted prose stylists” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading. Chabon asks why anyone would write an introduction, or for that matter, read one. His own daughter Rose prefers to skip them. Chabon's answer is simple and simultaneously profound: "a hope of bringing pleasure for the reader." Likewise, afterwords—they are all about shared pleasure, about the "pure love" of a work of art that has inspired, awakened, transformed the reader. Ultimately, this thought-provoking compendium is a series of love letters and thank-you notes, unified by the simple theme of the shared pleasure of discovery, whether it's the boyhood revelation of the most important story in Chabon's life (Ray Bradbury's "The Rocket Man"); a celebration of "the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars" (Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his character John Carter); a reintroduction to a forgotten master of ghost stories (M. R. James, ironically "the happiest of men"); the recognition that the worlds of Wes Anderson's films are reassembled scale models of our own broken reality (as is all art); Chabon's own rude awakening from the muse as he writes his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; or a playful parody of lyrical interpretation in the liner notes for Mark Ronson's Uptown Special, the true purpose of which, Chabon insists, is to "spread the gospel of sensible automotive safety and maintenance practices." Galaxies away from academic or didactic, Bookends celebrates wonder—and like the copy of The Phantom Tollbooth handed to young Michael by a friend of his father he never saw again—it is a treasured gift.

Inspired by Georges Seurat's pointillist masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical celebrates the art of creation and the creation of art. In the first half of the musical, set in 1884, the people - and the animals - in the painting come to life in a world where, for the artist George, art comes before love, before everything. In the second half, a century later, Seurat's great-grandson is wrestling with the same obsessions in present-day New York. Sunday in the Park with George was premiered on Broadway in May 1984, in a production directed by James Lapine. An earlier, incomplete version had been performed Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in July 1983. The musical went on to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The first London production opened at the National Theatre in March 1990. It won the 1991 Olivier Award for Best New Musical.

"A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world "To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth," Rolling Stone has advised, "you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert." From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert's work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays. An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that's succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who's considered the "father of global warming," amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection. The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing"-- Provided by publisher.

In the early twentieth century, affection between parents and their children was discouraged—psychologists thought it would create needy kids, and doctors thought it would spread infectious disease. It took a revolution in psychology to overturn these beliefs and prove that touch ensures emotional and intellectual health. In Love at Goon Park, Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum charts this profound cultural shift by tracing the story of Harry Harlow—the man who studied neglect and its life-altering consequences on primates in his lab. The biography of both a man and an idea, Love at Goon Park ultimately invites us to examine ourselves and the way we love.

Winner of several national awards including the 1967 Pulitzer Prize, this classic study by David Brion Davis has given new direction to the historical and sociological research of society's attitude towards slavery. Davis depicts the various ways different societies have responded to the intrinsic contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770's in order to establish the uniqueness of the abolitionists' response. While slavery has always caused considerable social and psychological tension, Western culture has associated it with certain religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction. The contradiction of slavery grew more profound when it became closely linked with American colonization, which had as its basic foundation the desire and opportunity to create a more perfect society. Davis provides a comparative analysis of slave systems in the Old World, a discussion of the early attitudes towards American slavery, and a detailed exploration of the early protests against Negro bondage, as well as the religious, literary, and philosophical developments that contributed to both sides in the controversies of the late eighteenth century. This exemplary introduction to the history of slavery in Western culture presents the traditions in thought and value that gave rise to the attitudes of both abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth century.

(Boosey & Hawkes Scores/Books). "Appalachian Spring" was composed in 1943-44 as a ballet for Miss Martha Graham on a commission from the Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. It was first performed by Miss Graham and her company at the Coolidge Festival in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1944. The original scoring called for a chamber ensemble of thirteen instruments. The present arrangement for symphony orchestra was made by the composer in the spring of 1945. It is a condensed version of the ballet, retaining all essential features but omitting those sections in which the interest is primarily choreographic. In 1945 "Appalachian Spring" received the Pulitzer Prize for music as well as the award of the Music Critics Circle of New York for the outstanding theatrical work of the season.

A half-century of previously unpublished interviews with legendary musicians, in a brand-new book from America's foremost oral historian "I'm one of these people that thinks that everybody has certain gifts, you know, when they're born I used to play the guitar when I was ten, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that's my little gift."Bob Dylan, interviewed in 1963, from And They All Sang Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel hosted a legendary daily radio program on WFMT in Chicago, presenting listeners with his inimitable take on a wide range of music from classical opera to jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and rock. His latest work of oral history shows us this completely different side of Studs Terkelthat of a brilliant and far-ranging musicologist. And They All Sang features over forty conversations with some of the greatest musical luminaries of the past century: rock icons Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, influential folk singer Pete Seeger, jazz geniuses Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, classical musicians Andres Segovia and Ravi Shankar, legendary opera divas Rosa Raisa and Edith Mason, and gospel giants Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson. Transcending genres and generations, Studs Terkel goes behind the music and doesn't miss a beat. Musicians featured include: Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Keith Jarrett, Alan Lomax, Catherine Malfitano, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, Ravi Shankar, Richard Tucker.

"Irreverent and inspiring advice for awakening your creative potential, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic. This beautiful and useful small-format hardcover-teeming with full-color art, sidebars, and contributions from art-world legends and everyday creatives-How to Be an Artist is a book for anyone who's ever yearned to make the arts a part of their life"--

The "compulsively and clock-racingly readable" novel ( New York Times Book Review ) that captures the comedy and tragedy of island life and inspired a Jimmy Buffett musical. It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.) It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick chronicles the new Russia that emerged from the ash heap of the Soviet Union. From the siege of Parliament to the farcically tilted elections of 1996, from the rubble of Grozny to the grandiose wealth and naked corruption of today's Moscow, Remnick chronicles a society so racked by change that its citizens must daily ask themselves who they are, where they belong, and what they believe in. Remnick composes this panorama out of dozens of finely realized individual portraits. Here is Mikhail Gorbachev, his head still swimming from his plunge from reverence to ridicule. Here is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the half-Jewish anti-Semite who conducts politics as loony performance art. And here is Boris Yeltsin, the tottering populist who is not above stealing elections. In Resurrection , they become the players in a drama so vast and moving that it deserves comparison with the best reportage of George Orwell and Michael Herr. "This is what happens when a good writer unleashes eye and ear on a story that moves with the speed of light. Resurrection has the feel of describing vast, historical change even as it is happening."--Chicago Tribune

The Pulitzer prize-winning newsman's analysis of Kennedy's ideological journey toward "increasing radicalism" and a personal account of his subsequent successes (and single major defeat) along the campaign trail. Halberstam shows how Kennedy in his role as "leader of the honorable opposition in the Democratic party" became the caustic critic of the administration's ghetto policies as well as a more cautious critic of its Vietnam policy, placing himself at "the exact median point of American idealism and American power." It is a fascinating story of realpolitik (the Kennedy staff wanted Mayor Daley's backing in Chicago) played for radical aims, but Halberstam demonstrates his thesis that Kennedy was the rare politician who surpassed his image. The Kennedy backers were a coalition of old eggheads, youngish radicals (Allard Lowenstein was a major booster and a radicalizer of the candidate), veterans like Larry O'Brien, and--possibly--because he was the first, candidate to visit them and make demands for them--the ghetto residents. Kennedy was a crucial bridge to the New Politics which was, like the country, "in transition politically." Halberstam mourns him.

One of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century, Ho Chi Minh was founder of the Indochina Communist Party and its successor, the Viet-Minh, and was president from 1945 to 1969 of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). In exploring the life and career of Ho Chi Minh, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam provides a window into traditions and culture that influenced the American war in Vietnam, while highlighting the importance of nationalism in determining the war's outcome. As depicted by Halberstam, Ho is first and foremost a nationalist and a patriot. He was also, according to the author, a pragmatist "who was able to turn the abstract into the practical and to embody the concept of revolution to his own people." This edition includes a new preface by the author.

David Brion Davis's books on the history of slavery reflect some of the most distinguished and influential thinking on the subject to appear in the past generation. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, the sequel to Davis's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and the second volume of a proposed trilogy, is a truly monumental work of historical scholarship that first appeared in 1975 to critical acclaim both academic and literary. This reprint of that important work includes a new preface by the author, in which he situates the book's argument within the historiographic debates of the last two decades.

David Brion Davis's books on the history of slavery reflect some of the most distinguished and influential thinking on the subject to appear in the past generation. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, the sequel to Davis's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and the second volume of a proposed trilogy, is a truly monumental work of historical scholarship that first appeared in 1975 to critical acclaim both academic and literary. This reprint of that important work includes a new preface by the author, in which he situates the book's argument within the historiographic debates of the last two decades.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray shines a light on a little known group of men: the nation's first black members of Congress. These men played a critical role in pushing for much-needed reforms in the wake of a traumatic civil war, including public education for all children, equal rights, and protection from Klan violence. But they have been either neglected or maligned by most historians--their "glorious failure" chalked up to corruption and "ill-preparedness."--From publisher description.

A novel about a hunting trip in Alaska which turns into an initiation rite. Vietnam is mentioned only once and the book can be seen either as an allegory or a symbolic psychic explanation of America's fighting in Vietnam. The author has won the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award for Arts and Letters (1969) and the 14th Annual Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts, McDowell Colony (1973).

Neil Simon’s inimitable play about the trials and tribulations that test family ties—winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. What happens to children in the absence of love? That is the question that lies at the heart of this funny and heartrending play by one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved playwrights. Debuting at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in 1990, Lost in Yonkers went on to win four Tony Awards, including Best Play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize, and tells the moving drama about the cruelties and painful memories that scar a family. It is New York, 1942. After the death of their mother, two young brothers are sent to stay with their formidable grandmother for the longest ten months of their lives. Grandmother Kurnitz is a one-woman German front—a refugee and a widow who has steeled her heart against the world. Her coldness and intolerance have crippled her own children: the boys’ father has no self-esteem; their Aunt Gert has an embarrassing speech impediment; their Uncle Louie is a small-time gangster; and their Aunt Bella has the mentality of a child. But it is Bella's hunger for affection and her refusal to be denied love that saves the boys—and that leads to an unforgettable, wrenching confrontation with her mother. Filled with laughter, tears, and insight, Lost in Yonkers is a heartwarming testament to Neil Simon’s talent.

This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-capitalist John Jacob Astor battled with each other for social primacy. William Waldorf Astor (born 1848) and his cousin John Jacob Astor IV (born 1864) led incomparably privileged lives in the blaze of public attention. Novelist, sportsman, and inventor, John Jacob went down with the Titanic , after turbulent marital adventures and service in the Spanish-American War. Collector of art, antiquities, and stately homes, William Waldorf became a British subject and acquired the title of Viscount Astor. In New York during the 1890s and after, the two feuding Astors built monumental grand hotels, chief among them the original Waldorf-Astoria on lower Fifth Avenue. The Astor hotels transformed social behavior. Home of the chafing dish and the velvet rope, the Waldorf-Astoria drew the rich, famous, and fashionable. It was the setting for the most notorious society event of the era—a costume extravaganza put on by its hosts during a time of widespread need and unemployment. The celebrity-packed lobbies, public rooms, lavish suites, and exclusive restaurants of the grand hotels became distinctive theaters of modern life.

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it.--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself.--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

"Inspired by the true-life events of Antje Paarlberg, So Big is a Pulitzer Prize award-winning drama that depicts the life of Selina Peake de Jong as she navigates the challenges of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Illinois. Selina, a schoolteacher, is determined to inspire her students to pursue their dreams, even if they are unconventional. When she marries a Dutch farmer named Pervus and welcomes a baby boy named Dirk into their family, she nicknames him “So Big.” --Amazon.