Book picks similar to
Carl Sagan: A Biography by Ray Spangenburg
biography
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nonfiction
biographies-of-men
The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr.
Robert T. Littell - 2004
Kennedy Jr.'s closest confidant. Now, in a beautiful and moving memoir, Littell introduces us to the private John. A story of laughter and sorrow, joy and heartbreak, The Men We Became is an unforgettable memoir.Rob Littell was a freshman at Brown when he met the young JFK, Jr. during orientation week. Although Littell came from a privileged background, it was worlds apart from the glamorous life of the son of the late President and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Eager to be accepted on his own terms, Kennedy admired Littell's irreverence toward his celebrity and they became close friends.John opened up to Littell on a very personal level, revealing the complex and sometimes tense nature of his relationships with his sister and cousins, as well as his mother's extraordinary influence on John-and how they both worked to keep it from being overbearing. John's marriage had its ups and downs and Carolyn had made enemies of some of his friends, but she was in great shape mentally and physically and they were planning to have children. Littell recounts wonderful dinners at Jacqueline Onassis's apartment where she surprised him with his favorite dinner of specially burned hamburgers and weekends at her retreat in Martha's Vineyard where she critiqued their touch football while lying on a chaise lounge, her face covered in cold cream and cucumber slices. As students, Littell and Kennedy bummed around Europe. They slept in Hyde Park, sampled the pleasures of Amsterdam, ran afoul of customs officers and almost got busted at the Ritz Hotel for smoking pot. They even shared apartments in New York City until Jackie summoned them to dinner one day and gently suggested it was time to grow up. The two went on to pursue their professional lives. John trained as a lawyer - and Littell speaks of his friend's anguish at repeatedly failing the bar - and then he founded his own political magazine, which seemed only fitting because Kennedy yearned to live up to the family name and accepted that politics would be his destiny. Later on, Littell was a part of JFK, Jr.'s secret wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Georgia, and three years later a pallbearer at his funeral.From shared adventures, private moments and lasting memories, Robert Littell offers a unique look at John F. Kennedy Jr.'s life - one that has never been seen before.
The Unstoppable Ruth Bader Ginsburg: American Icon
Antonia Felix - 2018
This gorgeously illustrated book, published in 2018 on her 25th anniversary as a justice of the Supreme Court, celebrates Ginsburg’s legacy with 130 photographs, inspiring quotes, highlights from notable speeches and judicial opinions, and insightful commentary.
Chasing Space: An Astronaut's Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances
Leland Melvin - 2017
Though his path to the heavens was riddled with setbacks and injury, Leland persevered to reach the stars.While training with NASA, Melvin suffered a severe injury that left him deaf. Leland was relegated to earthbound assignments, but chose to remain and support his astronaut family. His loyalty paid off. Recovering partial hearing, he earned his eligibility for space travel. He served as mission specialist for two flights aboard the shuttle Atlantis, working on the International Space Station.In this uplifting memoir, the former NASA astronaut and professional athlete offers an examination of the intersecting role of community, determination, and grace that align to shape our opportunities and outcomes. Chasing Space is not the story of one man, but the story of many men, women, scientists, and mentors who helped him defy the odds and live out an uncommon destiny.As a chemist, athlete, engineer and space traveler, Leland’s life story is a study in the science of achievement. His personal insights illuminate how grit and grace, are the keys to overcoming adversity and rising to success.
Leather Soul: A Half-Back Flanker's Rhythm and Blues
Bob Murphy - 2018
All of the laughs, the scraps, the yarns and the characters: they all left a mark on me. And I wouldn’t change any of it."Bob Murphy has never been a typical footballer.Music buff, Age columnist and Winnebago driver, he is as comfortable in a Fitzroy café or the front bar of a grungy pub as he is in the locker room.In this unique memoir, Murphy takes the reader inside his seventeen-year career, including his three years as captain of the Western Bulldogs, exploring the people, places and events that shaped him. From playing backyard cricket in 1980s Warragul to Community Cup with Paul Kelly in the 2000s, and from the joy of marrying his high school crush to the agony of a season-ending ACL rupture: the man described as the spirit of the Bulldogs has soul, and it’s made of leather.How did the country kid with a gypsy’s heart become an All-Australian captain? What’s it like to have your club reach the AFL Grand Final for the first time in sixty-two years, and have to cheer from the sidelines? How does it feel to realise you can no longer do the things that made you great?The great Australian football bard Martin Flanagan has long insisted Bob Murphy has a book in him like no footballer has written. Leather Soul proves him right.
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
Nick Bilton - 2013
In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways. Now Nick Bilton of the New York Times takes readers behind the scenes with a narrative that shows what happened inside Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds. This is a tale of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles as the four founders—Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass—went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities, featured on magazine covers, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Time’s list of the world’s most influential people. Bilton’s exclusive access and exhaustive investigative reporting—drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails—have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of fame, influence, and power. He also captures the zeitgeist and global influence of Twitter, which has been used to help overthrow governments in the Middle East and disrupt the very fabric of the way people communicate.
The Roof: The Beatles' Final Concert
Ken Mansfield - 2018
January 30, 1969 was one of those moments. There are those who were on the periphery of the event that day and heard what was going on; but as one of the few remaining insiders who accompanied the Beatles up onto the cold windswept roof of the Apple building, Ken Mansfield had a front row seat to the full sensory experience of the moment and witnessed what turned out to be beginning of the end. Ken shares in The Roof: The Beatles Final Concert, the sense that something special was taking place before his eyes that would live on forever in the hearts and souls of millions. As the US manager of Apple, Ken Mansfield was on the scene in the days, weeks, and months leading up to this monumental event. He shares his insights into the factors that brought them up onto that roof and why one of the greatest bands of all time left it all on that stage. Join Ken as he reflects on the relationships he built with the Fab Four and the Apple corps and what each player meant to this symphony of music history.
The Misfit (Kindle Single)
Steven Poser - 2011
Ralph Greenson, the star of Hollywood psychoanalysts, treated Marilyn Monroe for fifteen months until her August 1962 suicide. He saw her seven days a week and brought her into his home. He never got over losing her. Written by a practicing psychoanalyst, The Misfit recounts this tragic alliance and Marilyn Monroe’s borderline personality.
Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas
Caitlin Thomas - 1986
16 pages of black-and-white photographs.
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
Brenda Maddox - 2002
Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa
Shawn Levy - 2005
Pop songs were written about him. Women whom he had never met offered to leave their husbands for him. The gigantic peppermills brandished in Parisian restaurants became known, for reasons people at the time could only hint at, as "Rubirosas."Porfirio Rubirosa was the last great playboy: the roué par excellence, a symbol of powerful masculinity, ubiquity, and easy-come-easy-go money."Work?" he shot back at an interviewer, scandalized at being asked what he did with his days. "It's impossible for me to work. I just don't have the time."His natural habitat was the polo field, the nightclub, the Formula One racecourse, the bedroom.He had an eye for beautiful women, particularly when they came with great wealth: He managed to marry in turn two of the richest women on the planet. Rumor had him bedding hundreds of famous and infamous women, including Christina Onassis, Eva Perón, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, who gleefully posed for paparazzi after he had blacked her eye in a fit of jealousy on the eve of his marriage to another woman.But he was a man's man, too, a notable polo player and race-car driver with a gift for friendship, chumming around with the likes of Joe Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Oleg Cassini, Aly Khan, and King Farouk.When above-board, heiress-type income was scarce, he diverted himself with jewel-thievery, shadowy diplomatic errands, and any other illicit scam that came his way.Whatever legitimate power he wielded came to him from the hands of Rafael Trujillo, one of the most bloodthirstily power-mad dictators the New World has ever seen. A nation quivered at Trujillo's name for decades, yet Rubi flouted his strictures without concern, as if Trujillo's iron grip could never crush him. And he was right.When Rubi died at the age of fifty-six, wrapping his sports car around a tree in the Bois de Boulogne, an era went with him -- of white dinner jackets at El Morocco; of celebrity for its own sake when this was still a novelty; of glamour before it was available to the masses.In The Last Playboy, Shawn Levy brings Rubi's giddy, hedonistic story to Technicolor life.
Leonardo da Vinci
Anna Abraham - 2014
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.
Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius
Carol Dommermuth-Costa - 1994
Recounts the life and accomplishments of the Croatian-born engineer who developed alternating-current technology and invented the radio.
Fearless: The Heroic Story of One Navy SEAL's Sacrifice in the Hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the Unwavering Devotion of the Woman Who Loved Him
Eric Blehm - 2012
An undersized daredevil, prone to jumping off roofs into trees and off bridges into lakes, Adam was a kid who broke his own bones but would never break apromise to his parents. But after high school, Adam fell in with the wrong crowd, and his family watched as his appetite for risk dragged him into a downward spiral that eventually landed him in jail. Battling his inner demons on a last-chance road to redemption, Adam had one goal: to become the best of the best—a U.S. Navy SEAL. An absorbing chronicle of heroism and humanity, Fearless presents an indelible portrait of a highly trained warrior who would enter a village with weapons in hand to hunt terrorists, only to come back the next day with an armload of shoes and meals for local children. It is a deeply personal, revealing glimpse inside the SEAL Team SIX brotherhood that also shows how these elite operators live out the rest of their lives, away from danger, as husbands, fathers, and friends. Fearless is the story of a man of extremes, whose courage and determination was fueled by faith, family, and the love of a woman. It’s about a man who waged a war against his own worst impulses and persevered to reach the top tier of the U.S. military. Always the first to volunteer for the most dangerous assignments, Adam’s final act of bravery led to the ultimate sacrifice. Adam Brown was a devoted man who was an unlikely hero but a true warrior, described by all who knew him as fearless.
The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson - 2000
A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson’s memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams.Like many athletic kids he played baseball, won medals in track and swimming, and was captain of his high school wrestling team. But at the same time he was setting up a telescope on winter nights, taking an advanced astronomy course at the Hayden Planetarium, and spending a summer vacation at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert.Eventually, his scientific curiosity prevailed, and he went on to graduate in physics from Harvard and to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia. There followed postdoctoral research at Princeton. In 1996, he became the director of the Hayden Planetarium, where some twenty-five years earlier he had been awed by the spectacular vista in the sky theater.Tyson pays tribute to the key teachers and mentors who recognized his precocious interests and abilities, and helped him succeed. He intersperses personal reminiscences with thoughts on scientific literacy, careful science vs. media hype, the possibility that a meteor could someday hit the Earth, dealing with society’s racial stereotypes, what science can and cannot say about the existence of God, and many other interesting insights about science, society, and the nature of the universe.Now available in paperback with a new preface and other additions, this engaging memoir will enlighten and inspire an appreciation of astronomy and the wonders of our universe.