Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class. Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his por... View More...
From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography. Agassi's incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of thirteen, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he turns pro at sixteen, his new look promises to change tennis forever, as does his lightning-fast... View More...
Meet the real-life figure to rival the fictional Great Gatsby. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America, the compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping life of the notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar Simply put: Everybody came to Polly's. Pearl Polly Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but w... View More...
You know her. You've seen her. You may even see yourself in her. A dying rock star. A tail-less cat. A psychic who said the spirit world wasn't interested in her. Mix in an ex-monk, an eighteen-pound tumor, raging teenage children, cancer, and a whole lot of self-pity and you'll find yourself in the middle of this midlife crisis. This memoir follows a successful middle-aged woman who sometimes drinks too much, has unfulfilling sex, pities herself for being divorced and alone, loses her business along with her self-esteem, and lacks the gratitude to be thankful for the many good things in her l... View More...
Into the Wild meets Walden--a lyrical memoir for nature lovers and for anyone who has wondered what it would be like to disconnect from our hyper-connected culture and seek more meaningful connections After losing vision in one eye and becoming estranged from his family and friends, a young man spent two years searching for identity in self-imposed solitude in the backwoods of northern Vermont, where he embarked on a project of stripping away facades and all social ties--and learned to face himself. On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pi... View More...
Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women's rights advocate, and journalist. Wells's refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a "dangerous radical" in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. In the richly illustrated "To Tell the Truth Freely," the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells's legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Prog... View More...
Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial "dead white men," are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great... View More...
An intimate look at the love that built the Biden family and the delicate balancing act of the woman at its center. How did you get this number? Those were the first words Jill Biden spoke to U.S. senator Joe Biden when he called her out of the blue to ask her on a date. Growing up, Jill had wanted two things: a marriage like her parents'--strong, loving, and full of laughter--and a career. An early heartbreak had left her uncertain about love, until she met Joe. But as they grew closer, Jill faced difficult questions: How would politics shape her family and professional life? And was she read... View More...
Black shows how Eleanor Roosevelt, after being freed from the constraints imposed by her role in the White House, eagerly expanded her career and unabashedly challenged both the Democratic party and American liberals to practice what they preach. View More...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands astride American history like a colossus, having pulled the nation out of the Great Depression and led it to victory in the Second World War. Elected to four terms as president, he transformed an inward-looking country into the greatest superpower the world had ever known. Only Abraham Lincoln did more to save America from destruction. But FDR is such a large figure that historians tend to take him as part of the landscape, focusing on smaller aspects of his achievements or carping about where he ought to have done things differently. Few have tried to assess t... View More...
In Polk, Walter R. Borneman gives us the first complete and authoritative biography of a president often overshadowed in image but seldom outdone in accomplishment. James K. Polk occupied the White House for only four years, from 1845 to 1849, but he plotted and attained a formidable agenda: He fought for and won tariff reductions, reestablished an independent Treasury, and, most notably, brought Texas into the Union, bluffed Great Britain out of the lion's share of Oregon, and wrested California and much of the Southwest from Mexico. On reflection, these successes seem even more impressive, g... View More...
"Rachel beautifully illustrates that loving fiercely and grieving deeply are often two halves of the same whole. Her story will break you down and lift you up." --Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising While on her way to teach a yoga retreat in March 2014, Rachel Brathen collapses at an airport, brought to her knees by excruciating stomach pains. She is rushed to the hospital on the tiny island of Bonaire, and hours later forced to undergo surgery. When she wakes up from anesthesia, her boyfriend is weeping at her bedside. While R... View More...
The #1 New York Times Bestseller An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year Now a Major Motion Picture Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year rou... View More...
It is time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, autonomy, and voice. In our networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more alluring. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even cond... View More...
A Seventeen Magazine Best Book of the Year BuzzFeed senior writer Erin Chack hits you in the guts, the feels, and the funny bone all at once with this collection of personal essays that reads like Sloane Crosley for the Snapchat generation. In turns hysterically funny and heartbreakingly poignant, Erin recounts everything from meeting her soulmate at age 14 to her first chemotherapy session at age 19 to what really goes on behind the scenes at a major Internet media company. She authentically captures the agony and the ecstasy of the millennial experience, whether it's her first kiss ("Sean... View More...
A NEW IN NONFICTION PEOPLE PICK - A TIME TOP 10 NONFICTION BOOK OF 2017 - NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY: The Huffington Post - Glamour - Bustle - RedEye A Los Angeles Times bestseller**One of BookRiot's '11 Books to Help Us Make It Through a Trump Presidency'****One of The Guardian's Essentials for Black History Month**"Whenever I think about Michelle Obama, I think, 'When I grow up, I want to be just like her. I want to be that intelligent, confident, and comfortable in my own skin'." --Roxane Gay"Even after eight years of watching them daily in the press, the fact that the most powerful man i... View More...
"'Nobody's perfect' is the line that most sums up my work," Billy Wilder told writer Charlotte Chandler. "There is no comedy, no drama about perfect people."Film is the Cinderella Art of the 20th century, and Billy Wilder was one of its most legendary figures. When he died recently, Wilder left behind an incredible celluloid legacy. "Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment, Lost Weekend, Sabrina," and other Wilder films have become a part of our shared experience and collective memory.In "Nobody's Perfect," Billy Wilder speaks for himself, in what is as close to an ... View More...
