In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than 30 years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.

This is the full story of the shocking true crime which still haunts this nation, the sex killing of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by sweatshop operator and B'nai B'rith official Leo Frank in Atlanta, Georgia in 1913 -- and also the story of the tremendous political and economic forces attempting to exonerate the killer even today. This innocent young girl's death has been the stuff of mystery, song, legal corruption, public outrage, vengeance, ethnic conflict, and accusations of racism and anti-Semitism. This is the author's much-expanded edition of her original book, more than twice the size of the first edition, with much more extensive contemporary documentation -- and in-depth analysis of the highly politicized lobbying and literature that has grown up around this case. It is written by Mary Phagan-Kean -- the great-niece of Mary Phagan, the 1913 murder victim.

A biography of the powerful home run hitter who became the first Jewish player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The social media star offers personal anecdotes, doodles, and previously unreleased photographs that trace her struggles with heartbreak and anxiety, while counseling readers to be true to themselves.

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise' Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years - resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

From New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley, Detective Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia―blinding him to reason and risk. January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world ... and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. The missing ex, a young white man named Curt Fields, is found dead. Easy’s only real friend in the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, has gone into hiding rather than allow his femme fatale wife to go to the gas chamber. And that’s only the beginning. Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning. All of his success cannot succor his heart. The 1970’s have ushered in new expectations of men and women, Black and White, and Easy has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul. Shamus Award Finalist for Best Hardcover PI Novel

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill -- Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore -- collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. This social history shows how the works of these authors both reflected and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture.

This is a book about politics and politicians; about elections, lawmaking, governing, and how they work. It is also about power, its increasing concentration in American society, and its implications at home and abroad especially for those who exercise it. It is a book about the Republican Party during the period in which it developed the forces and frictions which still characterize it today. Finally, it is a book about a remarkably successful and vibrant man who contained within himself much of the best and the worst of his environment, who contributed generously to American life, who knew in his time disappointment, temptation, and pain, but also glory; a man remembered most by his intimates for the "fun of him." The author is in an enviable position to assess these matters. During five years as Associate Editor of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , he read and studied all TR's letters as well as all his published works, and delved deeply into the relevant literature of the period, including the vast material in the Congressional Record. From this rich store, John Morton Blum has drawn a new interpretation of Roosevelt the conservative, Roosevelt the professional Republican politician and Roosevelt the leader of men. He presents new material on Roosevelt's work as the manager of the Republican Party and as manager of Congress. He relates Roosevelt's roles in these situations to his conduct of foreign policy-a foreign policy so anticipatory of that of contemporary America-and to his Progressiveness-a doctrine of government with strong affinities to both the New Deal and the New Crusade.

"Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned after a year of "involuntary research leave" to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman-Joy Ladin."--Dust jacket.

"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur. There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew--FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more--and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse--sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above-- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles--if such a creature ever existed. "--

""The Indispensable Man: The Story Of Thomas Alva Edison's Life And Inventive Genius"" by David Sarnoff is a detailed biography of one of the most influential inventors of all time. Thomas Alva Edison is known for his inventions that changed the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the electric light bulb. The book explores Edison's life, from his early years as a curious child to his rise as a successful inventor and entrepreneur. It covers his struggles and failures, as well as his many successes, including his development of the first industrial research laboratory. Sarnoff delves into Edison's creative process, examining how he came up with his ideas and how he worked to turn them into reality. The book also explores Edison's personal life, including his relationships with his family and his colleagues. Overall, ""The Indispensable Man"" provides a comprehensive look at the life and work of Thomas Alva Edison, offering insights into his genius and his lasting impact on the world.The Story Of Thomas Alva Edison's Life And Inventive Genius Seen In 130 Photographs, The Most Unusual Collection About The Inventor Ever Assembled. Additional Authors Are Thomas W. Martin, Giorgio Valerio, Sherman R. Knapp, And Walker L. Cisler. Edited By George E. Probst.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

"This book explores the themes of exile and wandering, homecoming and fated closures in literature-but also in real life and history-by invoking Homer's Odyssey. Focusing on crucial moments in the lives and careers of three scholar/writers-Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald-all of whom were inspired by Homer's epic, Three Rings uses "ring composition" (Homer's dominant narrative technique) to tell the stories of the three writers' lives"--

"National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin tells the story of the 1929 Women's Air Derby, the first official all-female air race in the U.S."--

"A picture book biography of Frieda Caplan, the produce pioneer who changed the way Americans eat by introducing exciting new fruits and vegetables, from baby carrots to blood oranges to kiwis"--

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.

"A picture book biography of tennis champion and social activist Billie Jean King"--

"Philip Roth (1933-2018) is one of the most celebrated American writers of his age. Born in Newark, New Jersey -- where his short stories and thirty-one books were often set -- he wrote with immense ambition and drive, along with a keen awareness of what must be done to produce great literature. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an "unchaste monk" (his words). In this original and lucid biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures Roth's complex life and the astonishing range of his self-reflective writings-from "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Portnoy's complaint" to the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American pastoral" and "The plot against America." Employing extensive archival research and well over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth himself, Zipperstein provides an intimate and probing look at one of the twentieth century's most influential authors, placing his work in the context of Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality in America"-- Provided by publisher.

Deputy Attorney General Phil Ricker follows a trail intrigue, deceit, and assassination, matching wits with the KCIA, the Sicilian Mafia, and others in a search for a missing FBI file