-Titulo Original : Colored People A Memoir-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation. A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling From Publishers Weekly National Book Award winner Gates reflects on his childhood in pre-civil rights Piedmont, W.Va. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Affecting, beautifully written and morally complex...The heart of the memoir is Gates portrait of his family, and its placement in a black society whose strength, richness and self-confidence thrived in the darkness of segregation.--Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times [Colored People] may well become a classic of American memoir.--The Boston Globe From the Publisher Affecting, beautifully written and morally complex...The heart of the memoir is Gates portrait of his family, and its placement in a black society whose strength, richness and self-confidence thrived in the darkness of segregation.--Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times [Colored People] may well become a classic of American memoir.--The Boston Globe From the Inside Flap From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished colored world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling. About the Author Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The author of numerous books, including the widely acclaimed memoir Colored People, Professor Gates has also edited several anthologies and is coeditor with Kwame Anthony Appiah of Encarta Africana, an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. An influential cultural critic, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and other publications and is the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal...

-Titulo Original : The Last Mughal The Fall Of A Dynasty Delhi, 1857-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review “A compulsively readable masterpiece. . . . Every chapter of The Last Mughal has historical echoes that are still desperately relevant today.” -The New York Review of Books “Deeply researched and beautifully written. . . . A poignant account of the events of 1857 in Delhi.” -The Nation“There is so much to admire in this book - the depth of historical research, the finely evocative writing, the extraordinary rapport with the cultural world of late Mughal India. It is also in many ways a remarkably humane and egalitarian history . . . This is a splendid work of empathetic scholarship.” -David Arnold, Times Literary Supplement In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history.The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar-a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment-created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperors power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history. About the Author William Dalrymple is the author of seven previous works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; and From the Holy Mountain; White Mughals, which won Britain’s Wolfson History Prize. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He divides his time between New Delhi and London. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One: A Chessboard King The marriage procession of Prince Jawan Bakht left the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort at 2 a.m. on the hot summer night of 2 April 1852. With a salute from the cannon stationed on the ramparts, and an arc of fireworks and rockets fired aloft from the illuminated turrets of the Fort, the two gates opposite the great thoroughfare of Chandni Chowk swung open. The first to emerge were the chobdars, or mace bearers. The people of Delhi have never much liked being restrained by barriers and were in the habit of breaking through the bamboo railings hung with lamps that illuminated the processional route. It was the job of the chobdars to clear a way through the excitable crowd, before the imperial elephants-always a little unpredictable in the presence of fireworks-appeared lumbering through the gates. Two ministers of state on horseback began the procession proper. Shell ornaments were plaited into the horses’ manes, and bells strung around their necks and fetlocks, and as they rode out, the ministers were attended by servants with punkahs (fans). Then came a troop of Mughal infantry, with polished black shields and curved swords, long lances and fluttering pennons of green and gold. The first six of the imperial elephants followed, caparisoned with gold and saffron headcloths embroidered with the Emperor’s coat of arms. From the howdahs, officials held aloft the dynastic insignia that had been used by the Mughals since their arrival in India more than three centuries earlier: from one, the face of a rayed sun; from another, two golden fish suspended at each end of a golden bow; from the third, the head of a lion-like beast; from the fourth, a golden Hand of Fatima; from the fifth, a horse’s head; and from the last, a chatri, or imperial umbrella. A...

-Titulo Original : My Salinger Year-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: A keenly observed and irresistibly funny memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing. Now a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret QualleyAfter leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office-where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches-and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own. Review “A beautifully written tribute to the way things were at the edge of the digital revolution, and to the evergreen power of literature.” -Chicago Tribune“An affecting coming-of-age memoir. . . . Rakoff wisely-and deftly-weaves her Salinger story into a broader, more universal tale about finding one’s bearings during a pivotal transitional year into real adulthood.” -The Washington Post“Charming. . . . Glamorous. . . . Rakoff does a marvelous job of capturing a cultural moment. . . . What is most admirable is [her] critical intelligence and generosity of spirit.” -The Boston Globe“The loneliness of life after college [is] perfectly explained . . . There’s something Salingeresque about her book: it’s a vivid story of innocence lost.” -Entertainment Weekly“My Salinger Year describes its author’s trip down a metaphorical rabbit hole back in 1996. She arrived not in Wonderland, but a place something like it, a New York City firm she calls only the Agency. . . . An outright tribute to the enduring power of J.D. Salinger’s work.” -Salon “A breezy memoir of being a ‘bright young assistant’ in the mid-1990s . . . Salinger himself makes a cameo appearance. . . . The ‘archaic charms’ of the Agency are comically offset by its refusal to acknowledge the Internet age.” -The New York Times Book Review“While it may be the Salinger cameo that initially draws readers in, it’s Rakoff’s effortlessly elegant, unhyperbolic prose and poignant coming-of-age story that will keep them engrossed through the very last word.” -BookPage “Moving. . . . Heartfelt. . . . Rakoff uses Salinger-his fan mail and her favorite character, Franny-to help illuminate her inner life. . . . The memoir is touching, and it’s easy to empathize with how Rakoff, like Franny, is ‘trying to figure out how to live in this world.’” -USA Today “Gentle, funny, closely observed. . . . The special unworldliness of the young literary person, who has reached adulthood without ever knowing or caring much about how the world works, is the real subject of My Salinger Year.” -Tablet Magazine “Gripping and funny. . . . An involving, evocative tale that will have bookish women everywhere shuddering in recognition. Like Rona Jaffe’s novel of the 50s, The Best of Everything, it is concerned with what it feels like to move to the big city, to take on your first job, and to struggle to survive on a tiny salary when all the while your dreams are seemingly being snuffed out at every turn, and your love life is spiraling into muddle and mayhem. . . . So raw and so true.” -The Guardian “Hard to put down. . . . Demands sympathy, admiration, and attention. . . . Irresistible.” -The Sunday Times “Intimate . . . elegant . . . graceful.” -The Sunday Telegraph “As memoirs go, this is possibly one of the year’s funniest, enthralling and entertaining . . . For an insight into old-fashioned publishing this must be hard to beat. Everyone smokes, returns tiddly from boozy lunches, ...

-Titulo Original : Makes Me Wanna Holler A Young Black Man In America-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: NATIONAL BESTSELLER * One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood. Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery. In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard-and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles-and the great hopes-of our nation. With a new afterword by the author From Publishers Weekly McCalls autobiography?a seven-week PW bestseller?tracks his trajectory from the streets of Portsmouth, Va., to prison, rehabilitation and a job at the Washington Post; features a new introduction by the author. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Not since Claude Browns Manchild in the Promised Land has there been such an honest and searching look at the perils of growing up a black male in urban America....A compelling depiction of the toll that racism and misguided notions of manhood have taken in the life of one black man-and, by implication, many others.-The San Francisco Chronicle From the Publisher Not since Claude Browns Manchild in the Promised Land has there been such an honest and searching look at the perils of growing up a black male in urban America....A compelling depiction of the toll that racism and misguided notions of manhood have taken in the life of one black man--and, by implication, many others.--The San Francisco Chronicle From the Back Cover Sooner or later, every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall, whose memoir is . . . a stirring tale of transformation. He is a mesmerizing storyteller. --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The New YorkerAngry, eloquent, and powerful . . . a relentlessly honest book filled with pain, triumph, rage and humor, high and low. --Los Angeles Times Book Review About the Author Nathan McCall grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia. He studied journalism at Norfolk State University after serving three years in prison, and went on to report for the Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before joining The Washington Post in 1989. He is the author of a memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler; an essay collection, What’s Going On; and a novel, Them. McCall is currently is a senior lecturer in African American Studies at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia...

-Titulo Original : The Catcher Was A Spy The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: NATIONAL BESTSELLERNow a major motion picture starring Paul Rudd“A delightful book that recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of espionage. . . . . Relentlessly entertaining.”-The New York Times Book ReviewMoe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939. Educated at Princeton and the Sorbonne, he as reputed to speak a dozen languages (although it was also said he couldnt hit in any of them) and went on to become an OSS spy in Europe during World War II. As Nicholas Dawidoff follows Berg from his claustrophobic childhood through his glamorous (though equivocal) careers in sports and espionage and into the long, nomadic years during which he lived on the hospitality of such scattered acquaintances as Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein, he succeeds not only in establishing where Berg went, but who he was beneath his layers of carefully constructed cover. As engrossing as a novel by John le Carre, The Catcher Was a Spy is a triumphant work of historical and psychological detection. From Publishers Weekly Dawidoff uncovers the enigmatic life of former major-league catcher Berg, who, following his baseball stint, became a spy for the OSS assigned to find information on Nazi nuclear capabilities. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review “A delightful book that recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of espionage. . . . . Relentlessly entertaining.”-The New York Times Book Review “[A] meticulously researched biography. . . . . As Dawidoff tracks his elusive subject…the story becomes more than a search for the core of someone who spent his life making himself a mystery, but a dark, moving human tragedy.”-Los Angeles Times “[Dawidoff] has done heroic research, much of it in unlit corners. . . . Moe Berg doubtless will forever remain a mystery, but Dawidoff has brought the mystery to life.”-Washington Post From the Inside Flap The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides a careful and sympathetic biography (Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man. Photos. About the Author Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of five books. One of them, The Fly Swatter, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and another, In the Country of Country, was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg was a national bestseller and appeared on many 1994 best book lists. In 2009, Pantheon published The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball. He is also the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. A graduate of Harvard University, he has been a Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri and Berlin Prize Fellow, and is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the American Scholar...

-Titulo Original : Nathan Bedford Forrest A Biography-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review Nathan Bedford Forrest was the only soldier to rise from the rank of private to general during the U.S. Civil War. At once a soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity and an overbearing bully of homicidal wrath, Forrest is best remembered for the combination of brilliant military leadership and flamboyant bravery that drove his Confederate cavalry troops from victory to victory on the battlefield. His subordinates feared him (he shot those who turned tail), as did his enemies (he rarely lost a fight). General Sherman once said that Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the [national] treasury. Detractors point out that Forrest never has been exonerated from the Fort Pillow massacre, in which many Union soldiers, most of them black, were slaughtered after attempting to surrender. Following the war, he went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Late in life, however, Forrest disavowed racial hatred and called for black political advancement. Author Jack Hurst has written the essential biography of a complex and compelling man who was arguably the Civil Wars most remarkable soldier. (Movie trivia: Forrest Gumps mother named her son after this general.) Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded as no more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge, mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Sherman called him a devil who should be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury. And in a war in which officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forrest habitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy and often intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at the notorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in an exemplary biography that puts both Forrests genius and his savagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise from frontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general, Klansman to-eventually-New South businessman and racial moderate. Unflinching in its analysis and with extensive new research, Nathan Bedford Forrest is an invaluable and immensely readable addition to the literature of the Civil War. From the Inside Flap Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded as no more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge, mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Sherman called him a devil who should be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury. And in a war in which officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forrest habitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy and often intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at the notorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in an exemplary biography that puts both Forrests genius and his savagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise from frontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general, Klansman to -- eventually -- New South businessman and racial moderate. Unflinching in its analysis and with extensive new research, Nathan Bedford Forrest is an invaluable and immensely readable addition to the literature of the Civil War. From the Back Cover Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded as no more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge, mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Sherman called him a devil who should be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts t...

-Titulo Original : The Wives Of Henry Viii-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: The New York Times bestselling history of the legendary six wives of Henry VIII--from the acclaimed author of Marie Antoinette. Under Antonia Frasers intent scrutiny, Catherine of Aragon emerges as a scholar-queen who steadfastly refused to grant a divorce to her royal husband; Anne Boleyn is absolved of everything but a sharp tongue and an inability to produce a male heir; and Catherine Parr is revealed as a religious reformer with the good sense to tack with the treacherous winds of the Tudor court. And we gain fresh understanding of Jane Seymours circumspect wisdom, the touching dignity of Anna of Cleves, and the youthful naivete that led to Katherine Howards fatal indiscretions. The Wives of Henry VIII interweaves passion and power, personality and politics, into a superb work of history. Review When we think of the wives of Henry VIII, we tend to think of women who literally lost their heads. But Antonia Fraser opens the door to the political and cultural demands that shaped the destinies of the king and his royal wives. Romance, unfortunately, rarely had anything to do with it. And if you think the modern American media is too tough on political leadership, you oughta READ about the royal court in King Henrys day! Thats one family youd never want to marry into. From Publishers Weekly Frasers scrupulously researched recuperative study of Henry VIIIs six queens makes a major contribution to feminist scholarship. Illustrations. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Inside Flap The six-week New York Times bestselling history of the legendary six wives of Henry VIII--from an acclaimed biographer. Admirably succeed(s) in bringing to life the six women who married Englands ruler. . . .--New York Times Book Review. 16 color plates. 32 pages of illustrations. From the Back Cover The six-week New York Times bestselling history of the legendary six wives of Henry VIII--from an acclaimed biographer. Admirably succeed(s) in bringing to life the six women who married Englands ruler. . . .--New York Times Book Review. 16 color plates. 32 pages of illustrations. About the Author Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola, The Wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot, and Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832. She is also the author of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the 2000 Norton Medlicott Medal of Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize. She was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to Literature in 2011...

-Titulo Original : Speak, Memory An Autobiography Revisited-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokovs life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense. Review The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception. No dry recital of dates, names, and addresses for this linguistic magician--instead, Speak, Memory is a succession of lapidary episodes, in which the factoids play second fiddle to the development of Nabokovs sensibility. There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the authors family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and fin-de-siecle oddities). And Nabokovs account of his tenure at St. Petersburgs famous Tenishev School--where he counted Osip Mandelstam among his schoolmates--offers a lovely glimpse into the heart of Russias silver age. Still, Nabokov is much too artful an autobiographer to present Speak, Memory as a slice of reality--a word, by the way, that he insisted must always be surrounded by quotation marks. Review When he is writing about someone or something he loves, he is irresistible; when he is writing about someone or something he despises, he can manage to enlist ones sympathies, if only momentarily, for the object of his contempt. --The New York Review of Books From the Inside Flap Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokovs life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense. From the Back Cover Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokovs life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense. About the Author Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybodys concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror, the bl...

-Titulo Original : The Forever War-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: About the Author Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Before that, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau, and for The Miami Herald. In 2009, he was part of a team of Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has received a George Polk Award and two Overseas Press Club awards. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He lives in New York City. NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The definitive account of Americas conflict with Islamic fundamentalism and a searing exploration of its human costs-an instant classic of war reporting from the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, we witness the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, the aftermath of the attack on New York on September 11th, and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins is the only American journalist to have reported on all these events, and his experiences are conveyed in a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters and astonishing scenes.Brilliant and fearless, The Forever War is not just about Americas wars after 9/11, but about the nature of war itself. Review WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAROne of the Best Books of the Year: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, and Time“Stunning. . . . This unforgettable narrative represents . . . a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful wars history.” -Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review“Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.” -The New York Times“Unflinching. . . . Filkins confronts the absurdity of war head-on. . . . This is a page-turner, and one of the most astounding books yet written about the war in Iraq.” -Time“Thanks to one reporters heroic act of witness and brilliant recitation of what he saw, we can see the war as it is, and for ourselves.” -Los Angeles Times“Not since Michael Herr in Dispatches . . . has a reporter written as vividly about combat as Filkins does from Afghanistan and Iraq.” -USA Today 10 Best Books of 2008“The Forever War . . . achieves a gripping, raw immediacy.” -The Boston Globe’s Year’s Best Books“Splendid.” -Washington Post Book World Best Nonfiction of 2008“Dexter Filkins has seen the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; he has stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center; he has been in the heat of battle in Iraq; indeed, no one else has been closer to the action than this courageous and thoughtful observer. This is a sensational book in the best sense.” -Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11“Dexter Filkinss The Forever Waris the best piece of war journalism Ive ever read. He paints a portrait of war that is so nuanced, so filled with absurdities and heartbreak and unexpected heroes and villains, that it makes most of what we see and hear about Iraq and Afghanistan seem shrill and two-dimensional by comparison. And yet, as tragic as the events he describes are, the book manages to be a thing of towering beauty.” -Dave Eggers, Guardian Best Books of the YearThe Forever War is already a classic-it has the timeless feel of all great war literature. Dexter Filkins’s combination of courage and sensitivity is so rare that books like his come along only once every major war. This one is ours. -George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq“Dexter Filkins is the preeminent war correspondent of my generation, fearless, compassionate, and brutally honest. The Forever War is his astonishing story. It is one of the best books about...

-Titulo Original : Young Stalin-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review “Brilliantly researched. . . . The portrait of Stalin that emerges from these pages is more complete, more colorful, more chilling, and far more convincing than any we have had before.” -The New York Review of Books“Young Stalin is brilliantly readable, as intricately plotted and full of detail as a good novel, scrupulously researched, and full of hitherto unknown (or unreported) facts about Stalins life.” -Mens Vogue“A meticulously researched, authoritative biography. . . . Mr. Montefiore has found the devil in the details, working his way with a fine-tooth comb through previously unread archival material.” -The New York Times“The most complete, accurate account of the tyrants early years-a fascinating tale of life in the revolutionary underground, drenched in violence, fear and deceit, filled with a rogues gallery of bandits, double-agents and terrorists.” -The Seattle Times This revelatory account unveils how Stalin became Stalin, examining his shadowy journey from obscurity to power-from master historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. Based on ten years of research, Young Stalin-companion to the prizewinning Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar-is a brilliant prehistory of the USSR, a chronicle of the Revolution, and an intimate biography. Montefiore tells the story of a charismatic, darkly turbulent boy born into poverty, scarred by his upbringing but possessed of unusual talents. Admired as a romantic poet and trained as a priest, he found his true mission as a murderous revolutionary. Here is the dramatic story of his friendships and hatreds, his many love affairs, his complicated relationship with the Tsarist secret police, and how he became the merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image. Described by The New York Times as a meticulously researched, autoritative biography, Young Stalin is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.Winner of the Costa Book Award for BiographyA Christian Science Monitor and Seattle Times Best Book of the Year About the Author SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grande Prix de la biographie politique. Jerusalem: The Biography was a worldwide best seller. Montefiore’s books are published in more than forty languages. He is the author of the novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter, which won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2014. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Montefiore graduated from Cambridge University, where he received his PhD. He lives in London. simonsebagmontefiore Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE: The Bank RobberyAt 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing mustachioed cavalry captain in boots and jodhpurs, wielding a big Circassian sabre, performed tricks on horseback, joking with two pretty, well-dressed Georgian girls who twirled gaudy parasols-while fingering Mauser pistols hidden in their dresses.Raffish young men in bright peasant blouses and wide sailor-style trousers waited on the street corners, cradling secreted revolvers and grenades. At the louche Tilipuchuri Tavern on the square, a crew of heavily armed gangsters took over the cellar bar, gaily inviting passers-by to join them for drinks. All of them were waiting to carry out the first exploit by Josef Djugashvili, aged twenty-nine, later known as Stalin, to win the attention of the world.[1]Few outside the gang knew of the plan that day for a criminal terrorist “spectacular,” but Stalin had worked on it for months. One man who did know the broad plan was...

-Titulo Original : Negroland A Memoir-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.” Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. Negroland’s pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South. It evolved into a world of exclusive sororities, fraternities, networks, and clubs-a world in which skin color and hair texture were relentlessly evaluated alongside scholarly and professional achievements, where the Talented Tenth positioned themselves as a third race between whites and “the masses of Negros,” and where the motto was “Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.” Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions, while reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments-the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the falsehood of post-racial America. Review Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * A New York Times Notable Book“Brave. . . . Revelatory. . . . Recall[s] a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race . . . James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois.” -The New York Times Book Review“Powerful. . . . Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being party of America’s black elite.” -Roxane Gay, O, The Oprah Magazine“Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required reading across the country.” -Vanity Fair “Intricate and moving. . . . Powerful.” -The New York Times“Enlightening. . . . Poetic and bracing.” -The Washington Post “[A] masterpiece. . . . A phenomenal study-cum-memoir about the black bourgeoisie.” -Hilton Als, author of White Girls “A veritable library of African-American letters and a sumptious compendium of elegant style. . . . [Jefferson] paints her rich inner and outer landscape with deft, impressionistic strokes.” -The Boston Globe “Provocative and insightful. . . . Melancholic and hopeful, raw and disarming. . . . A moving memoir that is an act of courage in its vulnerability.” -Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns “Poignant. . . . Harrowing. . . . In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more.” -Los Angeles Times “Jefferson combines memoir with cultural critique in a series of unsparing vignettes.” -The New Yorker “Provocative and extraordinary. . . . Haunting.” -Time “Lyrical. . . . Vibrant and damning. . . . Dares to throw a wrench-class-into our tortured debates about race.” -Minneapolis Star Tribune “Razor sharp, self-lacerating and singular.” -More “A candid observer, Jefferson articulates the complicated and calculated performance of upper-class black life.” -New York “Brilliantly written. . . . Not reading this remarkable, indeed unique book, would be an immense mistake. . . . One of the great books published this year.” -Buffalo News “Truly indispensable.” -Flavorwire “A nuanced meditation from a life lived in the upper echelons of Chicago’s black bourgeoisie, beginning before the civil-rights era and trailing off in our still-conflicted present.” -Vulture “Beautiful. . . . Artfully self-aware. . . . Jefferson succeeds at something remarkable: she tells her story while at the same time not only evocatively capturing her era but situating her experiences into a centuries-long cultural tradition.” -Bookslut “Shines a spotlight on a fascinating slice of the American ...

-Titulo Original : Unforgivable Blackness The Rise And Fall Of Jack Johnson-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review Unforgivable Blackness is likely to be the definitive biography of Jack Johnson . . . A significant achievement. Geoffrey Ward provides an utterly convincing and frequently heartrending portrait of Jack Johnson. --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of BooksA formidable accomplishment . . . Ward has successfully brought this deep and colorful personality, this insufficiently understood and altogether amazing man, back to life. --David Margolick, The New York Times Book ReviewBrings [Johnson] to life in all his vulgar, splendid glory. Engrossing and definitive, Unforgivable Blackness is a great biography of a great and utterly fascinating subject. --Allen Barra, The Philadelphia InquirerAn engaging and well-researched popular biography . . . Throughout the book, Johnsons energy never flags, and neither does our interest. [Ward] has drawn a portrait of a fascinating figure, whose oversized personality fills every page. --Bruce Schoenfeld, Washington Post Book World“This remarkable book is at one and the same time a rousing story, a terrific biography, and first-rate history. With immense skill, Geoffrey Ward has not only brought Jack Johnson back to life but has provided a telling window onto what it was like to be a great black athlete in early-twentieth-century America.” -Doris Kearns Goodwin“Geoffrey Ward’s Unforgivable Blackness is a stunning exploration in the unbelievable bigotry of whites in early-twentieth-century America.” -David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois In this vivid biography Geoffrey C. Ward brings back to life the most celebrated - and the most reviled - African American of his age. Jack Johnson battled his way out of obscurity and poverty in the Jim Crow South to win the title of heavyweight champion of the world. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled simply to exist, he reveled in his riches and his fame, sleeping with whomever he pleased, to the consternation and anger of much of white America. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure prison and seven years of exile. This definitive biography portrays Jack Johnson as he really was--a battler against the bigotry of his era and the embodiment of American individualism. From the Back Cover He was the first black heavyweight champion in history, the most celebrated-and most reviled-African American of his age. In Unforgivable Blackness, the prizewinning biographer Geoffrey C. Ward brings to vivid life the real Jack Johnson, a figure far more complex and compelling than the newspaper headlines he inspired could ever convey. Johnson battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks and in 1908 won the greatest prize in American sports-one that had always been the private preserve of white boxers. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled just to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. And at a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased, and married three. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure a year of prison and seven years of exile. Ward points out that to most whites (and to some African Americans as well) he was seen as a perpetual threat-profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.Unforgivable Blackness is the first full-scale biography of Johnson in more than twenty years. Accompanied by more than fifty photographs and drawing on a wealth of new material-including Johnsons never-before-published prison memoir-it restores Jack Jo...

-Titulo Original : River Of Fire On Becoming An Activist-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: “River of Fire is Sister Helen’s story leading up to her acclaimed book Dead Man Walking-it is thought-provoking, informative, and inspiring. Read it and it will set your heart ablaze!”-Mark Shriver, author of Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis The nation’s foremost leader in efforts to abolish the death penalty shares the story of her growth as a spiritual leader, speaks out about the challenges of the Catholic Church, and shows that joy and religion are not mutually exclusive. Sister Helen Prejean’s work as an activist nun, campaigning to educate Americans about the inhumanity of the death penalty, is known to millions worldwide. Less widely known is the evolution of her spiritual journey from praying for God to solve the world’s problems to engaging full-tilt in working to transform societal injustices. Sister Helen grew up in a well-off Baton Rouge family that still employed black servants. She joined the Sisters of St. Joseph at the age of eighteen and was in her forties when she had an awakening that her life’s work was to immerse herself in the struggle of poor people forced to live on the margins of society. Sister Helen writes about the relationships with friends, fellow nuns, and mentors who have shaped her over the years. In this honest and fiercely open account, she writes about her close friendship with a priest, intent on marrying her, that challenged her vocation in the “new territory of the heart.” The final page of River of Fire ends with the opening page of Dead Man Walking, when she was first invited to correspond with a man on Louisiana’s death row. River of Fire is a book for anyone interested in journeys of faith and spirituality, doubt and belief, and “catching on fire” to purpose and passion. It is a book, written in accessible, luminous prose, about how to live a spiritual life that is wide awake to the sufferings and creative opportunities of our world.“Prejean chronicles the compelling, sometimes-difficult journey to the heart of her soul and faith with wit, honesty, and intelligence. A refreshingly intimate memoir of a life in faith.”-Kirkus Reviews Review “Compelling and down-to-earth, River of Fire is a deeply authentic memoir of faith in action. We need Sister Helen’s courageous and committed example of how to live fueled by a faith that does separate us from each other, but throws us wholeheartedly into the complicated, messy, and often tragic elements of humanity.”-Kate Hennessy, author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty“Sister Prejean’s radical openness and bracing honesty about her own faith journey is as refreshing and compelling as it is demanding and questioning. If you’ve ever wondered what ‘faith’ asks of you, you must read this book. It will turn your world upside down as you witness the conversion of a pious, sheltered nun into a fiery, faithful freedom fighter for the poor and the marginal. It set my own heart on fire, as I followed her quest to set the heart of the world aflame with passion for justice.”-Serene Jones, author of Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World “Sister Helen Prejean is one of the great moral leaders of our time. Her superb new memoir, River of Fire, is the inviting and inspiring story of her early days as a Catholic sister. A born storyteller, Sister Helen leads you, with her fierce intelligence and lively wit, from her entrance into a novitiate that still practiced the traditional ways of spiritual formation, to the volcanic changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, to the initial stirrings of understanding what ‘social justice’ meant in action. River of Fire is a book to read and treasure, and Sister Helen’s is a life to celebrate and honor.”-James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything“Helen Prejean’s account of her journey to ‘get Jesus right’ is rich in warm insights, tenderly human, and a full account of life in the American Church during the last sixt...

-Titulo Original : The Central Park Five The Untold Story Behind One Of New York Citys Most Infamous Crimes-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review Riveting. . . An important book.” -The Cleveland Plain Dealer“Burns’s gripping tale may serve as an allegory for some of the most pressing criminal justice issues of our time.” -The New York Times Book Review“This is a controversial and important book, presenting a powerful argument that the minority youths who are convicted of raping and nearly murdering “the Central Park Jogger” were innocent of that crime (though not necessarily of other violent crimes committed in Central Park that night). It demonstrates that our justice system is far from full proof even in the face of alleged confession, eyewitness and forensic evidence. Were these false convictions based on understandable mistakes? Or were they based on racial stereotyping? Read this fine book and make up your own mind.” -Alan M. Dershowitz, author of The Trials of ZionBurns is a calm, lucid, and concise writer.--NPR“Gripping from start to finish, The Central Park Five is an unvarnished look at one of the most infamous crimes in New York City history. You may think you know the true story of the Central Park jogger, but you don’t. Sarah Burns tells a harrowing story, in which her only allegiance is to the truth.” -Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland“Remarkable…Straightforward, thought-provoking reportage.” -Booklist “A riveting retrospective.” -News Blaze A spellbinding account of the real facts of the Central Park jogger case that powerfully reexamines one of New York Citys most notorious crimes and its aftermath. *A must-read after watching Ava DuVernays When They See Us On April 20th, 1989, two passersby discovered the body of the Central Park jogger crumpled in a ravine. Shed been raped and severely beaten. Within days five black and Latino teenagers were apprehended, all five confessing to the crime. The staggering torrent of media coverage that ensued, coupled with fierce public outcry, exposed the deep-seated race and class divisions in New York City at the time. The minors were tried and convicted as adults despite no evidence linking them to the victim. Over a decade later, when DNA tests connected serial rapist Matias Reyes to the crime, the government, law enforcement, social institutions and media of New York were exposed as having undermined the individuals they were designed to protect. Here, Sarah Burns recounts this historic case for the first time since the young mens convictions were overturned, telling, at last, the full story of one of New York’s most legendary crimes. About the Author Sarah Burns graduated from Yale University in 2004 with a degree in American studies and went on to work for Moore & Goodman, a small civil rights law firm based in New York. She is now producing a documentary film with Ken Burns based on this book. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The day it happened, Wednesday, April 19, 1989, Raymond Santana, Jr., walked over to the Taft Houses in East Harlem to visit a friend. Raymond, whose family had moved to New York from Puerto Rico before he was born, lived with his father and grandmother in an apartment building on 119th Street, a few blocks north of the project, but he often hung out in the courtyard of the Taft Houses, where some of his friends lived. At fourteen, he was of average size-about five six and 130 pounds-with curly hair and small features. He was well liked at school, where his good sense of humor made him popular with girls. Even though there were always kids playing sports around the neighborhood, especially basketball and football in local school yards and the decrepit project courtyards, Raymond was more interested in drawing. He took art classes and spent a lot of his free time sketching.As Raymond sat with his friend in the Taft courtyard that warm afternoon, a bunch of kids who lived there and in the surrounding buildings arrived. One of the boys in the group was Antron McCray, a...

-Titulo Original : On The Move A Life-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review “Intimate. . . . Brim[s] with life and affection.” -The New York Times“[A] wonderful memoir, which richly demonstrates what an extraordinary life it has been. . . . A fascinating account-a sort of extended case study, really-of Sacks’ remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood.” -Los Angeles Times“A glorious memoir. . . . In this volume Sacks opens himself to recognition, much as he has opened the lives of others to being recognized in their fullness.” -The Atlantic “Pulses with his distinctive energy and curiosity.” -The New York Review of Books“A beautiful vision, one that embraces an infinite spectrum of wonder. . . . On the Move illustrates what an exceptional human being he is. . . . He is fascinated by seemingly everything, and, damn, the man can write.” -Salon “Marvelous. . . . He studies himself as he has studied others: compassionately, unblinkingly, intelligently, acceptingly and honestly.” -The Wall Street Journal “Sacks’ ability to enact and celebrate intuition in medicine and precision in art is singular.” -The New York Times Book Review “[Sacks is] a wonderful storyteller. . . . It’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.” -San Francisco Chronicle “Remarkably candid and deeply affecting. . . . Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, ‘joining particulars with generalities’ and, especially, ‘narratives with neuroscience’-have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book.” -The Boston Globe “Intriguing. . . . When describing his patients and their problems, he is attentive and precise, straightforward and sympathetic, and he brings these worthy qualities to his descriptions of his younger self.” -The Washington Post “A compelling read. . . . Offers a glimpse into one of the greatest minds of our time.” -Men’s Journal “What a self this book reveals! A man animated by boundless curiosity, wide-ranging intelligence, gratitude for flawed humanity, perseverance despite setbacks. . . . We’re lucky to have all the books, including On the Move. It’s intensely, beautifully, incandescently alive.” -Newsday “An ebullient telling of a remarkable life.” -Paste “This remarkable man lifts us all. . . . [On the Move] is not only a record of his life-affirming characterological extravagance but also a meditation on what it is to be human in an age of medical arrogance and the numbing clout of technology.” -The Los Angeles Review of Books “An unforgettably passionate, joyous journey.” -The Daily Beast “[A] beautifully constructed and moving memoir. . . . His life and work are a gift.” -The Times Literary Supplement (London) “Moving. . . . Written with exceptional grace and clarity.” -Richmond Times-Dispatch A New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage, Slate, Men’s JournalWhen Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life-from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists-W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick-who have influenced his work. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. About the Author Oliver Sacks was a physician, writer, and professor of neurology. Born in London in 1933, he moved to New York City in 1965, where he launched his medical career and began writing case studies of his patients. Called the “poet laureate of m...

-Titulo Original : Where Is The Mango Princess? A Journey Back From Brain Injury-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family. When her husband Alan is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality-and the complexities of the heart.Outstanding Book Award Winner from the American Society of Journalists and Authors Review [S]imply amazing. [An] astonishing alchemical story of tragedy and recovery.--Anne Lamott, author of Traveling MerciesA portrait of family tragedy all the more poignant for mixing humor with blazing honesty.--ElleTranscends the subject of illness to become an inspiring meditation on the enduring nature of love.--Us Weekly From the Inside Flap Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family.When her husband Alan is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality-and the complexities of the heart. From the Back Cover Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family. When her husband Alan is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality-and the complexities of the heart. About the Author Cathy Crimmins has written several humor books, and her articles have appeared in The Village Voice, Redbook, Readers’ Digest, and Glamour, among other publications. She received the Outstanding Book Award in General Nonfiction for Where is the Mango Princess? from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She taught nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. She died in 2009 at the age of 54. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PrologueAccidents divide things into the great Before and After.Even before his brain injury, Alan had a hard time remembering names, Ill say. Since Daddys accident, I have to work more, I tell our daughter, Kelly. The brain injury community marks time by asking how long someone has been out of injury, the same way bereavement counselors ask how long your loved one has been dead. Six months out, two years out, ten years out.Out of what, exactly?Out of the giant crevice that has been exploded into the bedrock of your life.Heres how I see it: One day, you and your family are hiking across a long, solid plain, when out of the sky comes a blazing meteor that just happens to hit one family member on the head. The meteor creates a huge rift in...

-Titulo Original : My Age Of Anxiety Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review A Washington Post Notable BookA Seattle Times Best Book of the Year“Scott Stossel has produced the definitive account of anxiety. . . . This story has needed to be told.” -Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon“Enlightening, empowering. . . . Brave and . . . potentially therapeutic.” -The Washington Post“Sheds light not just on a particular disorder but on the human condition that gives rise to it.” -The Wall Street Journal“Brings to this story depth, intelligence, and perspective that could enlighten untold fellow sufferers for years to come.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love“A carefully reported, wryly funny, and admirably honest historical and personal investigation.” -Elle “[An] erudite, heartfelt, and occasionally darkly funny meld of memoir, cultural history, and science. . . . Excruciatingly relevant.” -O, The Oprah Magazine “Bravely intimate. . . . Dazzlingly comprehensive.” -The New York Times Book Review “Admirably done. . . . Intelligent, interesting, and well written.” -The New Yorker “First-rate. . . . Fascinating. . . . [A] triumph.” -The Boston Globe “There is much pain here, but humor, too. . . . Without meaning to, Stossel has written a self-help manual.” -Newsday “Quite impressive. . . . [Stossel is] a terrific, companionable writer.” -Forbes“With humor, insight and intense research, [Stossel] sheds light on the disorder that is believed to affect one in seven Americans. From a historical overview to a review of current treatments in a book laced with fascinating personal anecdotes, Stossel delivers authentic perspective on such suffering. “ -New York Daily News “Scott Stossel’s new book on his lifelong struggle with severe anxiety is outstanding in the fullest sense of the word. . . . Both conspicuous and superior within its genre.” -The Seattle Times “Books exploring personal experiences of mental illness tend to be either over-wrought accounts of personal trauma that shed little light on the world beyond the author’s nose, or the more detached observations of scientists and medics. It is rare to find works that bridge these objectives, which is one reason that the writer Andrew Solomon achieved such success with The Noonday Demon. . . . Stossel’s book deserves a place on this higher shelf.” -Nature “Powerful, eye-opening and funny. Pitch-perfect in his storytelling, Stossel reminds us that, in many important ways, to be anxious is to be human.” -The Dallas Morning News “An immense achievement. . . . Superbly wide-ranging. . . . With this substantial treatment, Stossel has done justice to himself and his subject.” -The Daily Telegraph (London) “An extraordinary literary performance. . . . In an age inundated by memoirs and psychic self-help books, My Age of Anxiety is the rare memoir that tells an entirely compelling story, and the rare self-help book that really helps. You, and many thousands of readers along with you, will laugh until you cry.” -Bookforum A bravely intimate [and] dazzlingly comprehensive history (The New York Times Book Review) of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety-from an acclaimed journalist with his own longstanding battle with this often misunderstood affliction. Drawing on his own experience with anxiety, Scott Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history. We discover the well-known who have struggled with the condition, as well as the afflicted generations of Stossels own family. Revealing anxietys myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll-its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze. He also explores how individual sufferers-including himself-have managed and controll...

-Titulo Original : Zeitoun-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.A New York Times Notable Book An O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of the YearA Huffington Post Best Book of the Year A New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Decade Review A New York Times Notable Book An O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year A New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Decade“Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. . . . Eggers’ tone is pitch-perfect-suspense blended with just enough information to stoke reader outrage and what is likely to be a typical response: How could this happen in America? . . . It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction. . . . Fifty years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.” -Timothy Egan, The New York Times Book Review “[A] heartfelt book, so fierce in its fury, so beautiful in its richly nuanced, compassionate telling of an American tragedy, and finally, so sweetly, stubbornly hopeful.” -The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) “Zeitoun is a riveting, intimate, wide-scanning, disturbing, inspiring nonfiction account of a New Orleans married couple named Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun who were dragged through their own special branch of Kafkaesque (for once the adjective is unavoidable) hell after Hurricane Katrina. . . . [It’s] unmistakably a narrative feat, slowly pulling the reader into the oncoming vortex without literary trickery or theatrical devices, reminiscent of Mailer’s Executioner’s Song but less craftily self-conscious in the exercise of its restraint. Humanistic, that is, in the highest, best, least boring sense of the word.” -James Wolcott, Vanity Fair “A major achievement and [Eggers’s] best book yet.” -The Miami Herald “Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book.” -Neil Steiberg, Chicago Sun-Times “Which makes you angrier-the authorities’ handling of Hurricane Katrina or the treatment of Arabs since Sept. 11, 2001? Can’t make up your mind? Dave Eggers has the book for you. . . . Zeitoun is a warm, exciting and entirely fresh way of experiencing Hurricane Katrina. . . . Eggers makes this account completely new, and so infuriating I found myself panting with rage.” -Dan Baum, San Francisco Chronicle“A masterpiece of compassionate reporting about a shamef...

-Titulo Original : Absolutely American Four Years At West Point-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: A superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life.... Powerful.... Wonderfully told. --The New York Times Book ReviewAs David Lipsky follows a future generation of army officers from their proving grounds to their barracks, he reveals the range of emotions and desires that propels these men and women forward. From the cadet who struggles with every facet of West Point life to those who are decidedly huah, Lipsky shows people facing challenges so daunting and responsibilities so heavy that their transformations are fascinating to watch. Absolutely American is a thrilling portrait of a unique institution and those who make up its ranks.With an updated Epilogue by the author.NATIONAL BESTSELLER Review “A superb description of modern military culture and one of the most gripping accounts of university life. . . . Powerful. . . . Wonderfully told.” -The New York Times Book ReviewDavid Lipskys up close and personal account of life at West Point is a national service. It takes the reader deep inside one of Americas most important institutions.”--Tom Brokaw “Addictive . . . a story that could inspire even nonmilitary buffs to follow the cadets’ careers like those of their favorite sports heroes.” -Newsweek“A fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line. Take a good look: this is the face America turns to most of the world, and until now it’s one that most of us have never seen.-Time “Immesely rich. . . . A genuinely evocative and wonderfully detailed portrait of an absolutely American institution.” -Newsday“Wonderfully engaging, a surprisingly nuanced portrait of these cadets.”-The Atlanta Journal-ConsitutionDuty, Honor, Casual Sex: Plain American hedonism is powerful at West Point, David Lipsky found, but so are discipline and self-sacrifice . . . A superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. This book must have been extremely hard to organize, and yet it reads with a novelistic flow. How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book. -David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review“A labour of love. While Lipsky’s friends back home wrestled with nagging, existential questions, he steeped himself in the demanding yet salubrious routines of cadet life, reveling in the youngsters’ comaraderie and marveling at their commitment to the academy’s core values, “Duty, Honor, Country.” The result is an immensely rich collection of portraits of young men and women put under very adult pressure by an insitution that itself must constantly adapt to the society around it. Lipsky [establishes] a dramatic tension that holds for the next 300-plus pages. [A] genuinely evocative and wonderfully detailed portrait of an absolutely American institution.”-Newsday“A fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line. Lipsky approaches the cadets like an anthropologist stalking the elusive Yanomamo tribe, and with good reason: he’s in a weird, weird place. Take a good look: this is the face America turns to most of the world, and until now it’s one that most of us have never seen. A mesmerizing and powerfully human spectacle”-Time Magazine“Masculinity has traditionally been associated with the military. Absolutely American, which vividly traces West Point cadets through their four years at the Academy, deals with both sexes and tells a lot about the changing definitions and conditions of masculinity and femininity in the new century.”-Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post Book World“Illuminating. . .Lipsky has done a distinguished service to a proud school.”-Entertainment Weekly“Although confined to one geographic area, Absolutely American covers a vast sociological, political and psychological landscape. . .neither an institutional hagiography nor a scathing, Sey...

-Titulo Original : My Dark Places-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. Review James Ellroys trademark is his language: it is sometimes caustically funny and always brazen. When hes hitting on all cylinders, as he is in My Dark Places, his style makes punchy rhythms out of short sentences using lingo such as scoot (dollar), trim (sex), and brace (to interrogate). But the premise for My Dark Places is what makes it especially compelling: Ellroy goes back to his own childhood to investigate the central mystery behind his obsession with violence against women--the death of his mother when he was 10 years old. Its hard to imagine a more psychologically treacherous, more self-exposing way in which to write about true crime. The New York Times calls it a strenuously involving book.... Early on, Mr. Ellroy makes a promise to his dead mother that seems maudlin at first: I want to give you breath. But hes done just that and--on occasion--taken ours away. Review Ellroy is more powerful than ever.--The Nation Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant.--Philadelphia Inquirer From the Back Cover Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant. --Philadelphia Inquirer In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. Ellroy is more powerful than ever. --The Nation About the Author James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. He is also the author of two collections, Crime Wave and Destination: Morgue! and two memoirs My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse. Ellroy currently lives in Denver, Colorado. jamesellroy Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. My father put me in a cab at the El Monte depot. He paid the driver and told him to drop me at Bryant and Maple.I didnt want to go back. I didnt want to leave my father. I wanted to blow off El Monte forever.It was hot--maybe ten degrees more than L.A. The driver took Tyler north to Bryant ...

-Titulo Original : Create Dangerously The Power And Responsibility Of The Artist-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: About the Author Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger-now one of the most widely read novels of this century-in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. “To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing.” In 1957, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Albert Camus gave a speech entitled Create Dangerously, effectively a call to arms for artists, in particular those who came from an immigrant background, like he did. Camus understood the necessity of those making art as a part of civil society. A bold cry for artistic freedom and responsibility, his words today remain as timely as ever. In this new translation, Camuss message, available as a stand-alone little book for the first time, will resonate with a new generation of writers and artists. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IThe most important honest response possible is this: it does, in fact, sometimes happen that art is a deceitful luxury. As we well know, we can, anywhere and forever, admire the constellations from the rear deck of the galley while the slaves in the hold keep rowing, growing more and more exhausted; we can always hear the worldly conversations taking place in the seats of the amphitheater while the lion’s teeth tear into his victim. And it is very difficult to object about something in art that has known such great success in the past. Except for this: things have changed somewhat, and, in particular, the number of slaves and martyrs throughout the world has increased tremendously. In the face of such misery, art-­if it wishes to continue to be a luxury-­must today accept that it is also deceitful.What would art speak of, in fact? If it were to conform to what the majority of our society asks of it, art would be merely entertaining, without substance. If artists were to blindly reject society, and choose to isolate themselves in their dreams, they would express nothing but negativity. We would thus have only the works of entertainers or experts in the theory of form, which, in both cases, would result in art being cut off from the reality of life. For nearly a century now, we have been living in a society that is not even the society of money (money and gold can arouse human passions); rather, it is a society full of the abstract symbols of money. Consumer society can be defined as a society in which objects disappear and are replaced by symbols. When the ruling class no longer measures its wealth in acres of land or gold bars, but rather by how many digits ideally correspond to a certain number of financial transactions, then that society immediately links itself to a certain kind of trickery at the very heart of its experience and its world. A society based on symbols is, in its essence, an artificial society in which the physical truth of humankind becomes a hoax.We would then not be at all surprised to learn that such a society had chosen a type of morality based on formal principles, which it then turns into its religion; and such a society would inscribe the words freedom and equality on both its prisons and its hallowed financial institutions. However, these words cannot be prostituted with impunity. The value that is most vilified today is most certainly the value of freedom. Thinking people-­I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of intelligence, intelligent intelligence and stupid intelligence-­hold as a doctrine that freedom is nothing more than an obstacle on the path to true progress. But such solemn stupidities could only be put forward because for one hundred years, consumer society made an exclusive and unilateral use of freedom, considering it a right rather than an obligation and not fearing to use the principle of f...

-Titulo Original : Duty Memoirs Of A Secretary At War-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Review A 2014 New York Times Notable Book“Probably one of the best Washington memoirs ever...Historians and policy wonks will bask in the revelations Gates provides on major decisions from late 2006 to 2011, the span of his time at the Pentagon…Gates is doing far more than just scoring points in this revealing volume. The key to reading it is understanding that he was profoundly affected by his role in sending American soldiers overseas to fight and be killed or maimed.” -Thomas E. Ricks, The New York Times Book Review “Touching, heartfelt...fascinating...Gates takes the reader inside the war-room deliberations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and delivers unsentimental assessments of each man’s temperament, intellect and management style...No civilian in Washington was closer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than Gates. As Washington and the rest of the country were growing bored with the grinding conflicts, he seemed to feel their burden more acutely.” -Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post “Forthright, impassioned…highly revealing about decision making in both the Obama and Bush White Houses…[Gates’] writing is informed not only by a keen sense of historical context, but also by a longtime Washington veteran’s understanding of how the levers of government work or fail to work. Unlike many careful Washington memoirists, Gates speaks his mind on a host of issues…[he] gives us his shrewd take on a range of foreign policy matters, an understanding of his mission to reform the incoherent spending and procurement policies of the Pentagon, and a tactile sense of what it was like to be defense secretary during two wars.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one.”-Jack Keane, The Wall Street Journal“A compelling memoir and a serious history…A fascinating, briskly honest account [of a] journey through the cutthroat corridors of Washington and world politics, with shrewd, sometimes eye-popping observations along the way about the nature of war and the limits of power.…Gates was a truly historic secretary of defense…precisely because he did get so much done…His descriptions of how he accomplished these feats-the mix of cooptation and coercion that he employed-should be read by every future defense secretary, and executives of all stripes, as a guide for how to command and overhaul a large institution.”-Fred Kaplan, Slate “A breathtakingly comprehensive and ultimately unsparing examination of the modern ways of making politics, policy, and war…Students of the nation’s two early twenty-first century wars will find the comprehensive account of Pentagon and White House deliberations riveting. General readers will be drawn to [Gates’] meditations on power and on life at the center of great political decisions…His vision is clear and his tale is sad. Gates takes ‘Duty’ as his title, but the account of his service also brings to mind the other two thirds of the West Point motto: ‘honor’ and ‘country.’”-David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe “Duty…is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of what makes Washington tick.” -Edward Luce, Financial Times “Gates has offered…an informed and…earnest perspective, one that Americans ought to hear, reflect on and debate.” -Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic“Engaging and candid….Young people who want to understand and live up to the highest ideals of American statesmanship would do well to read this book carefully; Gates has much to teach about the practical idealism that represents the best kind of American leadership.”-Foreign Affairs “Compelling…trenchant.” -Newsday“This is a serious, thoughtful, illuminating, and valuable insider account of the final years of the George W. Bush administration and early years of the Obama presidency….Gates holds little back in this revealing memoir.” -Choice “If you read only one book by a Washington insider this year, make it this one. It should be savored by anyone who wishes to know more about t...

-Titulo Original : Driving Over Lemons An Optimist In Spain-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: From the Inside Flap Driving Over Lemonsis the contagiously entertaining account of one couples beginning a new life as they turn a rundown peasant farm in southern Spain into a home.When Chris Stewart first sees El Valero, hes willing to overlook its lack of electricity, running water, or access road. Assured that hes bought a paradise for pennies, he phones his wife, Ana, still in England, whose enthusiasm is a little more tempered. Together they embark on an undertaking that includes rebuilding the house, feeding and housing a former owner reluctant to leave, the threat of drought (and flood), a cultural misunderstanding, and the creation of a whole new, fulfilling, enviable life A funny, generous, wonderfully written account of a family making a life and home in remote but enchanting southern Spain-from the first drummer of the rock band Genesis. No sooner had Chris Stewart set eyes on El Valero than he handed over a check. Now all he had to do was explain to Ana, his wife, that they were the proud owners of an isolated sheep farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain. That was the easy part.Lush with olive, lemon, and almond groves, the farm lacks a few essentials-running water, electricity, an access road. And then theres the problem of rapacious Pedro Romero, the previous owner who refuses to leave. A perpetual optimist, whose skill as a sheepshearer provides an ideal entree into his new community, Stewart also possesses an unflappable spirit that, we soon learn, nothing can diminish. Wholly enchanted by the rugged terrain of the hillside and the people they meet along the way-among them farmers, including the ever-resourceful Domingo, other expatriates and artists-Chris and Ana Stewart build an enviable life, complete with a child and dogs, in a country far from home. Review Take half a cup of Bill Bryson, mix with three tablespoons of Peter Mayle, then add just a pinch of Monty Python, and what you get is Driving Over Lemons.- Chicago TribuneA wonderful antidote to...modern electronic life. I love this book.-Peter Mayle, author of A Year in ProvenceThis funny book is required reading for anyone who has ever dreamed of taking up the pastoral life in a foreign country.- Travel & Leisure The ability to write hilarious travelogues... may well be a national characteristic [of the English]. Its certainly possessed by Chris Stewart.- The New York Times Book Review From the Back Cover Driving Over Lemons is the contagiously entertaining account of one couples beginning a new life as they turn a rundown peasant farm in southern Spain into a home. When Chris Stewart first sees El Valero, hes willing to overlook its lack of electricity, running water, or access road. Assured that hes bought a paradise for pennies, he phones his wife, Ana, still in England, whose enthusiasm is a little more tempered. Together they embark on an undertaking that includes rebuilding the house, feeding and housing a former owner reluctant to leave, the threat of drought (and flood), a cultural misunderstanding, and the creation of a whole new, fulfilling, enviable life About the Author Chris Stewart lives in Spain with his wife, Ana, and daughter, Chloe. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1El ValeroWell, this is no good, I dont want to live here! Isaid as we drove along yet another tarmac road behind a rowof whitewashed houses. I want to live in the mountains, for heavens sake, not in the suburbs of some town in a valley.Shut up and keep driving, ordered Georgina, the woman sitting beside me. She lit another cigarette of strong black tobacco and bathed me in a cloud of smoke.Id only met Georgina that afternoon but it hadnt taken her long to put me in my place. She was a confident young Englishwoman with a peculiarly Mediterranean way of seeming at ease with her surroundings. For the last ten years she had been...

-Titulo Original : Into The Silence The Great War, Mallory, And The Conquest Of Everest-Fabricante : Vintage-Descripcion Original: Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PrefaceOn the morning of June 6, 1924, at a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge high above the East Rongbuk Glacier and just below the lip of Everest’s North Col, expedition leader Lieutenant Colonel Edward Norton said farewell to two men about to make a final desperate attempt for the summit. At thirty-seven, George Leigh Mallory was Britain’s most illustrious climber. Sandy Irvine was a young scholar of twenty- two from Oxford with little previous mountaineering experience. Time was of the essence. Though the day was clear, in the southern skies great rolling banks of clouds revealed that the monsoon had reached Bengal and would soon sweep over the Himalaya and, as one of the climbers put it, “obliterate everything.” Mallory remained characteristically optimistic. In a letter home, he wrote, “We are going to sail to the top this time and God with us, or stamp to the top with the wind in our teeth.”Norton was less sanguine. “There is no doubt,” he confi ded to John Noel, a veteran Himalayan explorer and the expedition’s photographer, “Mallory knows he is leading a forlorn hope.” Perhaps the memory of previous losses weighed on Norton’s mind: seven Sherpas left dead on the mountain in 1922, two more this season, the Scottish physician Alexander Kellas buried at Kampa Dzong during the approach march and reconnaissance of 1921. Not to mention the near misses. Mallory himself, a climber of stunning grace and power, had, on Everest, already come close to death on three occasions. Norton knew the cruel face of the mountain. From the North Col, the route to the summit follows the North Ridge, which rises dramatically in several thousand feet to fuse with the Northeast Ridge, which, in turn, leads to the peak. Just the day before, he and Howard Somervell had set out from an advanced camp on the North Ridge at 26,800 feet. Staying away from the bitter winds that sweep the Northeast Ridge, they had made an ascending traverse to reach the great couloir that clefts the North Face and falls away from the base of the summit pyramid to the Rongbuk Glacier, ten thousand feet below. Somervell gave out at 28,000 feet. Norton pushed on, shaking with cold, shivering so drastically he thought he had succumbed to malaria. Earlier that morning, climbing on black rock, he had foolishly removed his goggles. By the time he reached the couloir, he was seeing double, and it was all he could do to remain standing. Forced to turn back at 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, he was saved by Somervell, who led him across the ice-covered slabs. On the retreat to the North Col, Somervell himself suddenly collapsed, unable to breathe. He pounded his own chest, dislodged the obstruction, and coughed up the entire lining of his throat.By morning Norton had lost his sight, temporarily blinded by the sunlight. In excruciating pain, he contemplated Mallory’s plan of attack. Instead of traversing the face to the couloir, Mallory and Irvine would make for the Northeast Ridge, where only two obstacles barred the way to the summit pyramid: a distinctive tower of black rock dubbed the First Step, and, farther along, the Second Step, a 100- foot bluff that would have to be scaled. Though concerned about Irvine’s lack of experience, Norton had done nothing to alter the composition of the team. Mallory was a man possessed. A veteran of all three British expeditions, he knew Everest better than anyone alive.Two days later, on the morning of June 8, Mallory and Irvine set out from their high camp for the summit. The bright light of dawn gave way to soft shadows as luminous banks of clouds passed over the mountain. Noel Odell, a brilliant climber in support, last saw them alive at 12:50 p.m., faintly from a rocky crag: two small objects moving up the ridge. As the mist rolled in, enveloping their memory in myth, he was the only witness. Mallory and Irvine would not be seen or heard from again....