Looks at the journeys of Roy Chapman Andrews who, in the early twentieth-century, led countless expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History in search of dinosaur fossils, facing dangers such as pythons, wild dogs, marauding bandits, sandstorms, and corrupt officials. Original.

"I have been a Jew during Fascism, a bourgeois under Communism, a rebel defeated in an uprising, a refugee among the free, and a have-not amid plenty. This book contains over 60 stories that range from my youth in Hungary, the ordeal of a death march and concentration camps, the oppression of the Communist dictatorship, the promise and defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and, finally, my American years"--Preminary pages

"In 1966, at the ripe age of 22, Richard Goldstein approached The Village Voice with a novel idea. "I want to be a rock critic," he said. "What's that?" the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that changed our lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form. From his unique position in journalism, he saw the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s--and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, and dropped acid with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He was present for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the student uprising at Columbia, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer, and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends--Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two--and their early deaths came as a wrenching shock, fueling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite to a vast industry--and the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away. Another Little Piece of My Heart is the intimate memoir of the writer as a young man with profound ambition. It is also a sweeping personal account of a decade that no one else could provide--a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America"--

In the early 1950's, in Los Angeles, at 6 AM, John West, vice-president of the National Broadcasting Company in charge of west coast, gets a phone call from New York City on the NBC tie line. The caller is General David Sarnoff, chairman of the Board of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, NBC's parent company. Awakened from sleep, Mr. West groggily says "Hello" "John, this is General Sarnoff." Mr. West swiftly clears the cobwebs. "Good morning, General, it's always good to hear from you." "John, you're acquainted with my nephew Richard Baer, aren't you?" "Yes, General, I am. He's a fine young man. I think very highly of him." "Last night I spoke with his mother, my sister. She's upset. The reason she's upset is that Richard has been out of work for four months and he has no prospects, so it looks like his life is going nowhere." "General, I'm surprised and sorry to hear that." "John, I want you to find Richard a job. And I want you to find him a job by nine o'clock this morning, your time. I'll be waiting for your call saying you took care of it. Goodbye."

Relates the trials and eventual transformation of Richard--a Yale tennis captain, surgeon, Lt. Commander in the navy, and a happily married man into Renee Richards, a woman with many accomplishments in her own right

Can a lady be kissed without being touched? Raymond Smullyan has been providing the world with such puzzle fun, chess problems, and logic quizzes for a long time. Now, he reviews his life and how all of this got started in a way that is just as interesting as his previous entertainments. Not surprisingly, there are more puzzles, but there are also new stories, many photos, and a look inside the many hobbies of the many personalities that is Raymond Smullyan. Some Interesting Memories is a "rambly" account taking you inside university life, meeting musicians, mathematicians, magicians, then, off to Eastern Philosophy, making stereoscopic viewers, or installing a 40-speaker sound system.

This first full-length study of Susan Howe illuminates the historical, autobiographical, and theoretical influences that underlie the work of this enigmatic and important contemporary American poet. In Led by Language , poet and scholar Rachel Tzvia Back offers a close and detailed reading of Susan Howe's provocative and powerful poetry. Howe's work is dense, often difficult, but always distinctive, and Back's volume explains a number of features crucial to understanding her poems. In this complete survey of Howe's major work, from 1978's Secret History of the Dividing Line to 1999's Pierce-Arrow , Back highlights the key strategies underlying Howe's work: linguistic experimentation, historical motifs, autobiographical references, and visual experimentation with types, fonts, and images. One of the book's most compelling arguments is Back's case for reading Howe's work autobiographically. An obsession with history characterizes Howe's poetry--historical figures from Mary Magdalene to Melville haunt her work--and Back deftly demonstrates the intensely personal nature of much of the historical terrain Howe traverses. This study debunks the myth of Howe's impenetrability, making her work accessible to a wide range of readers. Back has created a thorough guide to reading and understanding this important poet, and her book will be welcomed by students and scholars of contemporary poetry, American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies.

A visionary who took no prisoners and a billionaire at least twice over, Izzy Asper ran his empire out of his briefcase. He was constantly in flight and flux, each of his improbable ventures feeding on the next. What made him so special was his ability to create warm, electric moments with his friends and loyalists, while inspiring loathing among his critics and enemies. Asper was always ahead of the pack, creating the country’s largest communications empire while remaining a certified outsider, more feared than loved for besting his peers at their power games. Peter C. Newman deconstructs the passionate life and turbulent times of the man who once confessed that he didn’t get ulcers, he gave them. Newman dissects Izzy’s feuds and friendships with some of Canada’s most powerful big-league players, including Conrad Black, with whom he frequently and violently jousted. But even as his political and business ventures swirled around him, Izzy would relax by playing jazz piano in lounges, whenever he could get a gig. In Izzy, Newman paints a portrait of a Canadian business tycoon the likes of which this country will never see again.

From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto projects his voice at last to the wider world.

Omer Fast is one of the most distinctive film and video artists of the younger generation. In his award-winning four-channel video with multiple projections, Fast investigates how experience is transformed by memory. He refuses to frame memories according to the conventions of historical reconstruction just to turn them into a consumable narrative.Born 1972 in Jerusalem and living in Berlin, Omer Fast has achieved acclaim in exhibitions at internationally renowned museums, reaping honors including the prestigious Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008. Fast is nominated for the 2009 Berlin Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art.

Why I Left America and Other Essays by Oliver W. Harrington edited, with an introduction, by M. Thomas Inge To American black newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s "Ollie" Harrington was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons. He emerged as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and created Bootsie, the popular cartoon figure that became a fixture in black newspapers. Langston Hughes praised Harrington as America's greatest black cartoonist. After serving as a war correspondent in Italy, he returned to his homeland and the impediment of racism that pervaded American life. As director of public relations for the NAACP, he crusaded against America's policies of institutionalized racism, openly supporting leftist reform leaders. Upon hearing in this era of "red-baiting" that he was targeted for investigation, Harrington left America. In the culturally rich American community on the Left Bank in Paris that would come to include Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, he became a fixture. In 1961 he found himself trapped behind the Berlin Wall, but he chose to remain in East Germany. His cartoons appeared in East German magazines and in the American Communist newspaper The Daily World. Although he became a favorite with Eastern Bloc students and intellectuals, in America Harrington was mainly forgotten. The autobiographical pieces included in Why I Left America and Other Essays, written mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, detail Oliver W. Harrington's experiences as an African American artist in exile. One theme that persists in these writings and his cartoons is his intolerance of racism. Hence, as an artist, he has found it impossible not to be political. One essay, from Ebony magazine, fuels speculation about the mysterious circumstances in the death of his friend Richard Wright. In another piece Harrington details how he created the celebrated Bootsie. He writes in others of his life in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and in Paris with fellow black expatriate figures. Why did this African American choose to live in exile for over forty years? In an affectionate foreword to this volume Richard Wright's daughter Julia gives clues to the answer. Her insights, along with M. Thomas Inge's introductory essay about Harrington's life and achievements, bring special focus to the experiences of an outstanding African American artist and social critic who has been virtually without recognition in his homeland. Oliver W. Harrington (1912-1995), cartoonist and political satirist, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights. He lived in exile in East Berlin for many years. M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College.

Norman Levine's Canada Made Me , first published in England in 1958, is a bitter, critical reassessment of the moral and cultural values of Canada. His account of his three-month journey from Halifax to Ucluelet, a fishing village on the west coast, is an unconventional portrait of Canada's underbelly. The book ends with the words: `I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.' Canada Made Me was regarded as so controversial that it did not appear in a Canadian edition until 1979. Critical opinion, however, has slowly swung around to the point the book was recently described in the Globe and Mail as a `laconic classic'. For this new edition Norman Levine has written an introduction which traces the book's publishing history and reputation.

The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age. Renowned novelist Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of indelible portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane (immortalized by The Red Badge of Courage ); British artist Dora Carrington (called "the most neglected serious painter of her time"); and the legendary composer George Gershwin ( Rhapsody in Blue , Porgy and Bess ). All three lived colorful, productive lives before dying early, at an average age of thirty-five. In this learned and elegant book, Delbanco discovers what it is we mourn in authors who pass away so young, and muses on his own life--one marked by both early success and longevity.

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"Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read."—Carolyn Heilbrun In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal. "[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul."—Anne Roiphe, New York Times Book Review "Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal."—Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery "From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet."—Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner

Journalist Max Lerner writes a stunningly honest account of the feelings and thoughts that marked his battle with two successive cancers and a heart attack. Journal entries from this extraordinary ordeal show how mind and body interweave in the healing process. A worthy companion to Anatomy of an Illness.--Kirkus Reviews.

"This is a beautiful book, full of ideas that could help restore America’s genius for freedom and promise.” — Thomas Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Care of the Soul A lifelong Emerson lover, teacher, and spiritual seeker reveals how American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s twelve essential teachings hold the answer to living an authentic and fulfilling life, one that is in har[Bokinfo]