Biografie

It started out as a simple hike in the Utah canyonlands on a warm Saturday afternoon. For Aron Ralston, a twenty-seven-year-old mountaineer and outdoorsman, a walk into the remote Blue John Canyon was a chance to get a break from a winter of solo climbing Colorado's highest and toughest peaks. He'd earned this weekend vacation, and though he met two charming women along the way, by...

MY AMERICAN LIFE

Medical professional, corporate consultant, freedom fighter, family man -- Dr. Cobbs is diversity defined. A black pioneer in the field of psychiatry who came of age in the Civil Rights era, Dr. Cobbs has devoted his life to the study of race and gender. With My American Life, his first...

While the E reality show, The Girls Next Door,...

The Nez Perce people lived in peace with white intruders in their homelands from the time of Lewis & Clark until 1863 when a treaty called for the tribe's removal to a reservation in Idaho. Chief Joseph (1840-1904), headman of the Nez Perce band in northeastern Oregon's Wallowa Valley, became the greatest diplomat, philosopher, and-from necessity rather than choice-war leader of his people and among the most respected Indian leaders of American history.

In this meticulous and moving new study of Joseph's life, Candy Moulton-
who has traveled over all the trails he and his people...

"Ardalan's testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement."--Publishers Weekly

Drawing on her remarkable personal history, Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Ardalan's Iranian American parents, who barely spoke Farsi, moved from San Francisco to rural Iran in 1964. After her parents' divorce, Ardalan briefly joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, then,...

" This] may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir."
-Los Angeles Times

"Like that of] his literary ancestor Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut's] crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted. . . . Reading A Man Without a Country is] like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend."
-The New York Times Book Review

In a volume that is penetrating, introspective, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, one of the great men of letters of this age-or any age-holds forth on life, art, sex, politics, and the state...

Writing about oneself, says Patricia Foster, "engages in truth but depends on the imagination, on the life just beneath the skin, a life that's impressionistic and fragile." These eleven closely linked personal essays are at once an absorbing chronicle of a life fully undertaken and a model for anyone who has contemplated self-investigation through autobiographical writing.

The book's three sections each convey a stage of Foster's journey--still ongoing--toward new levels of insight and maturity. "Inside the Girls' Room" takes us back to Foster's life in the rural South from the 1950s...

Just married and returning to live in her new husband's native land, a young Austrian woman arrived with her Burmese husband by passenger ship in Rangoon in 1953. They were met at dockside by hundreds of well-wishers displaying colorful banners, playing music on homemade instruments, and carrying giant bouquets of flowers. She was puzzled by this unusual welcome until her embarrassed husband explained that he was something more than a recently graduated mining engineer - he was the Prince of Hsipaw, the ruler of an autonomous state in Burma's Shan mountains. And these people were his...

A memoir of spiritualism and self-discovery from the acclaimed, award-winning author

At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again.

In this luminous, spirited book, she charts her subsequent path as she learned not simply the joys of meditative...

Book of Dreams is Jack Kerouac's record of his dream life, a parallel autobiography of the soul, the sleeper's On the Road

-I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item . . . .-

Awake of asleep, Jack's mind spun the web of relationships that were the substance of almost everything he wrote:

-In the book of dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about.-

-Lost love,...

But the culture of the state changed in the 1960s, and the figure who replaced Dobie as the dominant Texas writer and literary icon was Larry McMurtry. The Texas of Larry McMurtry is a far different landscape. The old certainties were replaced by irony and cultural revolution. The high, wide, and handsome...