In this "stunning" new history, New York Times bestselling author Max Wallace draws on groundbreaking research to reframe Helen Keller's journey after the miracle at the water pump, vividly bringing to light her rarely discussed, lifelong fight for social justice across gender, class, race, and ability (Rosemary Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author). Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 Raised in Alabama, she sent shockwaves through the South when she launched a public broadside against Jim Crow and donated to the NAACP. She used her fame to oppose American intervention in WWI. She spoke out against Hitler the month he took power in 1933 and embraced the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. She was one of the first public figures to alert the world to the evils of Apartheid, raising money to defend Nelson Mandela when he faced the death penalty for High Treason, and she lambasted Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Cold War, even as her contemporaries shied away from his notorious witch hunt. But who was this revolutionary figure? She was Helen Keller. From books to movies to Barbie dolls, most mainstream portrayals of Keller focus heavily on her struggles as a deafblind child--portraying her Teacher, Annie Sullivan, as a miracle worker. This narrative--which has often made Keller a secondary character in her own story--has resulted in few people knowing that her greatest accomplishment was not learning to speak, but what she did with her voice when she found it. After the Miracle is a much-needed corrective to this antiquated narrative. In this first major biography of Keller in decades, Max Wallace reveals that the lionization of Sullivan at the expense of her famous pupil was no accident, and calls attention to Keller's efforts as a card-carrying socialist, fierce anti-racist, and progressive disability advocate. Despite being raised in an era when eugenics and discrimination were commonplace, Keller consistently challenged the media for its ableist coverage and was one of the first activists to highlight the links between disability and capitalism, even as she struggled against the expectations and prejudices of those closest to her. Peeling back the curtain that obscured Keller's political crusades in favor of her "inspirational" childhood, After the Miracle chronicles the complete legacy of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary figures.

"Fifteen years after her death, Andrea Dworkin remains one of the most important and challenging figures in second-wave feminism. Although frequently relegated to its more radical fringes, Dworkin was without doubt a formidable and influential writer, a philosopher, and an activist-a brilliant figure who inspired and infuriated in equal measure. Her many detractors were eager to reduce her to the caricature of the angry, man-hating feminist who believed that all sex was rape, and as a result, her work has long been misunderstood. It is in recent years, especially with the rise of the #MeToo movement, that there has been a resurgence of interest in her ideas. This biography is the perfect complement to the widely reviewed anthology of her writing, Last Days at Hot Slit, published in 2019, providing much-needed context to her work. Given exclusive access to never-before-published photographs and archives, including her letters to many of the major figures of second-wave feminism, award-winning biographer Martin Duberman traces Dworkin's life, from her abusive first marriage through her central role in the sex and pornography wars of the following decades. This is a vital, complex, and long overdue reassessment of the life and work of one of the towering figures of second-wave feminism"--

Finalist, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Lincoln Kirstein was a tireless champion of the arts in America. Working behind the scenes to provide artists with money, space, audiences, and, at times, emotional support, he helped found such landmark cultural institutions as the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet, New York’s Lincoln Center and Stratford's American Shakespeare Festival. Duberman's biography sheds light on this lamentably neglected cultural figure. Though best known as a benefactor of the arts, Kirstein was also an adept critic, poet and novelist who published some fifteen books in his lifetime. From his undergraduate years at Harvard, where he established the influential literary magazine Hound and Horn , as well as the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (precursor to the Modern Museum of Art), to his complex and historically significant relationship with George Balanchine, Kirstein's contributions were indespensible to the development of the arts in America. Authoritative and elegant, Duberman's biography utilizes previously unavailable documents, including Kirstein's diaries, to reveal the keen eye, incessant self-doubt, and enormous ambition that drove Kirstein's relentless advocacy. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein brings attention to an important, but until-now unappreciated figure whose individual contribution to the arts was one of the greatest of the twentieth century.

"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"--

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

Memoir, biography and travel book, The Monkey and the Dragon is a story about the personal and political tumult of a changing China. Linda Jaivin traces this transformation through the life of Hou Dejian: Taiwan pop star, defector to communist China, hunger-striker at Tiananmen Square, political activist, celebrity fengshui master and friend.

"Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian feminist Eve Adams, and her long-lost book Lesbian Love. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912, took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. Adams's bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her. Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist. Carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams, and the publisher reprints the long-lost text of Adams's rare, unique book Lesbian Love."--Publisher's website.

Yet only that last point is actually true. In this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. From his early days as a child prodigy performing for the imperial royal family in Vienna to the last months of his short life, driven to exhaustion by a punitive workload, one thing remained constant: his happy disposition Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart--blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humor, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating

Drawing on a series of new sources, this biography of Ezra Pound - the first to appear in more than a decade - outlines his contribution to modernism through a detailed account of his development, influence and continued significance. It pays special attention to his role in creating Imagism, Vorticism and the modern long poem, as well as his importance for Yeats, Joyce and Eliot. His roles as editor, translator and critic, plus his attempt to complete The Cantos , are also studied.

This new visual biography is an extraordinary chronicle of Lady Pamela's life. Daughter of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the last viceroy of India, Lady Pamela was a first cousin to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and served as a bridesmaid and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, before marrying legendary interior designer David Hicks. Sifting through her parents' archives, India has uncovered a trove of material about her mother. This beautifully illustrated personal history includes ephemera such as letters from the Queen; images of the houses and gardens where she grew up and made her wonderfully elegant home; details of her extraordinary work during Indian independence, her marriage to David Hicks and the homes he designed for them, the assassination of her father in Ireland, and later life in the country, as well as the lessons India has learned from her mother having had a front-row seat at so many historical events --

This initial volume of the Collected Works of Edith Stein offers, for the first time in English, the unabridged biography of Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), depicting her life as a child and young adult. Her text ends abruptly because the Nazi SS arrested, then deported, her to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. Edith Stein is one of the most significant German women of the 20th century. At the age of twenty-five she became the first assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology. She was much in demand as a writer and lecturer after her conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Later, as a Discalced Carmelite nun, she maintained her intellectual pursuits until she, like so many others, became a victim of the Nazi persecution that raged across Eastern Europe. By making this landmark work available in English, the Institute of Carmelite Studies provides an eye-witness account of persons and activities on the scene at the time when psychology and philosophy became separate disciplines. In addition to photographs and a map, this volume is enhanced with a preface, the foreword and afterword, notes, and a list of places associated with Edith Stein’s life. It is our aim that these, together with Edith Stein’s text, may help bring into relief the many background details of the rich autobiographical work she has left us.

"The long-awaited biography of the defining illustrator of the twentieth century by a celebrated art critic"--

Part of the Jewish Encounter series A dandy, a best-selling novelist, and a man of political and sexual intrigue, Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most captivating figures of the nineteenth century. His flirtation with proto-Zionism, his ideas about power and empire, and his fantasies about the Middle East remain prophetically relevant today. How a man who was born a Jew--and who remained in the eyes of his countrymen a member of a despised minority--managed to become prime minister of England seems even today nothing short of miraculous. In this compelling biography, renowned poet and critic Adam Kirsch looks at Disraeli as a novelist as well as a statesman, recognizing that the outsider Jew who became one of the world's most powerful men was his own greatest character. Though baptized by his father at the age of twelve, Disraeli was seen--and saw himself--as a Jew. But her created an idea of Jewishness to rival the British notion of aristocracy. Disraeli was a figure of fascinating contradictions: an archconservative who benefited from England's liberal attitudes, a baptized Christian who saw Jewishness as a matter of racial superiority, a perennial outsider who dreamed of glory for England, which, in the words of one contemporary, became for Disraeli "the Israel of his imagination."

The Hungarian-born celebrity recounts her life of glamour, describing her eight husbands, her lovers, her friends, and her famous brush with the law

In an immensely alive and pointed memoir by a writer who was himself blacklisted during what Lillian Hellman so aptly called "scoundrel time, " Bernstein recounts his passage from idealist to scapegoat. Chronicling his writing careers in Hollywood and then television, Bernstein tells of the blacklisting for communism which brought ostracism, FBI surveillance, and a search for "fronts" to take credit for his work. of photos.

Thomas Harding adapts his adult memoir of the same name for younger readers, tracing the shadow of war as it falls across a one-story cottage and the people who share it.