. .the World War II flying ace who shot down a Messerschmitt jet with a prop-driven P-51 Mustang . . .the hero who defined a certain quality that all hotshot fly-boys of the postwar era aimed to achieve: the right stuff.Now Chuck Yeager tells his whole incredible life story with the same "wide-open, full throttle" approach that has marked his astonishing career.  What it was really like enaging in do-or-die dogfights over Nazi Europe.  How after being shot over occupied France, Yeager somehow managed to escape.  The amazing behind-the-scenes story of smashing the sound barrier despite cracked ribs from a riding accident days before.The entire story is here, in Yeager's own words, and in wondeful insights from his wife and those friends and colleagues who have known him best.  It is the personal and public story of a man who settled for nothing less than excellence, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a true American hero.

    The granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Tzar Alexander II of Russia, at seventeen Marie left the glittering courts of Western Europe to marry the Crown Prince of Roumania. Drawing upon the young queen s diaries and letters, the author describes her struggle to gain an independent footing in the male- dominated court of Roumania, her early years as one of the most admired beauties of Europe, and the decisive period during World War I when she all but ran the Roumanian Government. With the sweep and panache of a great epic, this compelling story is historical biography at its best. This enthralling book is like a huge spicy plum pudding stuffed with juicy fruits Maureen Cleave, Evening Standard

    In time for the 2005 release of The Chronicles of Narnia movie, Sibley provides the full story behind the movie Shadowlands.

    This is the genuinely compelling story, and spiritual odyssey, of Ole and Hannah Nydahl, who in 1968 became the first Western students of the great Tibetan master, His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa. Their exciting travels on the worn path between the green lowlands of Europe to the peaks of the Himalayas, led them to experience the skillful teachings of numerous Tibetan lamas who helped transform their lives into "limitless clarity and joy." From their first contact with Tibetan Buddhism in Kathmandu in the form of a lama with extraordinary psychic powers, Ole and Hannah encountered the full spectrum of the Buddhist "view." Their aim in writing this book is "to form a bridge between two worlds, and especially to share with all who are looking for their true being ... an introduction to a time-proven way to Enlightenment." "One cannot really transmit anything, except what one has directly experienced, and the reason many of you will be able to identify with what happened to us is that, deep within, we are so very much alike."

    In doing so, he entered our hearts—my heart—because he made his struggle my struggle. His life became my life.”—Eric Bogosian“Virtuosic. A master writer, reporter, comic and playwright. Spalding Gray is a sit-down monologist with the soul of a stand-up comedian. A contemporary Gulliver, he travels the globe in search of experience and finds the ridiculous.”—The New York TimesIn 2004, we mourned the loss of one of America’s true theatrical innovators. Spalding Gray took his own life by jumping from the Staten Island ferry into the waters of New York Harbor, finally succumbing to the impossible notion that he could in fact swim to Cambodia. At a memorial gathering for family, friends and fans at Lincoln Center in New York, his widow expressed the need to honor Gray’s legacy as an artist and writer for his children, as well as for future generations of fans and readers. Originally published in 1985, Swimming to Cambodia is reissued here 20 years later in a new edition as a tribute to Gray’s singular artistry.Writer, actor and performer, Spalding Gray is the author of Sex and Death to the Age 14; Monster in a Box; It’s a Slippery Slope; Gray’s Anatomy and Morning, Noon and Night, among other works. His appearance in The Killing Fields was the inspiration for his Swimming to Cambodia, which was also filmed by Jonathan Demme.

    It was 1982, fourteen years after I had last set foot in Vietnam, and thirteen years after I returned to The World. I had a family and a career. I'd never written more than an occasional letter to the editor in my life. My twisted insides had spawned ulcers. The nightmares were more frequent. I needed to get Vietnam out into the open, but I couldn't talk about it. Not after all those years. Thus begins John Ketwig's powerful memoir of the Vietnam War. Now, over 15 years after its initial publication, Sourcebooks is proud to bring ...and a hard rain fell back into print in a newly updated edition, with a new introduction by the author and eight pages of never-before-published photographs. From the country roads of upstate New York to the jungles of Vietnam, and finally to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., ...and a hard rain fell is a gripping and visceral account of one young man's struggle to make sense of his place in a world gone mad.

    

    Written with characteristic warmth, vigor, and wit, this fascinating account brings to life the infectious enthusiasms, fervent battles, and bountiful friendships of a truly American original. "A warm, discursive, and salty document." - New Yorker

    The Blues, as they were called, were perpetually understrength and considered to be acceptable losses in hopeless situations—but their amazingly successful record proved otherwise.A firsthand account of mortal combat with the Ninth Cavalry, Flashing Saber is the remarkable story of the brave men who served in the First Air Cavalry Division's reconnaissance squadron. Included is an account of an air-ground raid that overran a regimental command post and killed more high-ranking enemy officers than any similar engagement of the war. The story begins when a teenager, an Eagle Scout and West Point Prep School student, goes to Vietnam in 1965. Motivated by patriotism and the desire to see combat firsthand, Brennan volunteers for front line duty and spends years as an artillery forward observer and infantryman. Promoted to sergeant and then to lieutenant, Brennan participates in hundreds of assault landings.An expansion and careful reworking of his previous work, Brennan's War, published in 1985, and in the vein of classic memoirs by Johnnie Clark and Frederick Downs, Flashing Saberis a harrowing firsthand account of life and death in war, one filled with breathtaking details about a renowned unit.

    Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelation.

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    Hemingway married four times, each time to a fascinating person: Hadley Richardson, who shared the Paris years and one son; Pauline Pfeiffer, the mother of two more sons, who created a haven in Key West; Martha Gellhorn, a writer and acclaimed journalist; and Mary Welsh, a Time correspondent. Drawing on letters and interviews with the living women, Bernice Kert sheds new light on the Hemingway heroines and their real-life prototypes.

    When, at the age of 38, Federico Garcia Lorca was executed by anti-republican rebels during the Spanish Civil War, he was already one of the world's most celebrated poets and playwrights. photos. (NIA)

    These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers.These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton.These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.

    It is now re-published with 50 new pages increasing in depth the story in the 1960s and 1970s, recording his time spent in the south of Italy.

    In the historic decade of the thirties, she was more - a pioneer, a shaper of the medium, and a motivator of the national conscience. Lange's direct, compelling studies of people forced from the land are both a faithful chronicle and a landmark of twentieth-century photography. In her later years, she brought this unique vision to rural communities as diverse as the Mormons of Utah, the countryfolk of Ireland, the fellaheen of Egypt. Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime is the most comprehensive collection of the artist's work ever to be published. It begins with portraits from her early years, when she was San Francisco's most fashionable studio photographer, and it concludes with images from her final years, when Lange traveled the globe, then, finally, turned her lens toward children and grandchildren, home, and the familiar objects and events of her daily life. In a penetrating critical biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles offers an incisive study of Lange's life and work. As one of the great contemporary social investigators, Coles explores in Lange's methods and accomplishments those qualities that enable the "artist-observer" to satisfy the objectivity expected of chroniclers and the subjective emotional involvement of the artist's personal vision. Accompanying the photographs are Lange's own reminiscences and observations, collected from her writings and from interviews made shortly before her death in 1965.

    Florence may have been a disappointment to her Granny, whose dream of rearing a Perfect Southern Lady would never be quite fulfilled. But after all, as Florence reminds us, no matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.

    Hanff recalls her serendipitous discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. She devoured Q’s book, and, wanting to read all the books he recommended, began to order them from a small store in London, at 84, Charing Cross Road. Thus began a correspondence that became an enormously popular book, play and television production, and that finally led to the trip to England – and a visit to Q’s study – that she recounts here. In this exuberant memoir, Hanff pays her debt to her mentor and shares her joyous adventures with her many fans.

    

    The talk is informal and far-ranging, and Betto's questions are often provocative (‘Does Cuba export revolution?’).”—Publishers WeeklyThe product of an intimate 23-hour dialogue between Fidel Castro and Brazilian liberation theologist Frei Betto, this was a Simon & Schuster bestseller in the 1980s. Here Castro speaks candidly about his views on religion and his education in elite Catholic colleges, offering an insight into the man behind the beard.Features a new translation and a unique selection of photos of Fidel as a boy.

    Also included are Spinoza's letters from the periods when these works were being written.The elaborate editorial apparatus--including prefaces, notes, glossary, and indexes--assists the reader in understanding one of the world's most fascinating, but also most difficult, philosophers. Of particular interest is the glossary-index, which provides extensive commentary on Spinoza's technical vocabulary.A milestone of scholarship more than forty-five years in the making, The Collected Works of Spinoza is an essential edition for anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza or the history of philosophy.

    Married and divorced five times, he had five sons, and yet was cheated of his dearest ambition-to found an oil dynasty. His angelic youngest son died at age twelve after years of illness. Of the remaining four sons, three proved to be hopeless businessmen and, one by one, dropped out of Getty Oil. Only one had the talent to take the helm of the family business, and he was groomed for the part. And then he killed himself.With his cherished hopes of a family dynasty crushed, John Paul built a magnificent museum as a monument for all time to his success. But money tainted even his philanthropy; the Getty Museum has become feared for its wealth and ability to pillage the art market. In the maneuvering that followed John Paul's death, Getty Oil was sold; Texaco acquired it for $9.9 billion, the biggest corporate takeover in history.Award-winning journalist and writer Russell Miller has broken the embargo of silence that has surrounded the Gettys to bring us the extraordinary and often disturbing story of a unique American family. From the pioneering days in the Oklahoma oil fields to the bitter struggles over Getty Oil, we follow the rise and fall of three generations-all apparently cursed with the Midas touch.

    Army. Down in My Heart is an account of the relationships among the men in the camps and their day-to-day activities - fighting forest fires, building trails and roads, restoring eroded lands - and their earnest pursuit of a social morality rooted in religious and secular pacifist ideals. In his new introduction to the book, Kim Stafford calls them a "generation of seekers" working full time "to envision a way to avoid the next war." First published in 1947, this "peace relic, " as William Stafford later called his first book, offers a rich glimpse into a little-known aspect of the war and a fascinating look at the formative years of a major American poet.

    One, of renowned heart surgeon Alfred Blalock, speaks for itself. The other, of highschool graduate Vivien Thomas, is testimony to the incredible genius and determination of the first black man to hold a professional position at one of America's premier medical institutions.Thomas's dreams of attending medical school were dashed when the Depression hit. After spending some time as a carpenter's apprentice, Thomas took what he expected to be a temporary job as a technician in Blalock's lab. The two men soon became partners and together invented the field of cardiac surgery.Partners of the Heart is Thomas's extraordinary autobiography. Trained in laboratory techniques by Alfred Blalock and Joseph W. Beard, Thomas remained Blalock's principal technician and laboratory chief for the rest of Blalock's distinguished career. Thomas very rapidly learned to perform surgery, to do chemical determinations, and to carry out physiologic studies. He became a phenomenal technician and was able to carry out complicated experimental cardiac operations totally unassisted and to devise new ones.In addition to telling Thomas's life story, Partners of the Heart traces the beginnings of modern cardiac surgery, crucial investigations into the nature of shock, and Blalock's methods of training surgeons.

    Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges, and triumphs.

    From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, which depicts a court life whose drama and pathos is of Shakespearean proportions. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this complete English translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply intelligent and articulate woman.JaHyun Kim Haboush's accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and of how the genre of autobiography fared in premodern times.

    Struggling to reconcile the desire to draw apart with God - to find her own spiritual "Walden" - with the demands to spend herself in the whirlwind of ministry to others, Jean set a major, year-long goal: "to simplify my life...to tame my schedule and to unclutter my environment."

    

    Written by Moe Howard's daughter, this detailed biography is bursting with photographs Curly traces the life of one wacky Stooge from birth to his final status as a cult hero.

    : chiefly ill., ports. ; 27 cm.Responsibility:\tphotos and text by Alfred Eisenstaedt ; introduction by Peter Adam ; [editor, Anne Hoy].

    It was there that an American priest, Father Stanley Rother, was murdered by a death squad in the parish where he served. In traveling to Santiago Nouwen hoped to learn more about this modern martyr about the faith that drew him there, and the love that held him in place, even when his life was threatened.

    The accident haunted the rest of her life as key men around her kept dying off : her 2d husband, her son and then Monty Clift. "She was like no one else we survivors ever knew," says Gore Vidal.

    He was not merely an entrepreneur with a shared vision of America as the Promised Land; he was a prophet with visions of his own and he built beyond himself."

    Driven from his native Hungary by political oppression, he was first recognized for photographing the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he was in China recording the Japanese invasion. During World War II he was in London, North Africa, and Italy, and then in France covering D-Day on Omaha Beach, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge. When the new nation of Israel was founded in 1948 he was there. In 1954 he was in Vietnam, taking photographs until the moment he was killed.Away from battle, Capa gather about him such famous people as Ernest Hemingway and his wife (the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn), Gary Cooper, Irwin Shaw, and Gene Kelly. Whelan shows Capa photographing the street life of Paris, crisscrossing America on assignment from Life, in Russia with John Steinbeck, in Italy with John Huston, on the Riviera with Picasso, and with Ingrid Bergman.

    A lyric and gripping record of Ackerman's relentless touch-and-go hours in pursuit of a private pilot's license and of her first solo and cross-country tours.

    Maud shares her humorous observations on family life, amateur dramatics, and social life. The images portray a Victorian woman living in semi-fine surroundings and what she finds to do with herself. The book includes stories about her and her family's life, including clippings and photos.

    The result is a picture which both supports and contradicts the charming vagabond persona depicted in Niven’s own bestselling memoirs.While millions throughout his life were enchanted by Niven’s happy-go-lucky charisma and world-class anecdotage, he was in many respects a private figure, haunted by a fear of failure, and a victim of several key tragedies in his personal life. Morley’s biography is a warm, appreciative but perceptive account which captures both sides of one of Hollywood’s most enduringly lovable figures.‘A compassionate account that goes past the blithe persona … yet, there is much humor—the actor’s and his biographer’s—in this notable book’ Publishers Weekly‘Head and shoulders above the average showbiz biography … He understands many of Niven’s deeper feelings’ John Mortimer, Sunday Times‘A well-told story … the darker side as well as the mask of a complex and perhaps desperate character. He was a life-enhancer off-screen as well as on’ The Times‘Shrewd and pleasing; shows how dark Niven’s moon could be’ Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

    He had, however, been conducting over his last two years a continuous series of private interviews with Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov. Their subject was Tchaikovsky, the composer who exercised perhaps the most profound lifelong influence on the great choreographer. And throughout these interviews, it was Balanchine's characteristic way to spring from his observations of Tchaikovsky and the many affinities he so deeply felt in the composer's art and life into a free flow of personal reflections and reminiscences.

    Beginning with Vita's childhood (one charming photograph shows Vita as a young girl dressed "as a basket of westiria"), the book leads the reader through the past of her beloved Knole, her marriage, travels to Constantinople and Persia, her first garden at Long Barn, and finally, to Sissinghurst Castle, where, with her husband, Harold Nicolson, Vita designed and created a garden of remarkable beauty. Color and black-and-white photographs throughout of Vita's gardens (there are also original sketches of garden plans), home interiors, and moments with family. The Daily Telegraph calls it "A gardening biography in which Vita's development as a character and a gardener are woven together and shown to achieve the fusion which, with the help of Harold Nicolson, produced Sissinghurst...'' The Times hails it as "A book hautingly illustrated by contemporary photographs, from which shines forth a deep understanding of and sympathy for her subject."

    The author's lucid and witty prose offers some unforgettable personal experiences and a host of cultural, political and professional insights as he reflects on the growing unease he came to feel in his role as psychiatrist in a society "destroying itself by violence masquerading as love."

    Demanding that black demonstrators and white demonstrators be able to walk together, the peace marchers were imprisoned, leading many in the group to fast and employ other nonviolent techniques of protest. Their presence and discipline had a lasting effect on the Albany Movement and other nonpacifist civil rights groups in the South.The remainder of the book relates Deming's final protest walk some twenty years later in 1983 with the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment, a group of women-only peace marchers scheduled to walk from Seneca, New York, the site of the first Women's Rights Declaration in 1848, to the missile base in Romulus, New York. This nonviolent march in honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminist heroines was interrupted by protestors. Deming and fifty-three other women were arrested and spent five days in a Waterloo, New York, jail. These events are told in "A New Spirit Moves Among Us," an essay written in letter form to a friend in defense of women-only actions, an interview with Deming conducted after her release from jail, and a statement of purpose issued from jail by the Waterloo Fifty-Four.As Grace Paley notes in her introduction, Prisons That Could Not Hold is "the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. . . . That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years."

    It sheds new light on his wartime romance with Agnes vonKurowsky, his first love (and a model for the character of Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms), as well as on the circumstances surrounding his wounding and convalescence. It closes with Hemingway on the brink of the literary career that would bring him worldwide fame. The five short stories--The Mercenaries, Crossroads, Portrait of an Idealist in Love, The Ash Heel's Tendon, and The Current--reveal that the Hemingway vision and style preceded the 1920s, his Paris years with Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. The book also contains many other newlyuncovered documents--including letters written by Ernest to his closest friend, Bill Horne, before and after the Kurowsky love affair--which provide a rich new perspective on Hemingway's emotional development and his beginnings as a writer. Jack Hemingway, Ernest's son by his first wife, HadleyRichardson, made his mother's complete correspondence available to Griffin and also contributed a foreword in which he writes, [Griffin] has shown me insights into my own father's character and behavior I would not have thought possible in view of the time lapse between Hemingway's death and theresearch he accomplished. This is the first installment of a projected three-volume life which promises to be the definitive Hemingway biography for this generation.

    The riveting story of how actress Tippi Hedren, in the process of making a feature film as a plea to save wildlife, came to share her home and land with some 100 lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and cougars.

    

    This book tells of the author's liberation from Aushwitz by soldiers of the Russian army, her encounters with Polish anti-Semites, her departure from Russia, five-week transatlantic voyage, and final arrival in America.

    Fifty full-color and 350 black-and-white photographs illustrate the Birth Project exhibit, conceived by Judy Chicago, based on nearly one hundred of her works, and needleworked by women across the country.

    Here they are designed to fit her royally, along with armor for Sir Walter Raleigh & text by the queen herself.