In this handy collection of Ambeth Ocampo’s “Looking Back” column pieces, the popular historian digs deep and looks back carefully at events, places and important people who make up the country’s history.

    Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated.Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers.Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

    By illuminating such subjects as poetic voice, metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself, Bloom presents an invaluable learning tool as a key to artistic expression.

    Travelling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin was the first white man to depict Plains Indians in their native territory. The author spent eight years traveling among the Indians of the Northwest and the prairies, noting their customs and recording his observations with pen and brush. Catlin published his observation in a multi-volume set of books on the Indian tribes he witnessed. In "My Life Among the Indians" the parts of Catlin's volumes on the North American Indians which will be of most interest to the public have been condensed and brought together in chronological order. It is a splendid book to read and to own, being made up from two large volumes of letters written by George Catlin, the well-known painter of Indian subjects. There are sixteen illustrations from the artist's original drawings. Mr. Catlin traveled extensively in the Indian country, making a fine collection of Indian specimens which he afterwards exhibited in this country and in foreign lands. Many of these specimens, together with his paintings, which were so true to life among the Indians, are still preserved in Washington. It was Catlin who, in 1832, made the suggestion that the government should set aside a great National Park in the Yellowstone region. "Mr. Catlin's scheme, as it then took shape in his mind, and was carried out without deviation, was the formation of an Indian gallery, for which he would use his skill as a painter in securing portraits among the different tribes he would personally visit; in reproducing pictorially their customs, hunt games, and manner of living; in collecting their robes, headdresses, pipes, weapons, musical instruments, and articles of daily life; and in studying their social life, government, and religious views, that he might arrive at their own view of their relation to the world in which they lived. This world he also wished to investigate geographically and topographically. In brief, he wished to see the Indian in his native state, and, if possible, to discover his past. His future he knew. The Indian would disappear before advancing civilization. "Mr. Catlin's personal equipment for his task was a lithe, alert frame, about five feet eight inches tall, made sturdy and enduring by the outdoor life of his boyhood, a knowledge of woodcraft, a trained eye with the rifle, fine horsemanship, simple habits, a mechanical, even an inventive mind, and great steadfastness of purpose." CONTENTS Sketch Of Catlin's Life I. The Missouri River In The Thirties II. A Studio Among The Guns III. Indian Aristocrats: The Crows And Blackfeet IV. Painting An Indian Dandy V. Canoeing With Bogard And Batiste VI. Mandans: The People Of The Pheasants VII. Social Life Among The Mandans VIII. The Artist Becomes A Medicine-man IX. A Mandan Feast X. The Mandan Women XI. Mandan Dances And Games XII. O-kee-pa: A Religious Ceremony XIII. Dances Of The O-kee-pa XIV. The Making Of Braves XV. Mandan Legend Of The Deluge XVI. Corn Dance Of The Minatarees XVII. The Attack On The Canoe XVIII. The Death Of Little Bear: A Sioux Tragedy XIX. The Dances And Music Of The Sioux XX. A Dog Feast XXI. The Buffalo Chase XXII. A Prairie Fire XXIII. Songs And Dances Of The Iowas XXIV. Painting Black Hawk And His Warriors XXV. With The Army At Fort Gibson XXVI. Lassoing Wild Horses XXVII. Visiting The Camanches XXVIII. The Stolen Boy XXIX.

    Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu’s essays take on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde, comic books, and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is an extraordinary new piece of cultural rediscovery, original to this book. It tells the untold story of one of the most important—and, ultimately, one of the most tragic—figures in American popular music, Billy Eckstine. Through exhaustive new research, Hajdu shows how this great, forgotten singer, once more popular than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, transformed American music by combining sex appeal, sophistication, and black machismo—in the era of segregation. The cost, for Eckstine, was his career—and nearly his life.Other essays in this expansive book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Beyoncé, Bobby Darin, Kanye West, Marjane Satrapi, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.

    This edition includes thirty-nine photographs, many of them originally presented as slides with the speech, and a rich interpretive essay by the translator.

    In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises to the challenge of that improbable description.My 1980s and Other Essays opens with a series of manifestos—or, perhaps more appropriately, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal. It then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). And then there is the personal—the voice, the style, the flair—that is unquestionably Koestenbaum. It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience. Koestenbaum is perched on the cusp of being a true public intellectual—his venues are more mainstream than academic, his style is eye-catching, his prose unfailingly witty and passionate, his interests profoundly wide-ranging and popular. My 1980s should be the book that pushes Koestenbaum off that cusp and truly into the public eye.

    . . pitch-perfect prose. . . . In language of terrible beauty, she takes India's everyday tragedies and reminds us to be outraged all over again."written in response to new developments in India that have seen the government launch a full scale war, "Operation Green Hunt," against the tribal community of Naxals defending their land in central India), and a previously unpublished essay also dealing with the government's response to the tribals' demands for greater land rights. Arundhati Roy's writings on the Naxals and her public support for their cause have led to a government investigation and threats of imprisonment, engendering worldwide petitions and outcry in her defense.

    Arguing that "the Great Plains environment. . .constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders," Webb singles out the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as evidence of the new phase of civilization required for settlement of that arid, treeless region. Webb draws on history, anthropology, geography, demographics, climatology, and economics to substantiate his thesis that the 98th meridian constituted an institutional fault—comparable to a geological fault—at which "practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered."

    A child prodigy as a pianist and a virtuoso conductor of symphonics and operas, Barenhoim has known and worked with many of the most distinguished and exciting musicians of the 20th century, including Rubinstein, Furtwangler, Zubin Meta, Pierre Boulez, Fisher-Diskau, Pablo Casals, and not least his wife, Jacqueline du Pre. Recent years have included his work at the annual Wagner festival Bayreuth; in Berlin at the rebirth of the State Opera House; taking over from George Solti's 22-year regin in Chicago; his summer festival in Weimar, Germany, where young Arabs and Israelis can play music together; and his worldwide travels. Barenboim has revised and updated his memoir, giving us trenchant thoughts on Israel today, the problems facing young musicians, and the changing world of music at the beginning of the 21st century.-One of the world's greatest musicians, Barenboim has a dedicated following who will be interested in reading about his life in his own words.-Barenboim was married to celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pre, the subject of the controversial film Hilary and Jackie.-His championship of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians is highly controversial, as is his insistence on playing Wagner in Israel.

    These two set forth from the lodges of the Blackfeet, in company with an older Indian who acts as their guide, philosopher, and friend, on a far quest to the salt water to find the medicine-animal that is called "fish-dog" because it lives only in the water, swimming like a fish, yet has the face of a dog and barks like a dog. One of the boys, being of white parentage, knew from books in the little library at home that this strange animal, which we recognize at once as some sort of a seal, frequented the waters of the Pacific Ocean and adjacent rivers. This boy was, in fact, J. W. Schultz, whose first book, "My Life as an Indian," was published some years ago. As a boy and young man he lived with the Indians on the upper Missouri in the days before the white man had penetrated the far West, and his writings about the Indians are based upon an intimate knowledge of their native life.

    Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    This book is the record of her experiences. It’s a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of her life—tracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert, canoeing in a snow squall, wading among migrating salmon in the dark—but it is also a profound meditation on the healing power of nature.

    Perelman's companion is cartoonist Al Hirschfield, whose drawings capture the very essence of Perelmania.