This long out-of-paint autobiography provides insight into the genesis of Bunuel's films and conveys his frank opinions on dwarves, Catholicism, the Marquis de Sade, food, and smoking, not to mention his recipe for a good dry martini!

    This autobiography traces Janet Frame's childhood in a poor but intellectually intense family, life as a student, years of incarceration in mental hospitals and eventual entry into the saving world of writers.

    By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing. Plath once called her journal her “Sargasso,” her repository of imagination, “a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives,” and in fact these pages contain the germs of most of her work. Plath’s ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat, a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journal with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. Written in electrifying prose, The Journals of Sylvia Plath provide unique insight, and are essential reading for all those who have been moved and fascinated by Plath’s life and work.

    in the Depresson years and World War II that has ever been written."—Harrison Salisbury.

    His story includes conflict in the air over Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Germany, where the Typhoons fought their last actions and where Desmond Scott earned major decorations from Belgium, France and Holland.

    Ken Harrison’s experiences as a Prisoner of war take the reader to the work camps of Singapore, to Thailand “Death Railway” and to the dockyards of Nagasaki. His journey culminates in a visit to the bomb-devastated Hiroshima long before the arrival of the occupation forces.

    "A first rate book and a joy to read...It's doubtful that a complete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtained without reading this book...Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction."—Variety"For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of must reading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic and absorbing screen entertainments."—Washington Post Book World

    Learn from Ruth as she weaves her unique humor into a warm and loving look into the life of a prominent family.

    It was an appropriate greeting to the young man, enjoying his first taste of freedom after spending time in three concentration camps, including the infamous Bergen-Belsen. A short time later, suddenly abandoned again to a Virginia military school, Spanjaard, then 16 years old, felt compelled to confront his past, particularly the loss of his beloved father, who died a few days after being released from Bergen-Belsen. This true story is unique because Barry Spanjaard is believed to be the only American citizen to be confined in Hitler's camps and dispels the idea that such a tragedy could only happen to people "over there - not here." His American citizenship was his and his family's tool to survival. His family never went into hiding, and Barry was able to keep his mother and father out of the camps for several years because of his American citizenship. His American citizenship was also the key which finally opened the doors to freedom in a prisoner exchange. Spanjaard recounts his meeting and the befriending of Anne Frank, his job as a personal messenger boy to Camp Commandant Josef Kramer and the destruction of his fellow Jews, with a cynical humor, without taking away from the seriousness of the situation. It reveals a youngster suddenly propelled to adult responsibilities, who nevertheless remains a teenager finding friends and life's remaining joys wherever he can."It is a book that young adults should read and then pass on to their parents."

    In this first volume of her autobiography, New Zealand novelist Janet Frame tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.Despite material privations and family conflicts, the world of the imagination was accorded a supreme place in the Frame household, and it was at this time that Janet Frame acquired her lifelong love for Romantic poetry and her tactile sense of the power of words.Amongst evocations of New Zealand landscape and the recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck Janet Frame under in the years before she found herself as a writer.

    He detailed his work in the student movement creating a network of the people and later described what he went through to train and become a guerilla fighter.

    Possessed of great warmth, wit and, above all a humanity which informs every word in this extraordinary account of Jersey life during the German Occupation, he served the island community with unfailing resourcefulness and not a little courage for five long and stressful years. However, despite the awfulness of the time, Dr Lewis infuses his account of it with an irrepressible joie de vivre which is utterly delightful. It is an uplifting story of winning against the odds, by turns hysterically funny and then unbearably sad. Above all it has an immediacy which takes the reader right into the heart of the Occupation, you can smell the fear, feel the pain, suffer the loss, sense the victory as do the characters in this history and they are many and varied. You will meet the good Jersey folk like the brave and tragic Mrs Gould from St Ouens and the not so good Jersey folk in the shape of the collaborators and informers or the “Jerry bags” like the exotic Ginger Lou. Here too you will meet some of the most wretched victims of the war, the Russian Todt workers who were hidden and helped by the locals and of course the many sorts of Germans who made up the occupying force. It is a story of compelling interest.I had the good fortune to meet John Lewis and his wife in 1991 at his lovely Jersey home. He talked for hours that seemed like minutes of his life during the war years. He was just as I’d hoped he would be - endlessly kind, witty and understanding. I came away from that meeting feeling happy, elated and much wiser, as you will surely do after reading of the Doctor’s Occupation. John Nettles

    LewisBrothers and Friends is an honest, intimate, often deeply affecting portrait of Warren H. Lewis and his beloved brother, "Jack," C.S. Lewis. The two were inseparable and lived together much of their lives: Jack called Warren "my dearest and closest friend." These previously unpublished diaries by the elder Warren give us a lively picture of English life, literature, music and thought during one of the most creative periods of recent history.Here also is an insider's look at notable contemporaries such as "inklings" J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield.

    He was a trusted adviser of the Kennedys and an intimate of Lyndon Johnson, William Paley, and Katharine Graham. His numerous business accomplishments included the building or revitalizing of such corporate giants as Avis, Holiday Inns, Warner-Lambert, and Engelhard Minerals & Chemicals. One of the world's savviest individual investors, he amassed a personal fortune of well over $200 million, yet to his dying day never gave up the search for the ultimate buck. After getting his professional start at a small Paris bank, he quickly caught the attention of the eminent private banking firm Lazard Freres, whose prestigious ranks he joined in 1925. Within a year, Andre Benoit Mathieu Meyer was made partner. With the advent of World War II, Meyer was forced into exile by the Nazi occupation. Resettling in the United States, he took over Lazard's New York operation, building it into the most venturesome investment bank in America. Financier captures Meyer's financial wizardry, a phenomenal talent that was tempered only by the volatile tantrums, ruthlessness, and insatiable greed that went hand in hand with his genius. Unveiling the dueling sides of his complex personality, this absorbing account shows Meyer at his best - as a father figure for the likes of Felix Rohatyn, his most famous protege, and for Jacqueline Onassis in the years after the assassination - and presents him at his worst - as a tortured and possessive father and a cruel, often vindictive boss.

    His published memoir––all 365 pages of it––stopped at 1927, when the twenty-two-year-old writer and his first wife, Andrée, were about to settle in California. Now revised and expanded, An Autobiographical Novel includes reminiscences that cover another twenty years of literary life and two more marriages. Linda Hamalian, author of A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (W. W. Norton, 1991), sifted through more than 300 pages of raw tape transcriptions. Weighing fact against fictions (Rexroth loved a tall tale and relished gossip), Hamalian has prepared a valuable index that identifies obscure allusions and the real people who figured in Rexroth’s emotionally tumultuous life. “It adds up to a very good read,” she says. “I am willing to bet a nice chunk of money that readers will wish Rexroth had been able to go on and on loosening his talk-tapes.”

    These diaries chronicle the last 30 years of his life, from his wartime concert tours through his private and professional depression in the 1950s to his triumphant reemergence and knighthood in the 1960s and '70s. Compulsive reading ... what Coward has to say about other people is light-hearted, witty, often shrewd, totally without malice ... his final entertainment for everyone's pleasure are these diaries. - Sunday Times A constant delight. A goldmine of gossip with a cast of a thousand stars. - Guardian

    Conover's introduction, a timetable and album of photographs, Hugh Kenner wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "No, no, not Myrna Loy, Mina...born in 1892, in London; died in 1966 in Aspen, Colorado; a startling beauty all her long life; by profession designer of lampshades and agent of artists (Dali, de Chirico, Braque, Ernst, Gris, Magritte); ...author of mordant free verse published in magazines 1915-25, thereafter lost track of by virtually everybody. Her utter absence from all canonical lists is one of modern literary history's most perplexing data. Loy's is agile wit, hard, unslushy in its admiration for kindred discipline. A bird with no hint of feathers!""Mina Loy," wrote William Carlos Williams, "was endowed from birth with a first-rate intelligence and a sensibility which has plagued her all her life facing a shoddy world."

    . . . High adventure, absorbing science." --New Yorker

    Well known as a poet during her lifetime, the nun's bold confrontation with high church authority, followed shortly by her death during an epidemic while tending to her sister nuns, has made her one of the folk heroes of Latin America.

    This edition, now completely revised, reflects the valuable insight and perspective gained by the author since the time of the book’s initial publication. From the age of 15, Yasuo Kuwahara began a life of military service that included suffering through brutal basic training, participating in ferocious aerial combat against the Allies, and avoiding a suicide mission when an atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, near his hometown. From being handpicked for kamikaze service to finding the discipline to die for the emperor, this history presents a firsthand account of the fascinating life of a kamikaze fighter pilot.

    The first of two memoirs by Dora Saint, known as Miss Read

    At the same time, Paul and his wife, Linda, a fellow band member, were raising a family at home and on the road. This book is a personal record of Wing's beginnings after the break up of the world's most celebrated rock group, the Beatles, through to the 1980s.

    A perceptive account of Howe's intellectual growth. Index.

    Buckley's extended meditation on the pleasures of sailing and good company. Not surprisingly, as much thought seems to have gone into stocking the wine cellar as to charting out the route. Kon-Tiki, this is not, but nor is it meant to be. Instead, it is an essay on appreciation, and a chance for Buckley to share his spirited point of view and exercise his unique sense of humor.After a leisurely, aside-filled discussion of other trips, Buckley sets out with several close friends and a photographer to make his second trans-Atlantic crossing. The first provided the basis for his popular book, Airborne. When asked by People magazine why he chose to make the journey again, Buckley replies with characteristic drollness, "the wedding night is never enough." It is a passion for sailing that motivates Buckley and enlivens his pages.The book ranges fluidly from observation to speculation, from humorous character sketch to wry editorial commentary. It is peppered with anecdotes, including one in which Buckley, armed with a hacksaw, breaks into a boatyard to steal his own boat back from an unscrupulous repairman. In another, an aide to president Reagan calls to discuss a conflict brewing in Africa, and all Buckley can think about is the weather ahead of him and his crew. The real focus of Atlantic High, however, is the voyage and the crewmembers who share it. From the Mujeres Islands to Fiji to Bermuda, to Sao Miguel and Gibraltar and beyond, the reader is treated to Buckley's observations of the places he visits and the people he encounters. A work as hard to categorize as Buckley himself, Atlantic High offers a glimpse into the good life on the high seas.

    S. Merwin recalls in utterly unsentimental prose his youth, growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household in the small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The complex portrait that emerges of a family without language or history, transforms the story of their isolated lives into the development of a writer’s conscience and a warning about the fate of a middle class eager to obliterate origins."This book is superbly written, offering deep glimpses into the complexities and mysteries of family bonds, with just that distancing from people and events necessary for artistic control."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal

    Over 100 photos.

    

    It is a charming, nostalgic reminiscence of a lost world, a childhood in a Welsh countryside still in the 19th century, of a time when chantey-singing sailors fought the weather to deliver bricks, coal, even animals around the world, and of a young boy who wanted to experience it all.

    Reminiscence of the first twenty-one years of Wilfred Bion's life: eight years of childhood in India, ten years at public school in England, and three years of life in the army.