She has hit rock bottom and here, for the first time, Kerry shares how bad it's really been.But this incredible story of survival charts Kerry's rise out of the mire of addiction, depression and bankruptcy. She has brought her life and health back from the brink of total collapse and has become a happy single parent and working mother of four.

    He was Welsh to his fingertips, she an exotic mixture of English and Jewish. They divorced when he was five and Tony's relationship with his aloof glittering mother never recovered. His inventiveness was soon apparent, at Eton and then Cambridge, where as cox in 1950 he designed a new rudder for his (winning) Boat Race crew. The engagement of this motorbike-riding freelance photographer in 1960 to Princess Margaret was a bombshell. Friends privately predicted disaster, and so it proved. But meanwhile in the 1960s, mixing with actors, artists, and pop stars, they were the epitome of stylish and unstuffy arts-loving Royals. Along with John and Jackie Kennedy or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, they were one of the iconic glamorous couples of that era. Tony continued to work and both began to have affairs. They divorced in 1978, the first royal divorce since Henry VIII divorced Anne of Cleves in 1540. Snowdon married again but this marriage collapsed after the birth of a secret love-child in 1998 and the suicide in 1996 of his mistress of 20 years, Anne Hill. His low boredom threshold and waspish cruelty are balanced by his fabled charm and genuine concern for the disabled and underprivileged. One of the great British photographers, up there with Beaton, Bailey, and Parkinson, at 76 he now suffers from a recurrence of childhood polio and needs sticks or wheelchair to get around. But by any standards he has had an extraordinary life.Will throw new light upon many areas of his life—his difficult childhood, his relationship with Margaret, his many affairs, his cruelty, his creativity and achievements. His story here is based on wide range of sources: friends, courtiers, servants, girlfriends and ex-mistresses.

    Best known as one of the world's greatest painters, he sketched the foundations for inventions that would not come to fruition for centuries. Born a bastard in a hillside village in northern Italy, Leonardo became the protégé of princes, popes, and kings. He mastered so many branches of science that scholars still debate whether he was greater as an anatomist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, or naturalist. Nevertheless, he died unhappy, believing he had failed to work the miracles of which he had dreamed. Here, from New York Times bestselling author Anna Abraham, is his extraordinary story.

    Embraced by millions of American women of all ages, sizes, and shapes, the dress became a cult object and symbol of women’s liberation, tied inexorably to the image of youth, independence, and sex Diane herself projected.In this masterful biography, Gioia Diliberto brings Diane’s extraordinary life into focus, from her post-World-War-II childhood in Belgium, through her rise to the top of the fashion world during the decadent seventies and glamorous go-go eighties, to her humiliating failures both professional and personal, and her remarkable comeback in the nineties. Like Coco Chanel, Diane has always been her own best advertisement. Morphing from a frizzy brunette outsider in a sea of sleek blondes to a stunning pop cultural icon, she embodied the brand she created—“the DVF woman,” a model of self-sufficiency, sensuality, and confidence.Dilberto’s captivating, balanced portrait, based on scores of interviews with Diane’s family, friends, lovers, employees, and the designer herself, explores von Furstenberg’s relationships with her husbands and lovers, and illuminates fashion’s evolution from rare luxury to marketing monster and the development of a uniquely American style. Lively and insightful, the book also explores the larger world of the nation’s elite, where fashion, culture, society, politics, and Hollywood collide. Diane von Furstenberg is a modern fable of self-invention, fame, wealth, failure, and success that mirrors late-twentieth century America itself.

    

    For more than three decades since then, Ronnie, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts have formed the core of the greatest rock 'n' roll band in history. This book is Ronnie's autobiography, and like the band it can only be talked about in superlatives: it's simply one of the biggest, most outrageous, most extraordinary and most fun rock 'n' roll memoirs ever to be published.From early 1960s Britain, when acts like The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones crisscrossed the country's club scene in clapped-out vans, barely making ends meet but having the time of their lives, through to the global mega stadium concerts of the 21st century (in 2006 the Stones played live to more than two million people in Rio), Ronnie takes us on a journey through his life and through rock history. Filled with unforgettable characters and truly eye-popping stories, his autobiography reveals Ronnie the husband, father, grandfather, artist and rock star the way you have never seen any rock star before. Ronnie is an up-front and personal look at life as a Rolling Stone, from the inside, and at the Stones as the rest of the world has never seen them. After Ronnie , sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will never be the same again.

    

     This book is a comprehensive ‘backstage look’ at the making of this historic TV show – how the writers contrived that delicious misinterpretation of Gracie’s world; the real Gracie and George vs. the characters they play; and an early look at broadcast television - kinescopes, then the coaxial cable – and loaded with George’s comedic wisdom and dialog from the series! The comedy is timeless. The genius behind the show may have been George Burns, who played the "straight man," but the one who got the laughs was Gracie, whose "illogical logic" made the show catch on like wildfire.

    One was a celebrity at twenty-three, the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One was right-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist. Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heart of their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were essentially the same man. Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and comic novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. However different they may seem, these two towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked for the first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, which goes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core of their beliefs–a shared vision that was startlingly prescient about our own troubled times.Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903, into the same comfortable stratum of England’s class-obsessed society. But at first glance they seem to have lived opposite lives. Waugh married into the high aristocracy, writing hilarious novels that captured the amoral time between the wars. He converted to Catholicism after his wife’s infidelity and their divorce. Orwell married a moneyless student of Tolkien’s who followed him to Barcelona, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War. She saved his life there–twice–but her own fate was tragic.Waugh and Orwell would meet only once, as the latter lay dying of tuberculosis, yet as The Same Man brilliantly shows, in their life and work both writers rebelled against a modern world run by a privileged, sometimes brutal, few. Orwell and Waugh were almost alone among their peers in seeing what the future–our time–would bring, and they dedicated their lives to warning us against what was coming: a world of material wealth but few values, an existence without tradition or community or common purpose, where lives are measured in dollars, not sense. They explained why, despite prosperity, so many people feel that our society is headed in the wrong direction. David Lebedoff believes that we need both Orwell and Waugh now more than ever.Unique in its insights and filled with vivid scenes of these two fascinating men and their tumultuous times, The Same Man is an amazing story and an original work of literary biography.

    Dr. Swift is the first to concentrate on this unusual subject with such a wealth of sympathetic detail."-Sarah Bradford, author of "America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain's Queen," and "The Reluctant King: The Life and Reign of George VI, 1895--1952""A splendid addition to our understanding of an extraordinary Anglo-American partnership. Both intimate and expansive, Will Swift's vigorously researched book is timely, illuminating, and dramatic."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of "Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933" and "Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: The Defining Years, 1933-1938""The Anglo-American alliance has long been a bedrock of the global order, and Will Swift's The Roosevelts and the Royals details an important chapter in that fascinating story with warmth and verve."-Jon Meacham, author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship""Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship-a great story!"-James MacGregor Burns, author of "The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America" and "Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom""A gripping account of four very different lives that were woven together to change the world in wartime."-Hugo Vickers, author of "Cecil Beaton and Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece""Written in fluid and lucid prose, this book is not only eminently readable but also historically illuminating. It explores the contrasting personalities of the four main protagonists with skill and insight and it is both convincing and refreshingly candid."-Brian Roberts, author of "Randolph: A Study of Churchill's Son and Cecil Rhodes and the Princess""This book brings to life my grandmother and her royal friends. Reading it, I found myself reliving the times I shared with them. A wonderful story."-Nina Roosevelt Gibson, Ph.D., psychologist and granddaughter of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt

    From Publishers Weekly"Required reading for fans of Woolf, this superlative study traces the impact of early sexual abuse on her personality and her writing," reported PW , calling the work "a major step toward a reappraisal of Woolf's feminism." Photos.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

    He ate idiosyncratically. He became increasingly sexually promiscuous as he aged. He would stay up much of the night, sleep during much of the day, and at times he would postpone sleep, remaining awake for thirty-six hours or more, until tension and exhaustion overcame him.Yet many people who met Mao came away deeply impressed by his intellectual reach, originality, style of power-within-simplicity, kindness toward low-level staff members, and the aura of respect that surrounded him at the top of Chinese politics. It would seem difficult to reconcile these two disparate views of Mao. But in a fundamental sense there was no brick wall between Mao the person and Mao the leader. This biography attempts to provide a comprehensive account of this powerful and polarizing historical figure.

    They showed that “the modern”need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen,and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

    It is a fascinating study of determination and courage, pain and triumph over tragedy. From the beginning of her life in a crowded terrace in Tyneside to her days as a best-selling writer able to offer thousands to charity as a Dame of the British Empire, Catherine Cookson’s own story is as extraordinary as any of her novels. It is hard to think of any writer, living or dead, who has produced — and continued to produce — such overwhelmingly popular fiction as Catherine Cookson. Between June, 1950, and the end of 1993, ninety million copies of her novels, children’s books and personal recollections had been sold worldwide. An average of 5,800 every day — 241 books every single hour. Cookson novels have been adapted into award winning television films. Musicals and plays based on her books have sold out within days and ran for weeks. Goodwin explores the intriguing, and at times distressing, life of the celebrated writer, Catherine Cookson and the novels that were inspired by her early experiences in Tyneside. Praise for the author: ‘Even Catherine Cookson couldn't have written a novel with as much drama as her own life story ... the full saga has not been told until now.’ - TODAY ‘As riveting as any of her famous novels.’ - SUNDAY EXPRESS ‘Cliff Goodwin has written a book which is hard to put down and which leaves you in greater admiration of its intriguing and enigmatic subject ... amazing and compulsive as any of her bestsellers.’ - NEWCASTLE JOURNAL ‘A cracking story ... essential for her fans, and a good read for everyone.’ - MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS Cliff Goodwin was born in London in 1950. He was educated in Slough, Berkshire, and joined the town's weekly newspaper as a trainee journalist in 1968. Since then he has worked as a reporter, feature writer and sub-editor for various newspapers and magazines. His coverage of the 1988 Lockerbie air crash earned him a regional press award. A regular freelance writer — he has published features in more than 200 newspapers and magazines worldwide — Cliff Goodwin has also worked as a radio producer and in public relations. In 1993, after 25 years in journalism, he decided it was time to concentrate on full-time writing. Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.

    The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history. What happened next is one of the most bizarre, remarkable, and forgotten adventure stories of the 20th century. In Half-Safe, author James Nestor endeavors to uncover Ben Carlin's fate and finds a gripping story of love, danger, and extraordinary perseverance that spans three oceans and five continents. Half-Safe takes us from the eye of an Atlantic Ocean hurricane to the sweltering Sahara to the impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia—and into the mind of a man who could overcome everything but his own demons.