In the Presence of Greatness: My Sixty-Year Journey as an Actress


Patty Duke - 2018
    The Patty Duke Show. Valley of the Dolls. Those perennial film and television titles still reverberate with audiences entranced with Academy Award-winning film actress and Broadway and television icon Patty Duke. Patty first gained national attention and praise playing Helen Keller in both the Broadway stage and film versions of The Miracle Worker. As identical cousins on The Patty Duke Show, her name became an American household word. Her later work in Valley of the Dolls, Me, Natalie, My Sweet Charlie, a later television remake of The Miracle Worker, and dozens of other productions established her as one of America's leading actresses. Patty's previous autobiographical works, Call Me Anna and A Brilliant Madness, achieved New York Times bestseller status. Now, her indelible show business legacy echoes enduringly with untold stories of her six-decade career and the legends of her time, including Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes, Fred Astaire, Anne Bancroft, Judy Garland, President John F. Kennedy, Helen Keller, Margaret Cho, Garth Brooks, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lucille Ball, Darren Criss, Richard Crenna, Patricia Neal, Liza Minnelli, and Helen Hunt. For the first time, Patty also talks openly of her friendship with actress Sharon Tate and her grisly murder at the hands of Charles Manson. Illustrated with over 70 rare photos from both Patty Duke's career and personal life, many never before published and from her personal collection. About William J. Jankowski: Since receiving his degree from Widener University, he has been interviewed for such publications as USA Today, and consulted on biographical television specials about Patty Duke's work for A&E, ABC, Lifetime, and E! This is his first book. "Patty Duke was one of the most talented actresses I ever worked with. Her first hand account of anecdotes on her Hollywood career is a must read. This book is both fascinating and touching." - Tab Hunter

This Ain't No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980–1995


James Lough - 2013
    This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City.

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev


Robert Dessaix - 2004
    In Russia works such as his A Hunter’s Notes and Fathers and Sons, were pivotal in transforming the Russian social landscape.No less sensational than his novels was his personal life. For forty years, until the day he died, he was passionately devoted to the diva Pauline Viardot, following her and her husband around Europe and even living with them amicably at times as part of their household. What, then, did Turgenev mean by "love," the word at the core of his life and work?Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev, first as a student of Russian in both Australia and Russia, then as a teacher, and now as what he calls a close friend. In Twilight of Love, Dessaix has come to see Turgenev’s life and work as an expression of a turning point in the history of love —the moment the Romantic became rational, love unraveled into sentiment and erotic feelings, and eros became a mere commodity.

A Compelling Unknown Force - The Dyatlov Pass Incident: AKA "Six Hours to Live"


Clark Wilkins - 2014
    It is one of the great mysteries of our times. They would be found with missing eyes, even a missing tongue, crushed bones, and stripped of their clothes in minus 50 degree temperatures . Theories range from their being being murdered by the CIA to space aliens, to "Abominable Snowmen". This book explores this famous incident using a technique known as "Higher criticism" to explain their terrifying deaths. It provides hitherto unexplored answers and is now the leading source on the incident, debunking all previous explanations while pointing to eleven points of overwhelming evidence that tell us what really happened on this tragic night of horror.

Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith's Life & Character


Various - 2021
    These pages are filled with insights into Joseph, but most have not yet been shared in a way that makes the accessible to a broader audience. This collection of short essays will help close this gap and bring insights into Joseph to Latter-day saints, both those who are struggling with questions about Joseph and those who simply want to understand the founding Prophet of the Restoration better. These essays look at Joseph Smith's life, character, personality, and relationships with others. Know Brother Joseph, is an accessible and faith-promoting look at Joseph Smith, his life, and its relevance to us in our daily walk.

When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky: Two Artists, Their Ballet, and One Extraordinary Riot


Lauren Stringer - 2013
    When their radically new ballet, The Rite of Spring, was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, the reaction was so polarized, there were fistfights and riots! Brilliant or disastrous, the performance marked the birth of modern music and dance. Stringer’s rhythmic text and gloriously inventive, color-rich paintings capture the wild and imaginative collaboration of composer and choreographer. The fascinating author note includes photos of the dynamic duo and The Rite of Spring dancers.

On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star


John Dickerson - 2006
    of photos.

A Very Young Dancer


Jill Krementz - 1976
    A ten-year-old student at the School of American Ballet in New York describes her classes and the preparation for and performance of her role in the ballet "The Nutcracker."

Fighting the Flying Circus


Eddie Rickenbacker - 1919
    The 94th ended the war in France with the highest number of air victories of any American squadron. Captain Rickenbacker later belonged to an association of pilots and Great War air veterans who, in the years immediately following the Second World War, invited many of the new "young" aces from the Pacific and European theaters for informal lectures. These men never lost their keen interest in aviation.

How Proust Can Change Your Life


Alain de Botton - 1998
    For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work—his fiction, letter, and conversations—and distills from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as it’s subject’s, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognizing love and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siècle Paris. At once slyly ironic and genuinely wise, How Proust Can Change Your Life is an unqualified delight.

The South Carolina State Hospital: Stories from Bull Street (Landmarks)


William Buchheit - 2020
    Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823, despite an operating budget that ranked forty-fifth out of the forty-eight states with such large public hospitals. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror and chaos. Author William Buchheit details this history through the words and interviews of those who worked on the iconic campus.

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman


Sam Wasson - 2010
    Here, for the first time, Sam Wasson presents the woman behind the little black dress that rocked the nation in 1961. The first complete account of the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. reveals little-known facts about the cinema classic: Truman Capote desperately wanted Marilyn Monroe for the leading role; director Blake Edwards filmed multiple endings; Hepburn herself felt very conflicted about balancing the roles of mother and movie star. With a colorful cast of characters including Truman Capote, Edith Head, Givenchy, "Moon River" composer Henry Mancini, and, of course, Hepburn herself, Wasson immerses us in the America of the late fifties before Woodstock and birth control, when a not-so-virginal girl by the name of Holly Golightly raised eyebrows across the country, changing fashion, film, and sex for good. Indeed, cultural touchstones like Sex and the City owe a debt of gratitude to Breakfast at Tiffany's.In this meticulously researched gem of a book, Wasson delivers us from the penthouses of the Upper East Side to the pools of Beverly Hills, presenting Breakfast at Tiffany's as we have never seen it before—through the eyes of those who made it. Written with delicious prose and considerable wit, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. shines new light on a beloved film and its incomparable star.

The Silent Twins


Marjorie Wallace - 1986
    As they grew up, love, hate, and genius united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five-week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a grueling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor.Award-winning investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace delves into the twins' silent world, revealing their genius, alienation, and the mystic bond by which the extremes of good and evil ended in possession and death.

House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family


Hadley Freeman - 2020
    Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz. Freeman pieces together the puzzle of her family’s past, discovering more about the lives of her grandmother and her three brothers, Jacques, Henri, and Alex. Their stories sometimes typical, sometimes astonishing—reveal the broad range of experiences of Eastern European Jews during Holocaust. This thrilling family saga is filled with extraordinary twists, vivid characters, and famous cameos, illuminating the Jewish and immigrant experience in the World War II era. Addressing themes of assimilation, identity, and home, this powerful story about the past echoes issues that remain relevant today.

Jacqueline Du Pre: A Life


Carol Easton - 1989
    Jacqueline du Pré (the subject of the recent film Hilary and Jackie) was the music world's "golden girl," with what appeared to many to be a fairytale career and storybook marriage to Daniel Barenboim. But away from her cello, du Pré was achingly human. As a child, she was isolated by her phenomenal talent. As an adult, she was confined to the rarefied, insular concert world. And during the last fifteen years of her life, she lived in the inexorably shrinking world of the invalid, as multiple sclerosis took its toll. The Baltimore Sun said, Carol Easton tells this extraordinary story "with feeling befitting du Pré's own."