From Winston Churchill's granddaughter comes an anecdotal history that retraces his journeys across four continents and 70 years and offers glimpses into the great man's soul.

In October 1899, the twenty-four-year-old Winston Churchill set sail from Southampton Docks for South Africa, where he was to cover the Boer War for the London Morning Post. The young Churchill's exploits on the North-West Frontier of India and in the Sudan had already won him a considerable following as an intrepid war correspondent, but for sheer audacity and excitement, nothing would rival his exploits in South Africa. Scarcely two weeks after his arrival in Cape Town, Churchill found him-- self on a train, carrying out a reconnaisance mission in enemy-held territory. The train was...

Naomi Shihab Nye writes, "In "Back Room at the Philosophers' Club," Christopher Buckley's gift for wide-ranging thinking meshes so gracefully with lovingly tender details, he feels like a companion voice for all time--a Hikmet, a Neruda, yes. 'I am rich in all the residual benefits due me / from the air...' and we are rich too, caught up in a spell of unfolding images, an arc of compelling music, and his passionate care for what we can and cannot change. These incredibly generous poems are challenging and comforting at once, thanks to Buckley's brilliant ability to consider, contain, and...

A stunning collection of autobiographical narratives that propel us into the life and mind of a literary genius.

In Fred Chappell s introduction to The Kelly Cherry Reader, he writes, Cherry is a flambeau example of the extremely conscious artist, a writer who mediates ceaselessly upon the problems and possibilities of the poem, the novel, the short story and the essay. She ponders what she has done and how she has done it; she thinks about the approaches and techniques she has employed, and she labors to extend and expand them. This kind of effort is not common to all writers, many of whom will write this year pretty much the same novel they wrote year before last, the same poem they wrote...