3040 results for "Biography"

Familiar stranger: a life between two islands

Hall, Stuart
This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world. When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left, and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory. Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall's struggle in post-war England: that of building a home and a life in a country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light. Told with passion and wisdom, this is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.
Duke University Press 2017-04-12 301 pages

Ruby of Cochin

Daniel, Ruby
"Ruby of Cochin" is the first book written by a Jewish woman from Cochin. It is a rich description of Jewish life on the Southwest Coast of India, spanning many centuries. It is the story of one woman - yet it is also the story of all the Jews of Cochin, from the earliest settlements, when the Maharajah granted the Jews their land and privileged status, until today, when a transplanted Cochin community is finding new life in Israel. The book is written with a distinctive storyteller's voice and contains historical legends, ghost tales, colorful renditions of Jewish celebrations in Cochin, and translations of Jewish women's songs from Malayalam, the language of the Cochin Jews." -- Google books.
Jewish Publication Society 2001-09 211 pages

Into my own: the remarkable people and events that shaped a life

Kahn, Roger
Roger Kahn is one of America's foremost sportswriters. After successful seasons as a newspaperman and magazine writer, he burst onto the national scene in 1972 with his memorable bestseller, The Boys of Summer, a work that went beyond sports and captured the minds and hearts of millions across the country. Now in his eighth decade, Kahn has again written a book for the hearts and minds of his readers. Chronicling his own life, Into My Own is Kahn's reflection on the eight people who shaped him as a man, a father, and a writer. In this poignant self-portrait, Kahn begins with his childhood in Brooklyn, reared on the verses of Homer, Shakespeare, Housman, and Millay---a curriculum set by his mother, and one that would influence his career with words. He combined his intellectual upbringing with his inherent passion for baseball, and began his sportswriting career under the legendary Stanley Woodward at the New York Herald Tribune . This lent Kahn the opportunity to interview and develop friendships with Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson--men he knew and admired for reasons far beyond their baseball abilities. Kahn's writing is by no means limited to his sports coverage, and on the political front he devotes chapters to Eugene McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, whom he interviewed for the Saturday Evening Post ---two diverse men in a turbulent era who championed their distinct versions of idealism. The Post had earlier sent Kahn to interview poet Robert Frost at his home in Vermont, a rare opportunity for any journalist, and one that resulted in the development of a marked friendship between two men of words. Perhaps most touching is his account, straightforward but abrim with love, of the life and death---at twenty-three---of his scholar-athlete son, Roger Laurence Kahn. Into My Own is the touching memoir of an unassuming man, whose great love of baseball and literature led him into extraordinary experiences, opportunities, and friendships. Even amidst great family tragedy and personal difficulty, Kahn has prevailed---amongst poets, writers, politicians, and most of all, ballplayers. Praise for Roger Kahn: "As a kid, I loved sports first and writing second, and loved everything Roger Kahn wrote. As an adult, I love writing first and sports second, and love Roger Kahn even more." ---Pulitzer Prize winner, David Maraniss "He can epitomize a player with a single swing of the pen." --- Time magazine "Roger Kahn is the best baseball writer in the business." ---Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books "A work of high moral purpose and great poetic accomplishment. The finest American book on sports." ---James Michener on The Boys of Summer "Kahn has the almost unfair gift of easy, graceful writing." --- Boston Herald
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press 2006-05-30 290 pages

The girl from Human Street: a Jewish family odyssey

Cohen, Roger
It has taken me a long time to piece all this together. Memories come not like heavy rain but the drops falling from leaves after it. There were elements missing. At last I knew I would not be whole until I found them... June Cohen was born on Human Street in 1929. Her street ran through the centre of Krugersdorp, a mining town near Johannesburg where June's father, Laurie, a doctor, and his wife of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, had decided to establish themselves thirty years on from the family's crossing to South Africa. June was named after the month she was born in. In the wake of his mother's death, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen embarks on a compassionate and sensitive portrait of the journeys made by both his maternal and paternal family, exploring the stories that have filtered through to him since childhood. Told through personal letters and collective memories, Cohen follows his family from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States and Israel. He illuminates the uneasy resonance of the racism his relatives witnessed living in apartheid-era South Africa and explores the pervasive sense of 'otherness' that originated from his Jewish heritage of persecution and from the repeated loss that accompanied his forebears' multiple migrations. And through this, he begins to understand better the manic depression that has permeated his family and that plagued his mother until her last moments. A sweeping family story spanning continents, families and great swathes of history, Roger Cohen's deeply personal examination of Jewish identity is a tale of displacement and remembrance, an account of suicide and resilience, a meditation on identity and belonging, a classic for our times.
Bloomsbury 2016-01-27 304 pages

Laboratory for world destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe

Wistrich, Robert S.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was rife with ethnic tensions that undermined the possibilities for Jewish assimilation in Central Europe. The Jews were trapped between rising German nationalism and other nationalisms. Discusses various Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes toward the "Jewish problem", whereby Jews were often stereotyped (e.g. by Rosa Luxemburg) or were considered to need a solution separate from that of European majority peoples (e.g. Nathan Birnbaum and Max Nordau). Views Nietzsche as belonging more to the philosemites than the antisemites, for whom he had great scorn; however, his complexity and obscurity provided ammunition for antisemites, including the Nazis. Herzl believed that a Jewish state was needed to provide a home for Jews suffering from antisemitism. Freud's experience of antisemitism, combined with his negative view of human nature, left no room for illusions about Austrian and German acceptance of Jews. Karl Kraus exhibited elements of Jewish self-hatred when he identified the worst elements of contemporary journalism and capitalism with Jews. Karl Lueger used political antisemitism to become mayor of Vienna. He provided a model for Hitler, who imbibed antisemitic attitudes and stereotypes from the cauldron of nationalisms that was Austria-Hungary.
Published by University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2007 404 pages

The real deal: the autobiography of Britain's most controversial media mogul

Desmond, Richard
From the age of five, when he helped his deaf father negotiate advertising contracts, Richard Desmond has always had an eye for business. In The Real Deal he offers a no-holds-barred account of an extraordinary career that has taken him from cloakroom attendant at a north London club to billionaire media owner. En route he tells of his early life as a rock and roll drummer, his first steps in the world of magazine publishing as a purveyor of leisure and top-shelf titles, and finally, after decades of paying his dues building smaller brands, his arrival in the big league with the launch of OK! magazine and the acquisition of Express Newspapers, his purchase and sale of Channel 5, and his £80 million investment in the Health Lottery, combining business innovation with help for good causes. Along the way, he imparts many of the secrets of his astounding success, as well as giving his forthright opinion (and he always has one) on such diverse subjects as politicians, religion, and the similarities between being a rock and roll drummer and running a business – as well as his views on a cast of characters ranging from Alan Sugar to Victoria Beckham and from Simon Cowell to Jennifer Aniston. Often controversial, frequently revelatory, always entertaining, The Real Deal is the brilliantly frank account of a life spent at the sharp end.
RH Business Books 2015 342 pages

I want to be a mathematician: an automathography

Halmos, Paul R.
This is a book of aspirations fulfilled, those of the author and his colleagues. It tells us what it is to be a mathematician and to do mathematics. It will be read with interest and enjoyment by those in mathematics and by those who might want to know what mathematicians and mathematical careers are like. Halmos, mathematician and expositor, has contributed much to ergodic theory, algebraic logic, operator theory, and the mathematical literature in general.
Springer-Verlag 1985 421 pages

Confessions of a raving, unconfined nut: misadventures in the counterculture

Krassner, Paul
Uncensored, uncontained, and thoroughly demented, the memoirs of Paul Krassner are back in an updated and expanded edition. Paul Krassner, “father of the underground press” (People magazine), founder of the Realist, political radical, Yippie, and award-winning stand-up satirist, shares his stark raving adventures with the likes of Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Groucho Marx, and Squeaky Fromme, revealing the patriarch of counterculture’s ultimate, intimate, uproarious life on the fringes of society. Whether he’s writing about his friendship with controversial comic Lenny Bruce, introducing Groucho Marx to LSD, his investigation of Scientology, or John Kennedy’s cadaver, no subject is too sacred to be skewered by Krassner. And yet his stories are soulful and philosophical, always authentic to his iconoclastic brand of personal journalism. As Art Spiegelman said, “Krassner is one of the best minds of his generational to be destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked—but mainly hysterical. His true wacky, wackily true autobiography is the definitive book on the sixties.”
Soft Skull Press 2012-09-11 389 pages

Patti Smith: dream of life

Smith, Patti
Dream of Life is an intimate look into the interior life of the musician, artist, and poet Patti Smith. Integrated throughout the book are quotes and private transcripts, along with personal and unpublished photographs that reveals Patti's extraordinary personal journey. Captured are such colourful moments as Patti reciting "Prayer for New York" in 1975, hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe, jamming with colloborator Sam Shepard, Patti's reading of an Allen Ginsberg poem at his funeral, kicking around the beach with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so much more.
Rizzoli 2008 431 pages

Pedigree

Modiano, Patrick
" It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me " Taking in a vast gallery of extraordinary characters from Paris' post-war years, Pedigree is an autobiographical portrait of Post-War Paris and a tumultuous childhood - a childhood replete with insecurity and sorrow that informed the oeuvre of France's Nobel Laureate. With his sometime-actress mother and shady businessman father barely functioning in any parental role, the young Modiano spent his childhood being packed off to the care of others, or held at a safe distance in a grimy boarding school - which he ran away from several times. His impecunious mother had "a heart of stone"; his womanising father once called the police when his son asked him for money, and later ceased all contact with him. But for all his parents' indifference, it is the death of his younger brother when Modiano is eleven that cuts deepest, leaving a wound that can never be healed.
MacLehose Press 2016-09 109 pages

The play goes on: a memoir

Simon, Neil
In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings - his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart of the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself. -- from back cover.-- Provided by publisher.
Simon & Schuster 2002 352 pages

The memoirs of Nahum N. Glatzer

Glatzer, Nahum N.
The geographic, spiritual, and intellectual journeys of Nahum N. Glatzer (1903-1990)―prolific scholar, Brandeis University professor, and editor of the Schocken publishing house―reveal a rich cultural ambiance that no longer exists, as well as a breadth of perspective and learning that remains enviable in our time. This collection of 78 memoir entries, written as a document for his family, offers personal glimpses of Nahum Glatzer which complement his scholarship. Episodes and vignettes in chronological sequence recount the decisive events of his travels from Bodenbach to Boston and from strict Orthodoxy to a more historical, cultural, and aesthetic understanding of Judaism. Anecdotal and at times humorous accounts of some of the many outstanding personalities Glatzer knew and interacted with, including Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, two of the leading German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Glatzer also relates a variety of his experiences and expressions of faith, both personal and social. The events themselves become moments of religious psychology or theological insight. For Glatzer, as for Rosenzweig, the world was transformed by speech and the realities brought into existence through it. Michael Fishbane’s detailed introduction sets these memoirs, from the final decades of Glatzer’s life, in the context of his life and work. A preface by Judith Glatzer Wechsler offers personal reflections on the character of her father and his work.
Hebrew Union College Press 1997-01-15 151 pages

Child of war

Seltzer, Nachman
Memoirs of Friedman, born in 1936 in Budapest, whose hasidic family survived in and around his native city, thanks to their luck or Divine providence, and their abilities - including his father's skillful forging of fake documents, the daring of his young aunts, and the acting ability of his mother and himself. Friedman, his mother, and baby brother survived posing as non-Jews in Buda, while most of the city's Jews were in danger in Pest. He pretended to be mentally ill due to the absence of a father serving in the Hungarian army, while his father was actually sheltered in the "glass house". Includes a brief account of how one aunt escaped on the Kasztner train. One sister was hidden in a convent until the Jewish children were found by the Gestapo, but she was saved by the ingenuity of her aunt Irene. Another sister was hidden in the countryside, discovered by the fascists, and rescued by her Aunt Edith. One relative survived by pretending to be a Gypsy violinist; another found refuge in a mental hospital. Friedman's grandmother escaped from a death march. Relates some of the horrors of life under the Arrow Cross, and the difficulty of remaining alive until the Russians liberated the city.
Mesorah Publications 2009 267 pages