The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys. An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyalties and myths, bringing the story of four generations of "America's family" fully into view. Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition; the dynastic ebb and flow; the invention of a mythic identity; the corrosive underside of the dream of Camelot--developed over four generations--that led one young Kennedy to say, "We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them." The Kennedys: An American Drama is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall. The authors have added new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., and the other family tragedies of the last few years, on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life. In addition to The Kennedys , Peter Collier and David Horowitz are the authors of dynastic biographies of the Fords, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, and Fondas.

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built on the ferocity of mother-daughter love, moral obligation, and the possibility and promise of healing. Having survived a harrowing childhood at the hands of her mother, Elissa is finally settled in Connecticut with her wife of almost twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, orbiting around her mother, but keeping far enough away from her to preserve the independent, quiet life she has built for herself. All of this is suddenly at risk when Rita, whose days are spent traversing the streets of Manhattan from Bergdorf's to Bloomingdale's and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall that leaves her fully dependent on her only child. Forced to confront her mother's desperate need for beauty, her view of the world through a medley of men, her lost days in the spotlight, addiction, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of maintaining her youth, Elissa must navigate the waters of their shared history, obligation, the problems of caregiving and age, and the frenetic, co-dependent love that has defined their obsessive relationship. Motherland asks the universal mother-daughter question: How much love is too much love?"--

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built on the ferocity of mother-daughter love, moral obligation, and the possibility and promise of healing. Having survived a harrowing childhood at the hands of her mother, Elissa is finally settled in Connecticut with her wife of almost twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, orbiting around her mother, but keeping far enough away from her to preserve the independent, quiet life she has built for herself. All of this is suddenly at risk when Rita, whose days are spent traversing the streets of Manhattan from Bergdorf's to Bloomingdale's and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall that leaves her fully dependent on her only child. Forced to confront her mother's desperate need for beauty, her view of the world through a medley of men, her lost days in the spotlight, addiction, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of maintaining her youth, Elissa must navigate the waters of their shared history, obligation, the problems of caregiving and age, and the frenetic, co-dependent love that has defined their obsessive relationship. Motherland asks the universal mother-daughter question: How much love is too much love?"--

Drawn to an image of her great-grandfather's ornately carved cane, scholar Elisa New embarked on a journey to discover the origins of her precious family heirloom. Treading back across the paths of her ancestors, she travels from Baltimore to the Baltic to London in order to find and understand an immigrant world profoundly affected by modern German culture, from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust. Deeply ambitious in its narrative sweep, Jacob's Cane captures the rich texture of life on several continents as New's family searches to establish itself in the tobacco trade. A fascinating history of one family's story of progress, innovation, and struggle, Jacob's Cane will change the way we think about the Jewish American experience.

Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now - balding, octogenarian - he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Fathe r is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times

In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch's seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian spaceman was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism, of the forward march of history. When Gagarin went to Highgate to visit the tomb of Karl Marx, the local communists came out to cheer, David's father, a full-time worker for the Communist Party, and his mother among them. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? In a sense they were like a non-magical version of the wizards of J K Rowling's world, living part secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Where others went to church they went to Socialist Sunday School, where others watched the Black and White Minstrels they went to see the Red Army Choir (always providing that visas had been issued). Society's up was their down, its heroes were their villains and vice versa. Trade unions were never more noble than when militant, the blacks were right and the whites were wrong. Who wanted American TV when you could have Russian movies? A memoir of early life among communists and an exploration of the world that created that life, Party Animals first took David Aaronovitch back through his own memories of belief and action. But there was much more to it. He found himself studying the old secret service files, his mother's diaries and letters, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal. Only then did he begin to understand what had come before - both the obstinate heroism and the monstrous cowardice. And the elements that shape our fondest beliefs