In 1925, the 22-year-old Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) and the legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) met in Italy. From that moment, they began a correspondence that lasted until Berenson's death at age 94. This book makes available, for the first time, the complete correspondence between two of the most influential figures in the 20th-century art world, and gives a new and unique insight into their lives and motivations. The letters are arranged into ten chronological sections, each accompanied by biographical details and providing the context for the events and personalities referred to. They were both talented letter writers: informative, spontaneous, humorous, gossipy, and in their frequent letters they exchanged news and views about art and politics, friends and family life, collectors, connoisseurship, discoveries, books read and written, and travel. Berenson advised Clark on his blossoming career, warning against the museum and commercial art worlds while encouraging his promise as a writer and interpreter of the arts. Above all, these letters trace the development of a deep and intimate friendship.

'Seated at a café table, in the syrupy warmth of out-of-season Nice, he reviewed his life and found it to be alarmingly empty.' George Bland had planned to spend his retirement in leisurely travel and modest entertainment with his friend Putnam. When Putnam dies George is left attempting to impose some purpose on the solitary end of his life. Then Katy Gibb appears as a temporary resident, perhaps even squatter, in a neighbouring apartment. Greedy, selfish, sometimes alluring, often manipulative, Katy exerts a strange influence on George, forcing him to recognize that his own careful, fastidious life has shown a distinct lack of passion and daring. As the realization takes hold, George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo .

In his 2 terms as prime minister, from 1963–1968, Lester B. Pearson oversaw the revamping of Canada through the introduction of Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the Auto Pact, and the new Maple Leaf flag. Pearson came to power after an impressive career as a diplomat, where he played a vital role in the creation of NATO and the United Nations, later serving as president of its General Assembly. He put Canada on the world stage when he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for his handling of the Suez Crisis, during which he brokered the formation of a UN peacekeeping force. Author Andrew Cohen, whose books have focused on Canada’s place in the world, is the perfect author to assess Pearson’s legacy.

A memoir of spiritualism and self-discovery from the acclaimed, award-winning author At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again. In this luminous, spirited book, she charts her subsequent path as she learned not simply the joys of meditative solitude, but to integrate her new awareness into a busy, committed, even hectic mainland life. “A ten-year voyage of discovery . . . Shulman's honesty and sense of inquiry carry us with her all the way--could even, if we were willing, change our lives.” — San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

Alexandra "Al" Silber seems to have everything a teenager could want: brilliance, beauty, and talent in spades. But when her beloved father dies after a decade-long battle with cancer when she is just a teenager, it feels like the end of everything. Lost in grief, Al and her mother hardly know where to begin with the rest of their lives. Into this grieving house burst Al's three friends from theater camp, determined to help out as only drama students know how--and they're moving in for the duration. Over the course of that winter, the now five-strong household will do battle with everything Death can throw at them--meddling relatives, merciless bureaucracy, soul-sapping sadness, the endless Tupperware. They will learn (almost) everything about love and will eventually return to the world, altered in different ways by their time in a home by a river. Told with raw passion, candor, and wit, White Hot Grief Parade is an ode to the restorative power of family and friendship--and the unbreakable bond, even in death, between father and daughter.

For ten years, the White House, assisted by allies in London and Rome, brushed aside the law in a relentless quest to support Saddam Hussein. What were the forces that shaped this persisting embrace of a dictator whom George Bush would eventually compare to Adolf Hitler? How did Washington and its NATO allies nurture a frequently illicit rapport with Saddam, and what was the real story of why it became necessary to mount Operation Desert Storm? How did the governments led by George Bush and Margaret Thatcher seek to cover up their past dealings with the Iraqi leader after Desert Storm finally drove him from Kuwait in 1991?

A starstruck Brooklyn teenager becomes a popular Latin singer only to discover the price of stardom may be too high. Abbe Lane has poured the dark and terrible secrets of her abusive marriage to (1940-50's bandleader) Xavier Cugat onto the pages of her debut novel. --Los Angeles Daily News.

Rudolph, the Trump supporterhad a very brown noseand if you knew the truth aboutyou would even say he blowsAll of the other cabinet membersused to laugh and call him namesThey never let poor Rudyplay in any white house games.Then one post election eveDonald came to say:"Rudolph with your stamina so low,I'm afraid sissies have got to goRudy never got a post in the Trump Administration because he lacked stamina another way of saying he was basically a sissy since thanks to HOMOTHUG, word circulated on the internet that he was a bisexual. Rudy had this book removed from Amazon ages ago but it is back like a recurrent nightmare. Homothug exposed him as a bisexual whose butt buddy was his childhood friend Alan Placa, a disgraced child molesting priest. This book reveals the real Rudy, a cross-dressing freak whose father was busted in a State Park Men's Room frequented by boys for offering to give one of the kids a blow job. Rudy's dad was a piece of work, he claimed he ran a bar when the only bar he ever owned was a tire iron he used when he was a Mafia enforcer. His father was busted for finding this milkman that owed the mob money and taking what he owed from him forcibly. This occured at 96th St and Lexington Ave in Manhattan. And the man who bailed pops out was an investor in the 2nd Ave Subway long before the current one began construction. This book is not only a history of the pot-hating weasel but a history of the mob in New York City and New Jersey. Shoot, the U.S. Marshalls and the NYPD broke into my crib on the premise there was a gangbanger loose in the building when in reality they were looking for one of my sources who had gone underground. Rudy lied for Trump, covered up Trump groping behavior, campaigned with him and become his spokesperson. Rudy showed his true colors, something that many suspected on him all along. He is basically a fascist.

Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. Here is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body. Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on the "poetry of forgetting," on the causes and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduce--among them, J. D. McClatchy, Frank Bidart, and Cynthia MacDonald. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar and Gracq. Hilton Kramer once wrote that Richard Howard "performs the essential critical service. He shows us the extent of the terrain. He points out its essential features. And he gives us a very vivid sense of its ethos as well as of its esthetics." Howard, now in his seventy-fifth year, continues his adroit, inventive commentary, which enriches us all. Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, critic, and translator. The author of more than a dozen books, including "Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003," he is the recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for translation. He teaches at Columbia University and is poetry editor of "The Paris Review." Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. His earlier work "Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950" has long been hailed as a landmark in literary criticism. "Paper Trail" is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body. Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on "the poetry of forgetting," on the cause and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduced. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar an Gracq. Hilton Kramer once wrote that Richard Howard "performs the essential critical service. He shows us the extent of the terrain. He points out its essential features. And he gives us a very vivid sense of its ethos as well as of its esthetics." Howard, now in his seventy-fifth year, continues his adroit, inventive commentary, which enriches us all. "If Richard Howard were not a poet at all, he would stand out nevertheless as a translator, an editor, a teacher of poets, and a critic of French, English, and American literature. "Paper Trail" collects his arrestingly elaborate essays on all three, as well as Howard's writings on visual art . . . The essays in "Paper Trail" offer language at least as intricate as that of Howard's verse, and information in even greater abundance: They can teach what the poems assume we know. Howard's preference for mannered abstractions, which can hinder the poems, assists the essays, making them more ambitious, and more daring, than most; even when their particular judgments do not convince, their general propositions enlighten."--Stephen Burt, "The Washington Post Book World" "While the essays range from Emily Dickinson to Robert Mapplethorpe to Claude Simon, they constitute an intimate autobiography . . . "Paper Trail" is something much larger than an argument about the shape of American poetry."--James Longenbach, "Boston Review" "[Howard is] a formidable man of letters: a brilliant poet, pioneering translator, revered champion of emerging poets, and learned, far-ranging critic. In this dazzling essay collection, a true landmark volume, Howard exemplifies the benefits of the life of the mind, which for him is a veritable fountain of youth. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has never lost the intellectual vivaciousness of his earlier works even as experience and growing knowledge have deepened his perspective. Howard writes with equal zest and insight about the minutiae of grammar and the grandness of worldviews, the eccentricities of writers and the great sweep of literature . . . Drolly witty, discerning, and wielding a vocabulary and syntax to die for, Howard makes each of his chosen subjects worthy of the reader's most avid attention."--Donna Seaman, "Booklist" "Well-crafted essays, forewords, and afterwords on poets and poetry by the critic, translator, editor, and poet . . . The collection opens with a sparkling essay, from 1973, on Emily Dickinson, who was just then being rediscovered and needed her champions in a rhymeless time. Howard's consideration is highly illuminating, and it well illustrates his magpie technique of turning up glittering oddments . . . Elsewhere the noted translator of Baudelaire and other French writers turns his attention to Francophone literature, and especially on writers who are not much read today, such as Marguerite Yourcenar, Claude Simon, and even the irreplaceable Stendhal. These admiring pieces . . . ought to awaken interest in those writers, which would be a grand service to them. Elsewhere still Howard praises then-new poets such as J. D. McClatchy, the writings of Brassaioch, the power of storytelling, and kindred matters, giving variety to an altogether satisfactory collection. [The book will be] of interest to Howard's admirers and students."--"Kirkus Reviews"

In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization. Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world. By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them, Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other.

In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Confessions of a Serial Biographer is the story (or rather the stories) of a man who has mingled with celebrities since he was a teenage junior newspaper reporter. He has been involved with some of the iconic names of Hollywood and showbiz in general - people like Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck and Andre Previn, all of whom co-operated in his biographies. Then there was a wide spectrum that ranged from Morecambe and Wise to Ella Fitzgerald, to say nothing of Leonard Bernstein and Bob Hope. His most recent biography is a best-selling study of the life of Dean Martin, King of the Road. Here is an autobiography of a biographer of more than 30 books, who, while still at school, was captivated by the voice of a singer called Al Jolson. It is not just a story of smooth, friendly relations with his subjects. James Cagney sued him in the New York courts and Mr Peck tried to stop his book. Freedland won in both cases. But this is also the story of politicians like Harold Wilson, Alec Douglas Home ... and Tony Blair, to whom Michael Freedland gave some early media training. Not least of all, it is the tale of a radio programme called You Don't Have To Be Jewish, which after 23 years became the longest-running regional broadcast in Britain.

*Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography This is the story of the making of a world-famous sociologist. It is even more the story of a boy hustling to survive. Here in an astonishing and candidly written memoir by one of America's premier social scientists recounting the intensely personal story of his tormented youth in a ghetto within a ghetto. It etches the painful details of a boy's overcoming alienation and isolation in a hostile place in an unloving family. In the 1930s a small remnant community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants still resided in predominantly black Harlem. As shopkeepers trying to make out a marginal existence, Harlem's Jews were a minority within a minority. Into this restricted world the author of this book was born. Irving Louis Horowitz's parents had fled Russia, his father the victim of persecution in the Tsarist army during World War I. The boy's schoolmates were the children of black sharecroppers who had immigrated to the North. Poverty, language, and culture all cut off the Horowitz family from traditional community life, and the stress of a survival existence led to the trauma of a deteriorating family unit. Harlem and its environs, the Apollo and the Alhambra theaters, the Polo Grounds, and Central Park were the stage on which a youngster from this ghetto built a kind of self-reliance at the cost of social graces. The recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography, this new, augmented edition contains the author's reflection of the impact of the Great Depression on Harlem family life.

In his book "Ramses II and His Time", Immanuel Velikovsky continues his reconstruction of ancient history. This volume covers the best-known of old Egypt's pharaohs, Ramses II. Velikovsky points out how little we know about this famous ruler. His revised chronology places Ramses II firmly into the 7th century B.C. and not, as we have been led to believe, hundreds of years earlier in the 13th century B.C.. Ramses II's adversary was thus none other than Nebuchadnezzar. We are made privy to fascinating personal details about this great Chaldean ruler, whose autobiography Velikovsky was able to locate. As in the first part of the series "Ages in Chaos", this volume unearths a string of erroneous theories and dismisses as pure fantasy several other aspects of the traditional written history concerning the ancient world. We learn, for example, that the so-called Hittite Empire is an historical invention and, in another critical paragraph, Velikovsky leads us the to the proper understanding of the Bronze- and Iron Ages. In the extensive supplement, Velikovsky deals with the age-calculating method of radiocarbon dating and its surprising connections to his own theories.

Philippines is Hélène Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.

In 1964, in a daring night-time escape, the author and her husband fled Johannesburg and slipped across the border under the eyes of the security police. This autobiography documents her transformation from model school girl to saboteur, and her family's history of flight and exile through the generations.

Characters: 4 male, 2 female 2 Interiors Maestro Vito De Angelis, an egomaniacal but charming conductor, is under contract to a major publisher to deliver his autobiography. The publisher has paid a huge advance and Vito has just fired his fifth ghost writer. The publisher sends pretty Iris Peabody, knowing that Vito is a sucker for the ladies, to gain his cooperation as she ghost writes the book. The stratagem works, a fact that distresses Mrs. Vito, former opera star Rachel Garla

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LITERARY. The Tongue Set Free is so beautifully written. It begins wtih an extraordinary image, Canetti's earliest memory. He comes out of a room. A man makes him stick out his tongue; if he talks he will cut it off. Years later Canetti realises that this was his nursemaid's lover, frightening him into silence about their rendezvous. The idea of speaking as the entry into forbidden grown-up life dominates this book. When he is seven his father dies. He is propelled from childhood into adulthood, from his father to his mother, through language. In an extraordinary, cruel episode his mother forces him to learn perfect adult German in three months, to replace her husband as quickly as possible. His tongue is set free: he has won his mother, against brothers , against all lovers. It is the most intense Oedipal relationhsip I have ever seen described and Canetti describes it brilliantly. But it's all extraordinary, and all masterfully written.

"One day, a young man receives an unexpected letter from his grandmother, kicking off a literary adventure that brings home to him everything he has not seen. Once Upon Argentina relates the lives of the narrator's relatives-- a group of people from all over the world gathered in a land where immigrant traditions merge and thrive. The lives of these relatives intersect, like a set of Matryoshka dolls or a hall of mirrors, as the personal and social stories of twentieth century Argentina converge. Beyond these tales of hardship and triumph, Andres Neuman's novel experiments with the nature of the autobiography, encompassing prenatal memories, expanding the autofiction genre with a new voice and twist. Merging present and past, collective experiences and his own, the narrator explores a genealogy populated by unforgettable characters, offering us the story of the construction of a country, his Argentine childhood, and his early literary discoveries.With extraordinary delicacy and intensity, combining elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andres Neuman reveals a world as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own. Once Upon Argentina is a coming-of-age tale, a political novel, and a love letter to the absent ones."--Publisher's website

Alfred Bader's achievements—as the founder of one of the most important companies in its field in the world, as a collector and dealer in Old Master paintings, and as a legendary philanthropist—make for fascinating reading. This book begins where Alfred Bader's first autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector, ended: with the boardroom coup in which he was dismissed from the chemical company he had built up from the ground. Bader now turns his enormous energy to Old Master paintings, in which he had become interested at a young age and in which he by now has the means to invest. The chapters that follow are roughly chronological, with some devoted to particularly meaningful paintings or groups of paintings, memorable auctions, mysteries, or discoveries relating to the artworks in the Bader Collection, while others are dedicated to friends, family, love, religion, charity, and, occasionally, chemistry.