Best of
Biography

1941

Leif the Lucky


Ingri d'Aulaire - 1941
    Book by Daulaire, Ingri, D'Aulaire, Edgar Parin

Catherine of Aragon


Garrett Mattingly - 1941
    England loved her; Henry loved, respected, and finally feared her. Wolsey hated her. Twice she saved England, once from invasion, once from Civil War. Here is one of those rare books, brilliantly readable and buttressed by scholarship and research, which make you see history through new eyes.

The Song of Bernadette


Franz Werfel - 1941
    How the book came to be written is itself an inspirational and even miraculous story. In 1940, famed Austrian author Franz Werfel and his wife were on a desperate flight from the Nazi invaders, whom Franz had publicly denounced. Repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to cross the French border, they found temporary refuge in Lourdes, home of the famous shrine where Bernadette received visions of the Virgin Mary and where millions come in faith to seek a miracle. Werfel became fascinated with Bernadette's story and began to visit the sacred grotto every day, swearing that, should he and his wife be granted escape from the Nazis, he would write the story of Bernadette for all the world. Franz's prayers were answered, and in America he wrote his masterpiece, The Song of Bernadette, a beautiful fusion of faith and craft.

The Selected Letters


T.E. Lawrence - 1941
    His remarkable epistles to contemporaries such as Lady Astor, Noel Coward, Robert Graves, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw disclose both the inner man and the political and military visionary often obscured behind the mystery and myth of "Lawrence of Arabia.” Among the letters is a wealth of intriguing correspondence that divulges the true nature of Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt, his anxieties about his illegitimacy, and his secret feelings on women and sexuality. In their entirety, these letters describe a remarkable but tragic life and provide ample proof of a gifted literary mind.

Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee


J. Steven Wilkins - 1941
    Robert E. Lee is preeminent among them."" He was offered the command of both the Union and Confederate forces because the men of his day recognized that Lee was a man of impeccable character and unimpeachable courage.""

Clarence Darrow for the Defense


Irving Stone - 1941
    Book by Stone, Irving

Grey Eminence


Aldous Huxley - 1941
    LCCC591213s/t: A Biographical Account of Religion & Politics in Cardinal Richelieu's FranceAldous HuxleyOn the Road to RomeChildhood & YouthThe Religious BackgroundThe EvangelistThe Approach to PoliticsThe Two CollaboratorsLa RochelleThe Diet of RatisbonNothing Fails Like SuccessPolitics & ReligionThe Final SceneAppendixIndexMeridian Books

No Life for a Lady


Agnes Morley Cleaveland - 1941
    In those days cowboys didn't know they were picturesque, horse rustlers were to be handled as seemed best on the occasion, and young ladies thought nothing of punching cows and hunting grizzlies in between school terms.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography


Arthur Hobson Quinn - 1941
    "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies."

Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger


Dan Matovina - 1941
    Revised edition with CD of the story of Bad Finger the band.

Not Without Peril


Marguerite Allis - 1941
    

Hernán Cortés: Conqueror of México


Salvador de Madariaga - 1941
    

The Life of Moses


F.B. Meyer - 1941
    Meyer's devotional studies on biblical characters reflect a rare depth of spiritual experience. These great figures were not so different from ourselves--sometimes weak, indifferent, willful. Yet they had their moments of faith, humility, and courage, and God was able to use these for His greater purposes. God's faithfulness, which not only accepts but transforms such inconsistency, calls us to more effective Christian living.

Doctor Wood, modern wizard of the laboratory: The story of an American small boy who became the most daring and original experimental physicist of our day--but never grew up


William B. Seabrook - 1941
    

Benjamin Franklin


Enid LaMonte Meadowcroft - 1941
    where he has no friends. Yet he is happy.H e is free at last! For the first time in all his seventeen years, he, Benjamin Franklin, is his own master! There is so much he wants to do—so much he wants to know—and his whole life lies ahead of him.Here is the story of that stirring life. It is the story of one of the most remarkable Americans who ever lived.

Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son


William Alexander Percy - 1941
    Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life -- although his life was exciting and varied -- but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy -- Will's nephew and adopted son -- recalls the strong character and easy grace of the most extraordinary man I have ever known.

The Letters of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia


David Garnett - 1941
    

Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War


Frederick Stansbury Haydon - 1941
    Stansbury Haydon's well-researched book remains the definitive work on the creation of the United States Balloon Corps during the Civil War. Haydon explores his topic down to the last detail, from the amount of fabric used to manufacture every balloon that saw federal service, to the formula for varnish used to seal the envelopes. He explains the technical operation of mobile gas generators that T. S. C. Lowe designed to inflate balloons in the field and provides the precise cost of each rubber hose used in their construction. Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War raises large and important questions about technological change within a military bureaucracy. The book begins with an introduction to the history of military ballooning since the wars of the French Revolution, with special attention to discussions of military aeronautics in the United States since the time of the Seminole Wars. Haydon also demonstrates the complicated maneuvering among American balloonists who sought to aid the army before the Battle of Bull Run and shows how the attitudes of various officers toward the balloons changed during the ensuing months of 1861-62.First published in 1941 as Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies, this volume received compliments in the Times Literary Supplement for its exploration of "the attitude of soldiers toward innovations." This edition includes a new foreword by Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the Aeronautics Division at the National Air and Space Museum.

Byron in Italy


Peter Quennell - 1941
    

Tomorrow Will Come


E.M. Almedingen - 1941
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780


Irving Brant - 1941
    Irving Brant was moved to undertake it as a result of his studies for Storm Over the Constitution. After three years of wide and intensive research, the results are now seen in the first volume of a projected three-volume work.Madison is carried in this volume from his birth in 1751 to his entrance into the federal Congress in 1780. These were his formative years, and also the formative years of the nation. They were his years of youth and zeal in a period when young men were shaping American destiny. So they possess a peculiar interest and importance.After tracing Madison's ancestry with little sympathy for those who try to build American "peerages," Mr. Brant describes his boyhood on the Montpelier estate in the Virginia Piedmont. A tie to the soil, a sense of responsibility for the family slaves, a fear of Indian uprisings, were bred in him during these plantation days. With all this was the frontier touch that intensified his revolutionary spirit and gave him a vision of a growing nation.In this book Madison's education comes to light and to life. That profound Scotch scholar, Donald Robertson, takes his rightful place in Madison's schooling. Princeton, which Madison chose over William and Mary because of its opposition to a state church, is here revealed as a source from which came patriotic ardor, devotion to religious freedom which Madison was to establish as a fundamental tenet of the new republic, and his deep grounding in public law. Here under President Witherspoon he drove relentlessly forward in scholarship; and in the recently organized American Whig Society, vied with Philip Freneau in writing satires, pointed by pornographic wit, against members of the rival Cliosophic Society. Earlier biographers' ignorance or suppression of these off-color verses helps to account for the false picture of Madison as one who "never said or did an indiscreet thing."In a postgraduate half-year at Princeton and three years at home studying political economy and divinity and tutoring younger brothers and sisters, Madison was afflicted by a mysterious illness. By a process of deduction as ingenious and conclusive as Sherlock Holmes's, Mr. Brant for the first time diagnoses that sickness.The beginnings of Revolutionary activity were showing themselves in Virginia. There were calls for a general congress. Madison, in sympathy with the radical group, favored an embargo against England and strong measures to enforce it. With a great majority of his fellow countrymen in a period when Congress was "the idol of America," he thought in terms of American unity and placed the sovereignty of a united continent above that of individual states.Mr. Brant does a thorough job of demolishing Van Tyne and other notable historians who have contended that the idea of Continental sovereignty arose only with the Constitutional Convention. This emerges as the central theme of his first volume, not as an opinion but documented with overwhelming proof in the words and works of Madison and his associates.Following his activities as a country committeeman enforcing the Continental Association, Madison was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776. Still young, shy, modest but of firm opinions cogently expressed in private conversations, he watched the launching of the independence movement and took active part in drawing a Declaration of Rights. From him came the distinctive provisions of the article on religious freedom, later to be embodied in the Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution. Here he came to know Patrick Henry and George Mason, who bulked large in his career; and in the first Virginia legislature he was to make friends with Thomas Jefferson, the great abiding influence, with whom he worked for laws that would broaden religious liberty and break the grip of aristocracy.Defeated for the legislature in 1777 because he would not furnish whisky to the voters, he was chosen only a few months later a member of the Council of State, the cumbrous eight-headed executive designed to curb the Governor (Patrick Henry). To it was entrusted the critical task of carrying on the war, and Madison found work made to his hand⁠—providing food for the army, coping with depreciation of the currency, aiding Henry with the conquest of the Mississippi Valley.In December 1779 Madison, not yet thirty, was elected to Congress. The book leaves him departing for the national scene, where he was to become so great an architect of its institutions and its fortunes, It leaves the reader with an understanding of that scene and a sure foreknowledge of Madison's place in it.Everywhere the author shows complete grasp of subject and background. Letters, documents, newspapers, books⁠—all primary sources⁠—have been directly drawn on. Mr. Brant with gusto goes into the controversial questions, reaching logical conclusions, clarifying contrary statements, destroying, by new evidence and reasoning, generally accepted views. Entirely new to this book are additional letters from Madison to Bradford throwing vivid lights on the early Revolution, his letter about Patrick Henry's gunpowder expedition, his desire to tar and feather Tory preachers, the relation of his religious beliefs to the doctrine of economic determinism, the intricate truth about the drafting of the Virginia Bill of Rights, many another point of interest and dispute, and, above all, complete refutation of the effort to use Madison as a witness against the existence of a national spirit.This is a book of excellent writing, of sustained interest, the product of a mind alert, acute, exceedingly alive. It is enlivened by many humorous comments, some of which call attention to parallels in events today or to radically different attitudes now.

Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Philosophy of Nonviolence


Greg Moses - 1941
    This groundbreaking book situates King as one of the most important social and political philosophers of our time, arguing that King's systematic logic of nonviolence is at the same time radically new and deeply rooted in African American intellectual history. Presenting a comprehensive genealogy of King's thought, Moses traces the influence of key African American thinkers and shows how King's concepts of equality, structure, direct action, love, and justice can be seen as strands of a coherent philosophical whole.