No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak. The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered. We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . . Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines. We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ. Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.

    On April 4th, 1968 a shot rang out in the Memphis sky bringing to a close the life of the last great American hero, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jnr.Although known to most for the delivery of his "I Have a Dream" address, which followed the peaceful march on Washington DC of 250,000 people, and as the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at age thirty-five), King in his eleven years as elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership to the then burgeoning civil rights movement, travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.Let the Trumpet Sound is the detailed examination of this life, written by Stephen B Oates, winner of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award.

    This memoir reflects on key moments of the author's early life, from childhood to his entering seminary, that reveal how God speaks to us in a variety of ways every moment of every day.

    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.

    Packed with personal letters, insightful anecdotes, and riveting stories of missionary life in China, this superb biography shines with God's constant faithfulness and power over evil.

    From his rural Welsh background to St Bartholomew’s Hospital (where at the age of 23 he was Chief Clinical Assistant to Sir Thomas Horder, the King’s Physician), then, suddenly at 27, to a struggling Calvinistic Methodist Church in Aberavon, South Wales, he appears successively as schoolboy, dairyman’s assistant, political enthusiast, debater, doctor, and finally Christian preacher.Some regarded his change of career as romantic, others as foolish. The one thing of which Dr Lloyd-Jones was sure was that his settlement amid the industrial depression of South Wales was no sacrifice: ‘I gave up nothing. I received everything. I count it the highest honour God can confer on any man to call to be herald of the gospel’This volume traces the unforgettable events of his first pastorate, his wider ministry in Wales (where, by 1933, the press reported, ‘he draws thousands to hear his message in all parts of the Principality’), his first visits to North America, and finally his settlement at Westminster Chapel, London,on the eve of World War II. While some saw him as ‘the modern Moody’, and others as ‘the last of the Calvanistic preachers’, Iain H. Murray’s work makes constant use of the hitherto unpublished material, and is able to present Dr Lloyd-Jones’ own view of his life and ministry.

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

    This biography by Brigitte Hamann reveals the truth of a complex and touching, curiously modern personality, her refusals to conform, escaping to a life of her own, filled with literature, ideas and the new political passions of the age.This edition is a translation into English from the original German by Ruth Hein.

    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.

    Donovan was a legendary figure. Donovan, originally published in 1982, penetrates the cloak of secrecy surrounding this remarkable man.During the dark days of World War II, “Wild Bill” Donovan, more than any other person, was responsible for what William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid, described as “the astonishing success with which the United States entered secret warfare and accomplished in less than four years what it took England many centuries to develop.”Drawing upon Donovan’s diaries, letters, and other papers; interviews with hundreds of the men and women who worked with him and spied for him; and declassified and unpublished documents, author Richard Dunlop, himself a former member of Donovan’s OSS, traces the incredible career of the man who almost single-handedly created America’s central intelligence service. The result is the definitive biography that Donovan himself had always expected Dunlop would write.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    Her range of sensitivity—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual— is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would “set color free in three dimensions.” She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself—and her readers—through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.

    Wetherell Johnson, from her overseas mission work to the founding and remarkable growth of Bible Study Fellowship.

    An in-depth biography of political philosopher Hannah Arendt traces her life from her childhood in Germany to her years in America, discussing the events and influences that shaped her work.

    Margaret's warm stories of life as the daughter of a Scandinavian pastor in Canada touches readers' hearts with timeless lessons of unwavering faith and family love.

    Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner's spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

    Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose.In a dazzling tapestry of voices—family, friends, lovers, rivals—the entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the ‘60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, music—the mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate within—like Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the ‘60s experience in America.

    Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

    Her magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established Isak Dinesen as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman's classic work explores Dinesen's life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been--as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale-- "a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.Winner of the National Book Award

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

    Hunter and Gordon B. Hinckley.

    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.

    battleship California depicts the devastation at Pearl Harbor from the hazardous vantage point of the open birdbath atop the mainmast.

    Anyone who's ever sent a jerk bait flying in the direction of one of them freshwater hawgs, read it and weep."

    Two were soon lynched. The third, James Cameron, with a noose around his neck and an angry mob calling for his blood, was spared. This is his story, told 64 years later with anger, insight, and reflection.

    A Black South African recalls his childhood and adolescence in the slums of Johannesburg and his ultimate escape to England.

    Anatomy of a Lynching carefully reconstructs the grim events surrounding the death of Claude Neal one of an estimated three thousand blacks to die at the hands of southern lynch mobs in the six decades between the 1880's and the outbreak of World War II.

    This book chronicles her extraordinary life in over 200 rare and previously unpublished photographs, with fascinating, information-packed extended captions.ties that made her a legendary star.

    in this companion volume to the author's popular spiritual autobiography, God Is My Delight, Phillip Keller relives his trek back to Africa and eventually around the world in the Lord's service.

    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

    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.

    In The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and numerous short stories, he explored such universal themes as stoicism in adversity, as well as our futile struggles against nature and mortality.This evocative, sympathetic biography illuminates the events that informed Hemingway's vigorous life: an accident-prone youth and early rivalry with his father; his experiences in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II; his stormy relationships with writers and women; his sudden fame, slow decline, and suicide. Based on previously unavailable information and exclusive interviews, Hemingway enriches anyone's understanding and appreciation of America's most important twentieth-century writer.

    It shows Lady Diana Spencer's swift apprenticeship for the role of Princess of Wales, flourishing from the shy unassuming daughter of an Earl, to become the first British Princess of Wales for seventy years.

    Her autobiography is a valuable source of information on early southern Utah and Mormon history.

    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.

    This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical ("I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly"), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.Drawing from Harvard's sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals--but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read--Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.

    At the age of 19, Schurz, a student at the University of Bonn, became involved in the Revolution of 1848. Participating in the revolutionary army, he managed to escape through a sewer during the siege of Rastatt, flee across the Rhine to France, and come back to rescue his professor, Gottfried Kinkel, from a jail near Berlin. This deed made him famous, and when he came to American in 1852, Schurz was nominated for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin on the Republican ticket. He quickly rose in the party and was the head of the Wisconsin delegation at the 1860 National Convention. He worked hard for the cause, and Lincoln rewarded him with the post of Minister to Spain. At the outbreak of war he returned to join the Union Army, became a Major General, and took part in several important battles. After the war, he moved to Missouri, was elected Senator from that State, and became a role model for his fellow German Americans. In 1871 he became one of the main figures in the Liberal Republican movement, and in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him Secretary of the Interior.After his retirement from the cabinet, Schurz became active in the politics of New York, as an advocate of municipal and civil service reform. He was a leading Mugwump who supported Grover Cleveland in 1884 and at the end of his life became a violent opponent of imperialism. He died in 1906.Carl Schurz, the man, his story, his ideals and his example, are particularly appropriate today because of the light his life sheds on the never-ending problems of immigration, assimilation, and the retention of ethnic identity. Carl Schurz's career furnishes a model example for all of these.

    In this groundbreaking book, she documents this phenomenon, profiling fifteen remarkable women ranging in age from twenty-one to seventy whose lives and professions center on the outdoors. Some are field scientists or hold technical jobs--a zoologist, a speleologist (cave explorer), a builder of log houses--others have forged unique, self-reliant lifestyles in wilderness homesteads. These women, LaBastille herself among them, constitute a new and important category of role models for young women.LaBastille also looks at the complex web of social and psychosexual factors that have alienated women from wilderness in the past and shows how feminism and the rise of environmental consciousness have allowed the "wilderness within women" to emerge. Updated with a new Afterword for this edition, Women and Wilderness offers exciting career ideas and inspiration for women everywhere.Finding the Way --The Background --Frontier Women-Case Studies --Frontier Women in Fiction --Changing Times --The Making of Professionals --The Wilderness Women --Elaine Rhode: Freelancer in the Aleutians --Jeanne Gurnee: Explorer Underground --Krissa Johnson: Architect with a Chainsaw --Margaret Owings: An Artist in Activism --Diana Cohen: A School without Walls --Eugenie Clark: Scientist in a Wetsuit --Peggy Eckel Duke: Monitoring the Olympics --Sheila Link: A Modern Diana --Carol Ruckdeschel: Island Naturalist --Margaret Stewart: The Frog Professor --Rebecca Lawton: Crusader for Whitewater --Margaret Murie: A Long Life in the Wilderness --Maggie Nichols: Outdoor Journalism in the Urban Jungle --Nicole Duplaix: The Peripatetic Zoologist --Joan Daniels: Homesteading on the Alaskan Frontier --Women and Wilderness

    When Bjo Trimble began the letter campaign that resulted in Star Trek's unprecedented renewal after the network had already decided to cancel the show, she never dreamed her action would lead to a position as "fan liaison" for both the television and motion picture versions.Answering mail, on the set, shepherding the stars to conventions, fielding questions from the media, traveling across the globe to represent Star Trek, her adventures and misadventures are side-splitting and heart-tugging by turns.Beginning with her first contact with the producer at a science fiction convention shortly before the program's premiere, and ending with the success of Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn and the plans for the third picture, she tells the whole hilarious story of her fifteen-year voyage, boldly going where no fan had gone before.

    With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill.'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James