Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”     In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth‑century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

    But in just two years' time, Stoops achieved the seemingly impossible: winning a national championship and returning the struggling Sooners to their powerhouse status, churning out NFL talent, Heisman Trophy winners and conference championships, bowl wins and national title runs on a regular basis.During his 18 seasons at OU, his record was a remarkable 190-48. At only age 56, at the peak of his career, he stunned the college football world by walking away.For the first time, Bob opens up about his career alongside the evolution of the game itself. From his unlikely emergence as a star player at the University of Iowa, to his coaching apprenticeships under giants like Hayden Fry, Bill Snyder, and Steve Spurrier, Stoops recounts how the game he fell in love with as a boy has evolved into a billion-dollar business often compromised by recruiting wars, aggressive agents, overzealous boosters and alumni, and the emergence of the CEO head coach rather than mentor and teacher. Bob holds nothing back while explaining why it was time to step away from the game--and players--he still loves.Told with a rare combination of sincerity, vulnerability, and pure heart, No Excuses is both an engaging and eye-opening football memoir and an unprecedented portrait of a coach of one of the greatest legacy programs in the history of the college game.

    

    One of punk rock's foundational documents, the archetype for indie obsession and all but disowned by its author, The Modern Lovers was an album doomed by its own coolness from day one. Powered by the two-chord wonder “Roadrunner” and its proclamation that “I'm in love with rock 'n' roll,”The Modern Lovers is the essential document of American alienation, an escape route from the cultural wasteland of postwar suburbia. The Modern Lovers is the bridge connecting the Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols; they were peers of the New York Dolls and friends with Gram Parsons and they would splinter into Talking Heads, The Cars, and The Real Kids.But The Modern Lovers was never meant to be an album. A collection of demos, recorded in fits and starts as Jonathan Richman and his band negotiate modernity and the music industry. It is a collection of songs about a city and a society in flux, grappling with ancient corruptions and bright-eyed idealism. Richman observes a city all but abandoned by adults, ravaged by white flight and urban renewal, veering towards anarchy as old world social moors collide with new attitudes. It is a city stands in stark contrast to the the ranchstyle bedroom community where he was raised. All of these conflicts are churned through Richman's intellectual acuity and emotional unrest to create one of the 20th century's most enduring documents of post-adolescent malaise.

    At least that’s how it works when you’re dealing with the legendary mind of Carl Reiner. In his 2013 memoir, “I Remember Me,” Carl treated us to ninety years of professional and personal anecdotes, ranging from witty, weird and heartwarming to insightful, informative, and always funny – usually a combination of at least two, sometimes three or four, of the aforementioned. Carl had taken us on a nostalgic trip through every corner, every nook and cranny, of his life. Or so we thought. But over the next two years, new “old memories” kept coming… and coming… and coming… until, before too long, another book was born. In addition to the above adjectives, “I Just Remembered” adds a whole new batch: the mysterious saga of the gold money clip and the rubber bands; the beautiful and bizarre Joyce Kuntz; the shocking story of Jack Parr and Fidel Castro; never before heard revelations about William Shakespeare; whimsical journeys down the information superhighway via Twitter, Google and YouTube; and for good measure, truly useful health tips for a long and happy life. “I Just Remembered” is the perfect companion to “I Remember Me,” and it will have you asking, over and over, “How could he have forgotten that?!” He didn’t. He just remembered.

    Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue's masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived--despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry--to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.Woven throughout the book are also André's own personal struggles that have impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he has turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Férstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and ongoing faith, which have guided him since childhood.

    The book is written by JD (James David by author's full name) Vance and in it the author tries to describe the overall life and struggles of people in post-industrial time in the United States. This book deals with the problems of white working-class and the book is not just some book where the author tries to describe lives of ordinary white people. The book is actually a memento and a message to the readers; in it Vance describes his life and his starts, especially growing up while being poor in Ohio. We can find out about this when we find out that Vance's family is of Scottish-Irish descent and that his ancestors have longer history of poverty and hard work that they need to endure in order to survive the hard times that were at hand. We also find out that since the 18th century many Scottish-Irish people were working as plantation workers, as miners and/or as millworkers. Because these people worked only the hardest jobs that hardly anyone else would take many people belittled them. Words like 'white trash, redneck' and/or 'hillbilly' were unfortunately a common everyday word for those people. Hillbilly Elegy is a fascinating work, not because it was written based on a true story but because it was written from a man who lived 'through' his story. The fact that the entire book contains a message is, of course, welcoming plus and something we want from literature of this genre. Here Is A Preview Of What You Will Get: In Hillbilly Elegy, you will get a summarized version of the book.In Hillbilly Elegy, you will find the book analyzed to further strengthen your knowledge.In Hillbilly Elegy, you will get some fun multiple choice quizzes, along with answers to help you learn about the book.Get a copy, and learn everything about Hillbilly Elegy.

    It begins in October 1900, as a teenage Pablo Picasso, eager for fame and fortune, first makes his way up the hillside of Paris’s famous windmill-topped district. Over the next decade, among the studios, salons, cafés, dance halls, and galleries of Montmartre, the young Spaniard joins the likes of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, and many more, in revolutionizing artistic expression.Sue Roe has blended exceptional scholarship with graceful prose to write this remarkable group portrait of the men and women who profoundly changed the arts of painting, sculpture, dance, music, literature, and fashion. She describes the origins of movements like Fauvism, Cubism, andFuturism, and reconstructs the stories behind immortal paintings by Picasso and Matisse. Relating the colorful lives and complicated relationships of this dramatic bohemian scene, Roe illuminates the excitement of the moment when these bold experiments in artistic representation and performance began to take shape.A thrilling account, In Montmartre captures an extraordinary group on the cusp of fame and immortality. Through their stories, Roe brings to life one of the key moments in the history of art. Praise for In Montmartre "Lively and engaging….[Readers] will find a fresh sense of how all these people—the geniuses and the hangers-on, the wealthy collectors and the unworldly painters—related to each other…..In [Roe’s] entertaining, ingeniously structured account Roe brings Montmatre’s hedyday back to life." —Sunday Times (London) "With evocative imagery Roe sketches out the intensely visual spectacle on which Montmatre’s artistic community was able to draw…. Roe is particularly good at communicating the extraordinary devotion of Matisse and Picasso to their work." —Financial Times

    So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless - the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life. Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives - a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    In Tudor, England, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was under house arrest, her needlework carried her messages to the outside world. From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework. Clare Hunter, master of the craft, threads her own narrative as she takes us over centuries and across continents—from medieval France to contemporary Mexico and the United States, and from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland—to celebrate the age-old, universal, and underexplored beauty and power of sewing. Threads of Life is an evocative and moving book about the need we have to tell our story.

     From the day when, as a young girl of eighteen, she succeeded to the throne, she showed that a constitutional monarch could still have a will of her own and that her words could make statesmen tremble. In this classic biography Hector Bolitho analyses the phases of the Queen's life; her childhood and upbringing, her all too brief married life with Albert, the years of' retirement behind the great walls of Windsor and the more remote fastnesses of Deeside. Although Bolitho calls his book The Reign of Queen Victoria, his work is essentially a record of a remarkable woman and her husband, their personal lives and characters, rather than a political history of her reign. It describes the childhood and youth of Victoria and Albert in alternate chapters so that the reader can see the two growing up side by side yet independently, and can trace the gradual evolution of their characters in isolation until they come together. The expansion of the Prince's influence, first over the Queen, then on successive Cabinets and Prime Ministers, and finally on every aspect of the national life, is traced, and the importance of his reforming zeal is clearly brought out, particularly in its lasting influence on Victoria herself, which controlled to the end the more irrational elements of her character. Praise for Hector Bolitho ‘Flowing and lively’ – Cobden Sanderson Hector Bolitho (1897-1974) was born in New Zealand but settled in Britain, where he wrote over fifty books and worked as a freelance journalist. His other books include Albert: Prince Consort and A Penguin in the Eyrie.

    For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more.In The Golden Flea, the acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world. With a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips recounts his obsession with the flea and its treasures and provides a fascinating account of the business of buying and selling antiques. Along the way, he introduces us to the flea’s lovable oddball cast of vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom among all the treasures and trash.As Rips’s passion for collecting grows and the flea’s last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one.

    Featuring the players’ fascinating stories and original photographs.Cam Perron always loved history, and from an early age, he had a knack for collecting. But when he was twelve and bought a set of Topps baseball cards featuring several players from the Negro Leagues, something clicked. Cam started writing letters to former Negro League players in 2007, asking for their autographs and a few words about their careers. He got back much more than he expected. The players responded with detailed stories about their glory days on the field, and the racism they faced, including run-ins with the KKK. They explained how they were repeatedly kept out of the major leagues and confined to the historic but lower-paying Negro Leagues, even after Jackie Robinson—who got his start in the Negro Leagues—broke the color barrier. By the time Cam finished middle school, letters had turned into phone calls, and he was spending hours a day talking with the players. In these conversations, many of the players revealed that their careers had been unrecognized over time, and they’d fallen out of touch with their former teammates. So Cam, along with a small group of fellow researchers, organized the first annual Negro League Players Reunion in Birmingham, Alabama in 2010. At the celebratory, week-long event, fifteen-year-old Cam and the players—who were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s—finally met in person. They quickly became family. As Cam and the players returned to the reunion year after year, Cam became deeply involved in a complicated mission to help many players get pension money that they were owed from Major League Baseball. He also worked to get a Negro League museum opened in Birmingham, and stock it with memorabilia. Sports fans—and anyone who enjoys a heartfelt story—will have their eyes opened by this book about unlikely friendships, the power of memories, and just how far a childhood interest can go.

    Three years later he was in Naples, where he painted The Seven Acts of Mercy. A year later he died at the age of thirty-eight under mysterious circumstances. Exploring Caravaggio's singular masterwork, in The Guardian of Mercy Terence Ward offers an incredible narrative journey into the heart of his artistry and his metamorphosis from fugitive to visionary.Ward's guide in this journey is a contemporary artist whose own life was transformed by the painting, a simple man named Angelo who shows him where it still hangs in a small church in Naples and whose story helps him see its many layers. As Ward unfolds the structure of the painting, he explains each of the seven mercies and its influence on Caravaggio's troubled existence. Caravaggio encountered the whole range of Naples's vertical social layers, from the lowest ranks of poverty to lofty gilded aristocratic circles, and Ward reveals the old city behind today's metropolis. Fusing elements of history, biography, memoir, travelogue, and journalism, his narrative maps the movement from estrangement to grace, as we witness Caravaggio's bruised life gradually redeemed by art.