Biography: adventurers and explorers Books

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Book SynopsisA fresh exploration of Paul's activities during the hidden years of his life, from his conversion in Damascus to his familiar ministry in the book of Acts. With an unparalled wealth of historical material and a reconsideration of Paul's own writings, a new picture of Paul's life...

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Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou’s classic memoirs have had an enduring impact on American literature and culture. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.This Modern Library edition contains I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven. When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to widespread acclaim in 1969, Maya Angelou garnered the attention of an international audience with the triumphs and tragedies of her childhood in the American South. This soul-baring memoir launched a six-book epic spanning the sweep of the author’s incredible life. Now, for the first time, all six celebrated and bestselling autobiographies are availab

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Book SynopsisThe authoritative statement on the deaf, their education, and their struggle against prejudice.

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Book SynopsisThis lively and elegant book by the acclaimed historian Jonathan D. Spence reconstructs an extraordinary episode in the early intercourse between Europe and China. It is the story of John Hu, a lowly but devout Chinese Catholic, who in 1722 accompanied a Jesuit missionary on a journey to France--a journey that ended with Hu''s confinement in a lunatic asylum. At once a triumph of historical detective work and a gripping narrative, The Question of Hu deftly probes the collision of tw ocultures, with their different definitions of faith, madness, and moral obligation.

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Book SynopsisThe compelling true story of a man of conscience at the heart of the Third Reich.   In the years when most Germans were abetting a policy of conquest and genocide, Helmuth James von Moltke, an aristocratic and devoutly Christian young lawyer drafted into the German Intelligence Service, was working tirelessly against it. Throughout the war, he fought through the labyrinthine insanity of wartime bureaucracy on behalf of Jews and foreign prisoners and organized a clandestine resistance to the Nazi regime.   From 1939 to the eve of his execution from treason in 1945, von Moltke wrote letters to his wife, Freya. Gathered here, these letters transcend their format to create at once a horrifying record of the daily workings of the Third Reich and an inspiring testament to the powers of love, courage, and conscience in the most conscienceless of times.   “Remarkable . . . A unique historical document, a morality tale, a love story, all set within t

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Book SynopsisPULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own (The New York Times Book Review).Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.

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Book SynopsisThe US-Soviet arms race, told through the story of a colorful and visionary American Air Force officer—melding biography, history, world affairs, and science to transport the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. Compulsively readable and important.” —The New York Times Book ReviewIn this never-before-told story, Neil Sheehan—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award -- details American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever’s quest to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, and describes American efforts to develop the unstoppable nuclear-weapon delivery system, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger.   In a sweeping narrative, Sheehan brings to life a huge cast of some of the most intriguing characters of

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Book SynopsisWith a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art. Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.'Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus.' ?The Boston Globe'One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time.' ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisHe inherited a sense of entitlement (and obligation) from his family, yet eventually came to see his own class as suspect. He was famously militaristic, yet brokered peace between Russia and Japan. He started out an archconservative, yet came to champion progressive causes. These contradictions are not evidence of vacillating weakness: instead, they were the product of a restless mind bend on a continuous quest for self-improvement. In Theodore Roosevelt, historian Kathleen Dalton reveals a man with a personal and intellectual depth rarely seen in our public figures. She shows how Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome his frailties as a child helped to build his character, and offers new insights into his family life, uncovering the important role that Roosevelt’s second wife, Edith Carow, played in the development of his political career. She also shows how TR flirted with progressive reform and then finally commited himself to deep reform

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Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times. It is also the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives—and the country that shaped and nourished them—with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

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Book SynopsisA uniquely revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tenor of their era. Mead’s best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Race (1940), and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), were landmark studies that ensured the lasting prominence and influence of their authors in the field of anthropology and beyond.With unprecedented access to the complete archives of the two women—including hundreds of letters op

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Book SynopsisSynopsis coming soon.......Trade ReviewFrank Higgins Kansas City Star I Was Right on Time has an amiability and truth that make it seem as if O'Neil is talking directly to the reader while both sit in the stands and enjoy a game at the field of dreams.Chicago Sun-Times [O'Neil's] wry memories of the Negro Leagues are just as captivating in print as they were on TV.Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsForeword by Ken Burns1. Why, Nancy, There You Are2. Damn, There's Got to Be Something Better Than This3. I Ate So Much My Mama Cried4. People Tell Me I Look Good in a Dress5. 18th and Vine6. Seems Like I Been Here Before7. Bring 'Em On8. Now Hear This! Now Hear This!9. Long Live the Monarchs10. My Cub Scout Years11. Love What You Do12. Got to Give It UpIndex

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