Archive For The “Biography” Category
By John Schofield
An authoritative biography of 1 of an important figures of the English Reformation who rose from humble beginnings to turn into Henry VIII's leader minister
Thomas Cromwell wielded huge, immense strength whereas he retained the king's want, however the failure of Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves, which Cromwell had prepared, resulted in his speedy downfall and execution. This biography unearths that the preferred picture of him as a blood-stained henchman is basically fictional. special examine into modern resources illuminates his wonderful brain and his love for and patronage of the humanities and arts, whereas brief case experiences shed new gentle on his kin with, and his acceptance between, Henry VIII's topics. the ultimate half narrates the drama of his downfall, and the king's posthumous exoneration of the "most trustworthy servant he ever had."
By Ben Sidran
Publish 12 months note: First released March twenty fifth 2003 by way of Taylor alternate Publishing
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Sidran's splendidly crafted memoir revisits the various various points of his lifestyles and occupation: As a performer, he has recorded with jazz icons (Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks) and rock legends (Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Steve Miller); as a composer, he has scored motion pictures (Hoop Dreams); and as a student he has written books and articles at the heritage of jazz and black track in the United States.
With a charismatic and trained voice, Sidran illuminates scenes from his adolescence in Chicago and offers an inside of view of the recording undefined, additionally revealing an expertise of the historical past of Jewish contributions to jazz.
By David Torrance
Alex Salmond is celebrated in Scotland, the united kingdom and past because the chief of the Scottish nationwide get together and Scotland's First Minister, yet really little is known approximately Salmond as a man or woman, what makes him a Nationalist, what formed his political opinions, and what kind of nation he believes an self sustaining Scotland will be. during this first biography, with which shut colleagues and buddies have co-operated, the acclaimed political biographer David Torrance turns his awareness to probably probably the most able and engaging politicians Scotland has produced within the previous few a long time. employing a raft of released and unpublished fabric, Torrance charts the existence and occupation of Alex Salmond from his schooldays, his political activism at St Andrews collage, his early profession on the Royal financial institution of Scotland, his election because the MP for Banff and Buchan and, in higher intensity than ever earlier than, his spells as chief of the SNP and, from 2007, as First Minister of Scotland.
A masterful paintings with elaborate research' - Dorothy-Grace Elder, Scottish assessment
'Torrance is an industrious historian and an assiduous biographer' - The usher in
By Stefan Zweig
The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) is among the most renowned navigators in background – he used to be the 1st guy to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and led the 1st voyage to circumnavigate the globe, even if he was once killed en course in a conflict within the Philippines.
In this biography, Zweig brings to existence the Age of Discovery by way of telling the story of 1 of the era’s such a lot bold adventurers. In regularly flowing and stylish prose he's taking us on a desirable trip of discovery ourselves.
By Lisa Robinson
From a mythical song journalist with 4 many years of unheard of entry, an insider's behind-the-scenes examine the foremost personalities of rock and roll.
Lisa Robinson has interviewed the most important names in music--including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Patti Smith, U2, Eminem, woman Gaga, Jay Z and Kanye West. She visited the teenage Michael Jackson repeatedly at his Encino domestic. She spent hours speaking to John Lennon at his Dakota apartment--and in recording studios simply weeks sooner than his homicide. She brought David Bowie to Lou Reed at a personal dinner in a long island eating place, helped the conflict and Elvis Costello get their checklist bargains, used to be with the Rolling Stones on their jet in the course of a daunting hurricane, and used to be mid-flight with Led Zeppelin whilst their journey supervisor pulled out a gun. A pioneering woman journalist in an particular boys' membership, Lisa Robinson is a preeminent authority at the personalities and impacts that experience formed the tune global; she has been well-known as rock jounralism's final insider.
A keenly saw and lovingly acknowledged glance again on years spent with numerous musicians behind the curtain, after hours and at the highway, There is going Gravity files a life of riveting tales, informed jointly the following for the 1st time.
By Jonathan Keates
During the last twenty years an entire revolution in Handel's prestige has taken position. he's now obvious either as a colossal determine in track, and as one of many world's favourite composers, with snatches of his paintings accompanying weddings, funerals, and tv advertisements across the world. even though undoubtedly one of many maximum and best-loved of all composers, George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) had obtained little recognition from biographers prior to Jonathan Keates’s masterful biography appeared in 1985. This absolutely up to date and improved version charts intimately Handel’s lifestyles, from his adolescence in Germany, via his brilliantly winning Italian sojourn, to the opulence and squalor of Georgian London. Written with sympathy and penetration approximately this notable genius, it information Handel's profession which abounded in reversals that may have beaten a person with much less resilience and dedication, yet his effect was once deeply felt by way of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Interwoven with the account of Handel’s existence are commentaries on all his significant works, in addition to many much less wide-spread items by means of this such a lot artistic, expressive, and appealing of composers.
By Claire Tomalin
The tumultuous lifetime of England's maximum novelist, fantastically rendered through extraordinary literary biographer Claire Tomalin.
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London effectively campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the ultimate resting position of England's kings and heroes. millions flocked to mourn the simplest famous and enjoyed guy of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them giggle, proven them the squalor and greed of English lifestyles, and likewise the ability of non-public advantage and the energy of usual humans. In his final years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had accrued a fortune.
Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a difficult route to greatness. Born right into a modest middle-class kin, his younger existence was once overturned whilst his profligate father used to be despatched to debtors' legal and Dickens used to be pressured into harsh and humiliating manufacturing unit paintings. but via those early setbacks he built his impressive eye for all that used to be absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London lifestyles. He got down to prevail, and with striking velocity and effort made himself into the best English novelist of the century.
Years later Dickens's daughter wrote to the writer George Bernard Shaw, "If you'll make the general public keep in mind that my father was once now not a joyous, jocose gentleman strolling in regards to the international with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you will drastically oblige me." obvious because the public champion of loved ones concord, Dickens tore his personal lifestyles aside, betraying, deceiving, and breaking with family and friends whereas he pursued an obsessive love affair.
Charles Dickens: A Life provides complete degree to Dickens's heroic stature-his large virtues either as a author and as a person- whereas looking at his failings in either respects with an unblinking eye. popular literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a narrative invaluable of Dickens's personal pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy because the very characteristics that made him great-his indomitable power, boldness, mind's eye, and showmanship-finally destroyed him. the guy who emerges is certainly one of striking contradictions, whose vices and virtues have been intertwined as absolutely as his existence and his art.
By Paul Rees
Robert Plant by way of Paul Rees is the definitive biography of Led Zeppelin's mythical frontman. As lead singer for one of many largest and such a lot influential rock bands of all time—whose music "Stairway to Heaven" has been performed extra occasions on American radio than the other track—Robert Plant outlined what it potential to be a rock god.
Over the process his twenty-year occupation, British track journalist and editor Paul Rees has interviewed such greats as Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Bono, and AC/DC. Rees now bargains a whole portrait of Robert Plant for the 1st time, exploring the forces that formed him, the ravaging highs and lows of the Zeppelin years—including his courting with Jimmy web page and John Bonham—and his lifestyles as a solo artist today.
Illustrated with greater than dozen pictures, Robert Plant: A LIfe is the never-before-told tale of a proficient, complex song icon who replaced the face of rock 'n' roll.
By Blake Bailey
From the acclaimed writer of a sad Honesty: The lifestyles and paintings of Richard Yates comes the unforgettable lifetime of John Cheever (1912–1982), a guy who spent a lot of his occupation impersonating an ideal suburban gentleman, the higher to turn into one of many best chroniclers of postwar the USA. “I used to be born into no precise class,” Cheever mused in his magazine, “and it used to be my selection, early in lifestyles, to insinuate myself into the center category, like a secret agent, in order that i might have an valuable place of assault, yet I look every now and then to have forgotten my undertaking and to have taken my disguises too seriously.” Written with extraordinary entry to crucial sources—including Cheever’s tremendous magazine, just a fraction of which has ever been published—Blake Bailey’s biography finds the stricken yet surprisingly cute guy at the back of the disguises, an artist who extremely joyful within the daily radiance of the area whereas craving, primarily, “to be illustrious.”
Cheever’s used to be a soul in clash: he used to be a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage whereas deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, relations circle; a high-school dropout who released his first tale at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who regularly driven the bounds of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to put in writing the nice novel Falconer; a mystery bisexual who struggled together with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a guy who hid his anxieties in the back of the masks of a genial Westchester squire—a paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers outfits whose global was once peopled via mythical writers and gorgeous girls (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, desire Lange, and John Updike, between them); whose groundbreaking paintings landed him at the covers of Time and Newsweek; a guy whose demons and desperation have been by no means relatively vanquished by means of the enjoyment he present in his work.
Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a author of undying fiction and of the fellow at the back of the web page.
By Sarah Hepola
*A long island occasions BESTSELLER*
"It's any such savage factor to lose your reminiscence, however the loopy factor is, it doesn't damage one bit. A blackout doesn't sting, or stab, or go away a scar while it robs you. shut your eyes and open them back. That's what a blackout feels like."
For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was once "the fuel of all adventure." She spent her evenings at cocktail events and darkish bars the place she proudly stayed until final name. consuming felt like freedom, a part of her birthright as a powerful, enlightened twenty-first-century woman.
But there has been a cost. She usually blacked out, waking up with a clean house the place 4 hours may be. Mornings grew to become detective paintings on her personal lifestyles. What did I say final evening? How did I meet that man? She apologized for issues she couldn't take into account doing, as if she have been cleansing up after an evil dual. Publicly, she lined her disgrace with self-deprecating jokes, and her profession flourished, yet because the blackouts amassed, she might now not stay away from a sinking fact. The gasoline she idea she wanted used to be draining her spirit instead.
A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, BLACKOUT is the tale of a girl stumbling right into a new type of adventure—the sober lifestyles she by no means sought after. Shining a gentle into her blackouts, she discovers the individual she buried, in addition to the arrogance, intimacy, and creativity she as soon as believed got here in simple terms from a bottle. Her story will resonate with an individual who has been pressured to reinvent or struggled within the face of helpful switch. It's approximately giving up the item you cherish most—but getting your self again in return.