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Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories
By Elijah Wald. 2024
A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early…
blues and jazz. In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city&’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast. Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph'Brilliant ... An amazing…
story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan SnowIT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz.The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war.As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9.Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.Africa Askew - Traversing The Continent
By Peter Boehm. 2014
AFRICA ASKEW was in the Top Ten of the German Amazon Travel&Adventure section for almost a year.Peter Boehm travelled right…
across Africa, in speeding SUVs, rickety buses and dilapidated trains. He travelled for almost six months, over 6,000 miles, through nine countries – Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Senegal.The journey was breathtaking and nerve-shattering, but never dull. The people he met were exciting, bizarre and pathetic, but they never leave you cold. In Somali, Peter Boehm describes psychiatrists who consider all their compatriots to be mad – as do the Somalis themselves and, in the end, even the author thinks he’s mad too! In Sudan, he meets doctors who re-seal women; in Chad there are street kids already sitting on their suitcases, awaiting the journey to Germany; in Mali he meets traditional healers who are, at the same time, GPs, best friends, and agony aunts; in Nigeria there are traditional leaders whose subjects throw themselves on the ground before them, and Islamic judges who savour the whippings they’ve ordered as one would a high-quality wine.For good measure, Peter Boehm has kept a record of the troubles and transformations of a European in Africa.Peter Boehm’s tone is laconic, and free of any sentimentality. You’ll never have read about Africa like this before.Eredi di Tamerlano
By Peter Boehm. 2018
L’irrinunciabile guida per un viaggio in Asia centrale. EREDI DI TAMERLANO contiene reportage da Kazakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizistan e Tagikistan…
e spaccati di realtà a noi lontane: il cibo centroasiatico, la nuova capitale kazaka Astana, il massacro di Andijan, la scomparsa del lago d’Aral, il capo dei capi: il grande Türkmenbaşy, il buzkashi, Samarcanda, il rapimento delle spose, donne che si suicidano col fuoco, il traffico uzbeko, e tanto altro.Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family
By Jordan Mechner. 2024
"[A] vibrant, poignant book." —NPR Book Reviews1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment office when his idyllic life in…
a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.2015. The creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
By Emily Raboteau. 2024
Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau crafts a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice—and what it takes to…
find shelter. Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and city parks where her children may safely play while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from Indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community, she discovers the most intimate examples of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph'Brilliant ... An amazing…
story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan SnowIT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz.The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war.As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9.Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
By Peter Brown. 2023
A beautifully written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity by one of the world’s most influential and distinguished…
historiansThe end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium” now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new and influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues that include the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the French theorist Michel Foucault, and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the “grand endeavor” to reimagine a decisive historical moment.Karl Marx: Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition
By Isaiah Berlin. 2014
Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the…
life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct, deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other nineteenth-century thinker. A brilliantly lucid work of synthesis and exposition, the book introduces Marx's ideas and sets them in their context, explains why they were revolutionary in political and intellectual terms, and paints a memorable portrait of Marx's dramatic life and outsized personality. Berlin takes readers through Marx's years of adolescent rebellion and post-university communist agitation, the personal high point of the 1848 revolutions, and his later years of exile, political frustration, and intellectual effort. Critical yet sympathetic, Berlin's account illuminates a life without reproducing a legend. New features of this thoroughly revised edition include references for Berlin's quotations and allusions, Terrell Carver's assessment of the distinctiveness of Berlin's book, and a revised guide to further reading.Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
By Hayden Herrera. 2015
Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel…
monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle—as both an artist and a man—was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes, he also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone. Throughout his career, Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art—now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West—did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged.Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy
By Clint Hill, Lisa McCubbin Hill. 2022
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Mrs. Kennedy and Me reveal never-before-told stories of…
Secret Service Agent Clint Hill&’s travels with Jacqueline Kennedy through Europe, Asia, and South America. Featuring more than two hundred rare and never-before-published photographs.While preparing to sell his home in Alexandria, Virginia, retired Secret Service agent Clint Hill uncovers an old steamer trunk in the garage, triggering a floodgate of memories. As he and Lisa McCubbin, his coauthor on three previous books, pry it open for the first time in fifty years, they find forgotten photos, handwritten notes, personal gifts, and treasured mementos from the trips on which Hill accompanied First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as her Secret Service agent—trips that took them from Paris to London, through India, Pakistan, Greece, Morocco, Mexico, South America, and &“three glorious weeks on the Amalfi Coast.&” During these journeys, Jacqueline Kennedy became one of her husband&’s—and America&’s—greatest assets; in Hill&’s words and the opinion of many others, &“one of the best ambassadors the United States has ever had.&” As each newfound treasure sparks long-suppressed memories, Hill provides new insight into the intensely private woman he always called &“Mrs. Kennedy&” and who always called him &“Mr. Hill.&” For the first time, he reveals the depth of the relationship that developed between them as they traveled around the globe. Now ninety years old, Hill recounts the tender moments, the private laughs, the wild adventures, and the deep affection he shared with one of the world&’s most beautiful and iconic women—and these memories are brought vividly to life alongside more than two hundred rare photographs, many of them previously unpublished. In addition to the humorous stories and intimate moments, Hill reveals startling details about how traveling helped them both heal during the excruciating weeks and months following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. He also writes of the year he spent protecting Mrs. Kennedy after the assassination, a time in his life he has always been reluctant to speak about. My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy unveils a personal side of history that has never been told before and takes the reader on a breathtaking journey, experiencing what it was like for Clint Hill to travel with Jacqueline Kennedy as the entire world was falling in love with her.Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life
By Kao Kalia Yang. 2024
An Esquire Best Memoir of 2024 A mesmerizing and hauntingly beautiful memoir about a Hmong family&’s epic journey to safety…
told from the perspective of the author&’s incredible mother who survived, and helped her family escape, against all odds.Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb&’s childhood was marked by the violence of America&’s Secret War and the CIA recruitment of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities into the lost cause. By the time Tswb was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were labeled as traitors. Fearing for their lives, Tswb and her family left everything they knew behind and fled their village for the jungle. Perpetually on the run and on the brink of starvation, Tswb eventually crossed paths with the man who would become her future husband. Leaving her own mother behind, she joined his family at a refugee camp, a choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Eventually becoming a mother herself, Tswb raised her daughters in a state of constant fear and hunger until they were able to emigrate to the US, where the determined couple enrolled in high school even though they were both nearly thirty, and worked grueling jobs to provide for their children. Now, her daughter, Kao Kalia Yang, reveals her mother&’s astonishing saga with tenderness and unvarnished clarity, giving voice to the countless resilient refugees who are often overlooked as one of the essential foundations of this country. Evocative, stirring, and unforgettable, Where Rivers Part is destined to become a classic.Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
By Donald J. Robertson. 2022
In the tradition of Logicomix, Donald J. Robertson's Verissimus is a riveting graphic novel on the life and stoic philosophy…
of Marcus Aurelius.Marcus Aurelius was the last famous Stoic of antiquity but he was also to become the most powerful man in the known world – the Roman emperor. After losing his father at an early age, he threw himself into the study of philosophy. The closest thing history knew to a philosopher-king, yet constant warfare and an accursed plague almost brought his empire to its knees. “Life is warfare”, he wrote, “and a sojourn in foreign land!” One thing alone could save him: philosophy, the love of wisdom!The remarkable story of Marcus Aurelius’ life and philosophical journey is brought to life by philosopher and psychotherapist Donald J. Robertson, in a sweeping historical epic of a graphic novel, based on a close study of the historical evidence, with the stunning full-color artwork of award-winning illustrator Zé Nuno Fraga.Dream Car: Malcolm Bricklin’s Fantastic SV1 and the End of Industrial Modernity
By Dimitry Anastakis. 2024
Dream Car tells the story of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s fantastical 1970s-era Safety Vehicle-1 (SV1), audaciously launched during a tumultuous breakpoint…
in postwar history. The tale of the sexy-yet-safe SV1 reveals the influence of automobiles on ideas about the future, technology, entrepreneurship, risk, safety, showmanship, politics, sex, gender, business, and the state, as well as the history of the auto industry’s birth, decline, and rebirth. Written as an “open road,” the book invites readers to travel a narrative arc that unfolds chronologically and thematically. Dream Car’s seven chapters have been structured so that they can be read in any order, determined by whichever theme each reader finds most interesting. The book also includes a musical playlist of car songs from the era and songs about the SV1 itself.I'm Down: A Memoir
By Mishna Wolff. 2009
Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he…
was black. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn't tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried," writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter Down. Unfortunately, Mishna didn't quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn't dance, she couldn't sing, she couldn't double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. She was shy, uncool and painfully white. And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too "black" to fit in with her white classmates. I'm Down is a hip, hysterical and at the same time beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black and white in America.The Bridesmaid's Daughter: From Grace Kelly's Wedding to a Women's Shelter—Searching for the Truth About My Mother
By Nyna Giles, Eve Claxton. 2012
A daughter’s moving search to understand her mother, Carolyn Scott—once a bridesmaid to Princess Grace and one of the first…
Ford models—who later in life spent years living in a homeless shelter.Nyna Giles was picking up groceries at the supermarket one day when she looked down and saw the headline on the cover of a tabloid: “Former Bridesmaid of Princess Grace Lives in Homeless Shelter.” Nyna was stunned, shocked to see her family’s private ordeal made so public—the woman mentioned on that cover, Carolyn Scott Reybold, was her mother. Nyna’s childhood had been spent in doctor’s offices. Too ill, she was told, to go to school like other children, she spent nearly every waking moment at her mother’s side at their isolated Long Island estate or on trips into the city to see the ballet. The doctors couldn’t tell her what was wrong, but as Nyna grew up, her mother, who’d always seemed fragile, became more and more distant. Now Nyna was forced to confront an agonizing realization: she barely knew the woman on the magazine in front of her. She knew that her mother had been a model after arriving in New York in 1947, living at the Barbizon Hotel, where she’d met the young Grace Kelly and that the two had become fast friends. Nyna had seen the photos of Carolyn at Grace’s wedding, wearing the yellow bridesmaid gown that had hung in her closet for years. But how had the seemingly confident, glamorous woman in those pictures become the mother she knew growing up—the mother who was now living in a shelter? In this powerful memoir of friendship and motherhood, Nyna Giles uncovers her mother’s past to answer the questions she never knew to ask.Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography
By Andrew Morton. 2010
The gripping true story of Angelina Jolie, from #1 New York Times bestselling biographer Andrew Morton."I like to collect knives,"…
says Angelina Jolie, "but I also collect first edition books." At first glance, she might seem to be someone without any secrets, talking openly about her love life, sexual preferences, drug use, cutting, and tattoos--and why she kissed her brother on the lips in public. And yet mysteries remain: What was really going on in her brief, impulsive marriages to Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, and what was going on in her partnership with Brad Pitt? What's behind the oft-reported feud with her father, the Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight? What drove her to become a mother of six children in six years? And—perhaps most puzzling of all—what about the other side of Angelina: How did this talented but troubled young actress, barely 35 years old, become a respected Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations as well as the "most powerful celebrity in the world" (unseating Oprah Winfrey) on Forbes' 2009 Celebrity 100 list? The answers that Andrew Morton has uncovered are astonishing, taking us deep inside Angelina's world to show us what shaped her as a child, as an actress, and as a woman struggling to overcome personal demons that have never before been revealed. In this spellbinding biography, Andrew Morton draws upon far-reaching original interviews and research, accompanied by exclusive private photographs, to show us the true story behind both the wild excesses of Angelina's youth and her remarkable work with children and victims of poverty and disaster today.Friedrich Hayek: A Biography
By Alan Ebenstein. 2001
This biography tells the story of one of the most important public figures of the twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek.Here is…
the first full biography of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who became, over the course of a remarkable career, the great philosopher of liberty in our time. In this richly detailed portrait, Alan Ebenstein chronicles the life, works, and legacy of a visionary thinker, from Hayek's early years as the scholarly son of a physician in fin-de-siecle Vienna on an increasingly wider world as an economist and political philosopher in London, New York, and Chicago.Ebenstein gives a balanced, integrated account of Hayek's extraordinary diverse body of work, from his fist encounter with the free market ideas of mentor Ludwig Von Mises to his magisterial writings in later life on the legal, political, ethical, and economic requirements of a free society. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hayek's vision of a renewed classical liberalism-of free markets and free ideas in free societies-has taken hold in much of the world.Alan Ebenstein's clearly written account is an essential starting point for anyone seeking to understand why Hayek's ideas have become the guiding force of our time. His illuminating portrait of Hayek the man brings to new life the spirit of a great scholar and tenacious advocate who has become, in Peter Drucker's words, "our time's preeminent social philosopher."Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique
By Sydney Ladensohn Stern. 1997
Includes a new afterword: A &“richly detailed&” biography of the iconic feminist based on interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and…
Steinem herself (The Washington Post). Going beyond Gloria Steinem&’s public persona, this biography provides an in-depth portrait of the famed activist—covering her family of origin, Smith College education, travels in India, founding of Ms. magazine, and much more—drawn from fifty hours of interviews with Steinem, as well as conversations with more than two hundred people in her life. &“Stern&’s biography is sympathetic but critical about the woman who was once perhaps the foremost figure of American feminism. . . . Follows its subject from her childhood with a mentally ill mother and ne&’er-do-well father through her rise in the women&’s movement.&” —The New York Times Book Review &“Feminist icon, goddess, social climber, bunny—who is Gloria Steinem? All of the above, according to [this] serious new biography. . . . A real look at Steinem off the public platform.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“Avoiding esoteric psychological or feminist theorizing, Stern still provides a clear context for Steinem&’s development both as a public figure and as an exemplar of the movement that seeks to have women define themselves as autonomous individuals.&” —Library JournalIncludes photographsThe Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown
By Karen Olsson. 2019
A New York Times Editors' Pick and Paris Review Staff Pick"A wonderful book." --Patti Smith"I was riveted. Olsson is evocative…
on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge." --Parul Sehgal, The New York TimesAn eloquent blend of memoir and biography exploring the Weil siblings, math, and creative inspirationKaren Olsson’s stirring and unusual third book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the story of the brilliant Weil siblings—Simone, a philosopher, mystic, and social activist, and André, an influential mathematician—while also recalling the years Olsson spent studying math. As she delves into the lives of these two singular French thinkers, she grapples with their intellectual obsessions and rekindles one of her own. For Olsson, as a math major in college and a writer now, it’s the odd detours that lead to discovery, to moments of insight. Thus The Weil Conjectures—an elegant blend of biography and memoir and a meditation on the creative life.Personal, revealing, and approachable, The Weil Conjectures eloquently explores math as it relates to intellectual history, and shows how sometimes the most inexplicable pursuits turn out to be the most rewarding.