1472 results for "Biography"

Jeff Smith: conversations

Smith, Jeff
First with his magisterial fantasy Bone to his mind-bending, time-warping sci-fi noir RASL, Paleolithic-set fantasy Tüki: Save the Humans, arthouse-styled superheroic miniseries Shazam!, and his latest children's book Smiley's Dream Book, Jeff Smith (b. 1960) has made an indelible mark on the comics industry. As a child, Smith was drawn to Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Carl Barks's Donald Duck, and Walt Kelly's Pogo, and he began the daily practice of drawing his own stories. After writing his regular strip Thorn for The Ohio State University's student paper, Smith worked in animation before creating, writing, and illustrating his runaway success, Bone. A comedic fantasy epic, Bone focuses on the Bone cousins, white, bald cartoon characters run out of their hometown, lost in a distant, mysterious valley. The self-published series ran from 1991 to 2004 and won numerous awards, including ten Eisner Awards. This career-spanning collection of interviews, ranging from 1999 to 2017, enables readers to follow along with Smith's development as an independent creator, writer, and illustrator.
University Press of Mississippi 2019 137 pages

Jacob Adler: a life on the stage

Adler, Jacob P.
(Applause Books). Jacob Adler, with his performances in the Yiddish King Lear , Uriel Acosta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice , became first a megastar of the exploding Yiddish theatre, and then all of Broadway. His memoirs, originally written and published in Yiddish and now translated (by his granddaughter) into English provides not only a compelling portrait of one of America's greatest actors but a fascinating social history of his time.
Applause 2001-05 403 pages

The full Rudy: the man, the myth, the mania

Newfield, Jack
Newfield reminds us that in April 1999 Giuliani had only a 40 percent approval rating. A year later his divorce lawyer was savagely attacking his wife, Donna Hanover, while the mayor was flaunting his mistress in public. As a result, Giuliani's popularity plummeted again in the spring of 2000. He was almost a laughingstock when he withdrew from his Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. He looked like a control freak who had lost control of himself. Then came 9/11, and Giuliani re-emerged as an international celebrity. He took charge when the towers fell, and he displayed leadership when others were dumbstruck. He was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year," the avatar of the stricken city. He did a victory lap around the country, raising money for Republican candidates and giving speeches for 100,000 a pop; he may rake in 10 million over the next year. Yet even as he became a part of pop iconography, celebrated as "America's Mayor," Giuliani was still loathed in some black neighborhoods in the city. People in Brownsville, Texas, might have thought of him as their mayor, but blacks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, did not. In The Full Rudy Newfield gives the devil his due, conceding that New York City did become a better place to live during Giuliani's two terms. He was skilled at solving problems that lent themselves to the application of a military-style strategy but he was a mayor of excess, a mayor of missed opportunities, political opportunism, and stunning harshness. Photographs and cartoons add to this Emmy award-winning journalist's myth-busting portrait. "In a time when American journalism is getting its share of slings and arrows ... Newfield stands out as a national treasure."—Peter Maas "He writes with the sharp eye of the trained observer and the engaged heart of a humanist."—Budd Schulberg " He is the loudest liberal voice in a time of timid whispers. Newfield's hands ... pull out the truth."—Jimmy Breslin "Newfield has made it his life's mission to uncover and share significant truths about important people and events."—Mario Cuomo
Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books 2002 176 pages

The Jewish bishop and the Chinese bible: S.I.J. Schereschewsky (1831-1906)

Eber, Irene
A study of the life and times of Bishop S.I.J. Schereschewsky (1831-1906) and his translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into northern vernacular (Mandarin) Chinese. Based largely on archival materials, missionary records and letters, the book includes an analysis of the translated Chinese text together with Schereschewsky's explanatory notes. The book examines his Jewish youth in Eastern Europe, conversion, American seminary study, journey to Shanghai and Beijing, mission routine, the translating committee's work, his tasks as Episcopal bishop in Shanghai and the founding of St. John's University. Concluding chapters analyze the controversial "Term Question" (the Chinese term for God) and Schereschewsky's techniques of translating the Hebrew text. Included are useful discussions of the Old Testament's Chinese reception and the role of this translation for subsequent Bible translating efforts.
Brill 1999 287 pages

A woman wanders through life and science

Koprowska, Irena
Irena Koprowska's autobiography illuminates the struggles of a young immigrant woman to combine family responsibilities and a demanding medical career. Irena Koprowska's autobiography chronicles the life and struggles of an immigrant woman who successfully pursued a career while raising a family. In the process, she became an award-winning physician, professor, and research pioneer at a time in history when it was believed a woman's place was in the home. Born in Warsaw in 1917, Irena Koprowska was married, pregnant, and a physician by the age of twenty-two. Forced to flee the Nazis, first in Poland and then in France, she fled to Brazil in 1940. Four years later she immigrated to the United States. Unable to speak English, she started her academic career as a volunteer at the Department of Pathology at Cornell University Medical College. During the years of her subsequent Research Fellowships at Cornell University Medical College, she worked with George N. Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear. The two co-authored a case report of the earliest diagnosis of lung cancer by a sputum smear. Eight years later, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Pathology at State University of New York Downstate Medical College and went on to become the first woman physician to become a full professor at Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital (now known as Hahnemann University) in Philadelphia. Later she joined the faculty of Temple University Medical School where, upon her retirement in 1987, she became Professor Emerita. She was recognized as "Woman Physician of the Year" by a Gold Medicus award of the Polish American Society in 1977 and received the Papanicolaou Award of the AmericanSociety of Cytology in 1985.
State University of New York Press 1997-01-01 306 pages

Howard Fast: life and literature in the left lane

Sorin, Gerald
Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast?s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.
Indiana University Press 2012-11-05 512 pages

The man who would marry Susan Sontag and other intimate literary portraits of the Bohemian era

Field, Edward
Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York’s literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris’s Left Bank and Tangier—where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay—Field opens the closet door to reveal, as never been seen before, some of the most important writers of his time. Here are young, beautiful Susan Sontag sitting at the feet of her idol Alfred Chester, who shrewdly plotted to marry her; May Swenson and her two loves; Paul and Jane Bowles in their ambiguous marriage; Frank O’Hara in and out of bed; Fritz Peters, the anointed son of Gurdjieff; and James Baldwin, Isabel Miller (Patience and Sarah), Tobias Schneebaum, Robert Friend, and many others. With its intimate portraits, Field’s memoir brings back a forgotten era—postwar bohemia—bawdy, comical, romantic, sad, and heroic.
University of Wisconsin Press 2005-12-09 284 pages

California Red: a life in the American Communist Party

Healey, Dorothy
Dorothy Ray Healey joined the Communist party at age fourteen, in 1928, and was leader of the Los Angeles district--the second largest in the country--for over twenty years. As a strike leader, opponent of McCarthyism, Vietnam war protestor, candidate for public office, and mentor to Angela Davis, she won fame as "a tough lady red," one of the few women to rise to Communist party leadership.
University of Illinois Press 1993 263 pages

Open secret: gay Hollywood, 1928-2000

Ehrenstein, David
Part social history and part exposé, this revealing, entertaining, and provocative book spans nearly seventy years as it explores the lives and careers of some of the silver screen's foremost gays and lesbians and the effect of their high-profile lifestyles on the general public. From Charles Laughton and Greta Garbo to Nathan Lane and Ellen DeGeneres, David Ehrenstein traces the gradual transformation of Hollywood from a time when it was box-office poison to be publicly gay to the modern era when many top entertainment figures are celebrating their gay sexuality--and are in turn celebrated for it. Updated, Open Secret reveals what has happened to the key players in gay Hollywood since the original hardcover publication.
Perennial 2000-05-16 399 pages

Vibrations: the adventures and musical times of David Amram

Amram, David
David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as "the Renaissance man of American Music." Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram's music with Kerouac's narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Nancy Griffith, Johnny Depp, and more. Vibrations is the story of one boy's adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the U.S. Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring-often down but never out-finally emerging as a major musical force. With its stage-setting foreword by Douglas Brinkley and a new afterword by Kerouac biographer Audrey Sprenger, this new edition is not to be missed.
Paradigm Publishers 2010 502 pages

Upbeat: nine lives of a musical cat

Amram, David
David Amram-composer, jazz artist, conductor, and world music pioneer-has been described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music." From early collaborations with Kerouac and Sinatra, chosen by Leonard Bernstein as the New York Philharmonic's first composer in residence, Amram's artistry has taken him from concerts with Willie Nelson to jamming with the Massai tribe of Kenya. In Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, Amram recounts his extraordinary adventures in the many worlds of music he calls home, all told in a rollicking anecdotal style that makes you feel that you are at home around the world. He writes, "Everywhere I have been in the world, music transcends politics. As musicians, we were able to go beyond all that and just be fellow human beings." Threading through Amram's tale of music, hard work, respect, and friendship are unforgettable stories of fellow great artists-Dizzie Gillespie, Hunter S. Thompson, Janet Gaynor, George Plimpton, Lyle Lovett, Zoe Caldwell, Willie Nelson, and many more.
Paradigm Publishers 2008 322 pages