Best of
Biography-Memoir

1967

Tortured for Christ


Richard Wurmbrand - 1967
    This history of the Underground Church reflects the continuing struggle in many parts of the world today.

Augustine of Hippo: A Biography


Peter R.L. Brown - 1967
    The remarkable discovery recently of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine has thrown fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.

Childhood


Tove Ditlevsen - 1967
    In her working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her - and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.Childhood, the first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.

Down These Mean Streets


Piri Thomas - 1967
    Dark-skinned morenito had family who ignored African blood. Consolation from drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery end when Piri 22 goes to Sing Sing prison for shooting a cop. His journey continues to self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence. 30-year anniversary edition has Intro by author.

My Horses, My Teachers


Alois Podhajsky - 1967
    Timeless, inspiring, and full of valuable advice. A book every rider should read.

The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton


Fawn M. Brodie - 1967
    . . the Devil drives!"So Richard Francis Burton, preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863, wrote to Monckton Milnes from the African kingdom of Dahomey. His answer, "the Devil drives," applies not only to his geographical discoveries but also to the whole of his turbulent life.Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika.Burton's passion was not only for geographical discovery but also for the hidden in man. His enormous erudition on the sexual customs of the East and Africa, long confined by the pruderies of his time, finally found expression in the notes and commentary to his celebrated translation of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights.For this major biography of one of the most baffling heroes of any era, Fawn M. Brodie has drawn on original sources and a newly discovered collection of letters and papers.

The World of Rosamunde Pilcher


Rosamunde Pilcher - 1967
    125,000 first printing.

Tough Trip Through Paradise, 1878-1879


Andrew García - 1967
    Ben Stein acquired the manuscript and edited it to tell Garcia's story of the 1877 war between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce people, the end of the buffalo herds and other historic events in western life.

North Toward Home


Willie Morris - 1967
    In North Toward Home, Morris vividly recalls the South of his childhood with all of its cruelty, grace, and foibles intact.  He chronicles desegregation and the rise of Lyndon Johnson in Texas in the 50s and 60s, and New York in the 1960s, where he became the controversial editor of Harper's magazine.  North Toward Home is the perceptive story of the education of an observant and intelligent young man, and a gifted writer's keen observations of a country in transition. It is, as Walker Percy wrote, "a touching, deeply felt and memorable account of one man's pilgrimage."

The Unlikeliest Hero: The Story of Desmond T. Doss


Booton Herndon - 1967
    

Jennie: The Life of the American Beauty Who Became the Toast—and Scandal—of Two Continents, Ruled an Age and Raised a Son—Winston Churchill—Who Shaped History


Ralph G. Martin - 1967
    She was the most captivating and desired woman of her age. Originally from Brooklyn, Jennie became the reigning queen of British society. Beautiful and defiant, she lived with an honesty that made her the talk of two continents.Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Winston Churchill, writes that Jennie is, "a master work" that "pulses with energy as the author leads us from her cradle to relatively early grave, at the age of sixty-seven, of a woman who finally emerges—under his guiding hand—from the shadow of being a great man's mother, to being a woman in her own right."

Pimp: The Story of My Life


Iceberg Slim - 1967
    It is the smells, the sounds, the fears and the petty triumphs in the world of the street pimp.

The Siege: A Family's Journey Into the World of an Autistic Child


Clara Claiborne Park - 1967
    This classic work tells the tale of how a devoted mother accomplished miracles in fostering the intellectual, social and emotional development of her autistic daughter.

A Life On Film


Mary Astor - 1967
    Four husbands, two children and a career that went from 1922 to 1964. With stories about filming with Bogie and Gable, and a chat with Garbo at a party -- all crisp, amusing and written with lively intelligence.

The World of Van Gogh: 1853-1890


Robert Wallace - 1967
    He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life and died, largely unknown, at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. Today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art.

My Friends The Wild Chimpanzees


Jane Goodall - 1967
    Scientific study of chimpanzees in the wild in 1960.

Dostoevsky: His Life and Work


Konstantin Mochulsky - 1967
    Konstantin Mochulsky's critical biography is, in the words of George Gibian, the "best single work in any language about Dostoevsky's work as a whole." Joseph Frank has called it one of the "indispensable studies by Russian critics." An established classic, it is here available for the first time in paperback in English translation.

Ibsen


Michael Meyer - 1967
    Creating new attitudes to theatre, he is credited with being one of the first to write about ordinary people in prose, abandoning traditional theatrical effects in favour of a new style of performance. This is a biography of the founding genius of modern European theatre.

Collected Letters Ed Owen & Bell


Harold Owen - 1967
    

The Dogs of the Sinai


Franco Fortini - 1967
    It is also the book in which Fortini sought to clarify for himself his conflicted identity as an Italian Jew.An uncomfortably timely book, The Dogs of the Sinai combines polemic and autobiography with narrative and criticism in a terse and finely wrought reflection on politics, identity, and truthfulness in the period after the Six Day War of 1967. As topical today as it was forty-five years ago, this meditation against power is published alongside Fortini/Cani, a film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, drawn from Fortini’s essay. The film includes moving scenes of the author reading excerpts from his book against quiet landscapes. The Dogs of the Sinai is a powerful text from one of the most important intellectuals of the Italian New Left.