Bookpedia : Library : Genre : [Global:Letter]

ISBN: 9781594869419

ListPrice: $24.95

Edition: First Edition

Dimensions: 1.10 x 8.90 x 6.00 in

Summary:      Dubbed the "Mayor of Running," Bart Yasso is one of the best-known figures in the sport, but few people know why he started running competitively, how it changed his life, or how his brush with a crippling illness nearly ended his career a decade ago. With insight and humor, "My Life on the Run" chronicles the heatstroke and frostbite, heartache and triumphs he’s experienced while competing in more than 1,000 competitive races during his nearly 30 years with "Runner’s World" magazine.      Yasso gives valuable and practical advice on how to become a runner for life and continually draw joy from the sport. He also offers practical guidance for beginners, intermediate, and advanced runners, such as 5-K, half-marathon, and marathon training schedules including his innovative technique known as the Yasso 800s.      Recounting his adventures in exotic locales like Antarctica, Africa, and Chitwan National Park in Nepal (where he was chased by an angry rhino), Yasso recommends the best exotic marathons for runners who want to grab their passports to test themselves on foreign terrain. With the wit and wisdom of a seasoned insider, he tells runners what they need to know to navigate the logistics of running in an unfamiliar country.      Yasso’s message is this: Never limit where running can take you because each race has the potential for adventure.

ISBN: 0151012180

ListPrice: $25.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: For decades after his death in 1789, John Ledyard was celebrated as the greatest explorer America had ever produced. A veteran of Captain Cook’s final voyage, he walked across nearly all of Russia and suggested to his friend Thomas Jefferson that traversing the American continent was feasible—inspiring the Lewis and Clark expedition. When he died he was preparing to venture into Africa. Once as famous as the Founding Fathers whom he had befriended and beguiled, the “American traveler,” as Ledyard was called, fell into obscurity over the years, reduced to becoming a foot­noted reference in "Moby Dick". Bill Gifford reenacted Ledyard’s 1773 escape from Dartmouth College in a canoe and followed Ledyard’s trail down the length of the Lena River in Siberia. In "Ledyard" he reveals the man in the legend, bringing back an American original and giving us a story that until now has not been fully told.

ISBN: 0060817178

ListPrice: $21.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: "The Prince", Niccolò Machiavelli's handbook on power—how to get it and how to keep it—has been enormously influential in the centuries since it was written, garnering a heady mixture of admiration, fear, and contempt. Its author, born to an established middle-class family, was no prince himself. Machiavelli (1469-1527) worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. Upon the Medici's return to power, however, he found himself summarily dismissed from the government he had served for decades and exiled from the city where he was born. In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli's legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history's finest political thinkers. Ross King's Machiavelli visits fortune-tellers, produces wine on his Tuscan estate, travels Europe tirelessly on horseback as a diplomatic envoy, and is a passionate scholar of antiquity—but above all, a keen observer of human nature.

ISBN: 0060598956

ListPrice: $21.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments—so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two camps: one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors. Peter D. Kramer, himself a practicing psychiatrist and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a new take on this controversial figure, one both critical and sympathetic. He recognizes that although much of Freud's thought is now archaic, the discipline he invented has become an inescapable part of our culture, transforming the way we see ourselves. Freud was a myth-maker, a storyteller, a writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature. The result of Kramer's inquiry is nothing less than a new standard history of Freud by a modern master of his thought.

ISBN: 0060598980

ListPrice: $21.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first foreigners to recognize and trumpet the grandness of the American project. His two-volume classic, "Democracy in America", published in 1835, not only offered a vivid account of what was then a new nation but famously predicted what that nation would become. His startling prescience, as well as the endurance of his political ideas, has firmly established Tocqueville's place in American history; his chronicle of our infancy is a fixture on every American history syllabus. Nearly all of his clairvoyant predictions about American political life, from the influence of Evangelical Christianity to the advent of our "consumer society," have come true—and on the schedule he set. Yet in his own time, Tocqueville had little evidence for the truth of his ideas. Introspective, sickly, prone to self-doubt, he was an unlikely visionary. Joseph Epstein, America's most versatile essayist, proves an ideal guide to his predecessor. In wry, elegant prose, he engages Tocqueville's intellectual contributions, illuminates the development of his thought, and provides a referendum on his various prophecies. (His record was far from perfect—he thought the federal government would wither away as the states rose in power.) "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" is an altogether human portrait of the Frenchman who would become an American icon.

ISBN: 1582345023

ListPrice: $24.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Paul Collins travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of our most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine. A typical book about an American founding father doesn’t start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn’t your typical founding father. A firebrand rebel and a radical on the run, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. In death, his story turns truly bizarre. Shunned as an infidel by every church, he had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a former enemy converting to Paine’s cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine’s honor. But he never got around to it. So what happened to the body of this founding father? Well, it got "lost. "Paine’s missing bones, like saint’s relics, have been scattered for two centuries, and their travels are the trail of radical democracy itself. Paul Collins combines wry, present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden in, among other places, a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Along the way he crosses paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and hellfire ministers—not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys." " " " In the end, Collins’s search for Paine’s body instead finds the soul of democracy—for it is the story of how Paine’s struggles have lived on through his eccentric and idealistic followers.

ISBN: 0670037885

ListPrice: $27.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Despite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase “United States of America,” and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known - and the most controversial - of the American founding fathers. Unlike such friends and allies as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, the world's first crusader for the public good has always remained a somewhat indistinct figure. How this lower- class British tradesman managed not only to have written the cornerstone of American democracy, "Common Sense", but become a revered citizen of the world are questions that have challenged historians for centuries, and have more often than not left us with biographies that are more monumental than illuminating. In Craig Nelson's "Thomas Paine" we now have a rich and vivid portrait that does justice to this towering figure of our history, one that brings him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the heady intellectual exhilaration of the Age of Enlightenment. Nelson traces Paine's path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey to seek his fortune in the New World (in which he arrived on a stretcher, after a nearly deadly bout of shipboard typhus); from his early career as a crusading pamphleteer to his emergence as the heroic voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents; from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris during The Terror to his final years in America, where the once-lionized patriot spent his final days nearly impoverished and in the throes of dementia. Throughout his insightful portrait Nelson takes full account of this paradoxical figure, whom some contemporaries judged as brilliant and charismatic and others disparaged as abrasive and egotistical, a cherished patriot who was nonetheless dismissed by John Adams as a “disastrous meteor” and Teddy Roosevelt as a “dirty little atheist.” Five years in the making, drawing on both the most recent scholarship and the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Paris, London, Lewes, and Thetford, "Thomas Paine" restores this often misunderstood man to the stature that he deserves, and reveals him, a man who famously asserted that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” to be as much a man of our own time as a paragon of the Enlightenment. BACKCOVER: “Thomas Paine has had many biographers, but this is the first book to recover him in his own electrical style. Nelson's account brings Paine to life with all the flaws and foibles flaming away amidst the greatness. The story is poignant and the prose is incandescent.” —Joseph J. Ellis, author, most recently, of "His Excellency: George Washington"

ISBN: 0060759747

ListPrice: $21.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

ISBN: 0140440577

ListPrice: 54.00

Edition: Collector's Edition

Summary: Chosen as one of the ten best adventure books of all time by "National Geographic Adventure." Liveright is proud to reissue a facsimile of its classic 1926 edition of "The Travels of Marco Polo". Beginning from the traditional lyrical Marsden translation, editor Manuel Komroff corrected it against Henry Yule's magisterial two-volume work, including a chapter missing from the Marsden. The artist Witold Gordon created thirty-two two-color woodcut illustrations for the original edition, published again here for the first time in over fifty years. "The Travels of Marco Polo" remains a wondrous adventure narrative. Chronicling the thirteenth-century world from Venice, his birthplace, to the far reaches of Asia, Marco Polo tells of the foreign peoples he meets as he travels by foot, horse, and boat through places including Persia, the land of the Tartars, Tibet, India, and, most important, China. There he stays at the court of Kublai Khan, venturing to the capital of Beijing and to Shangtu, made immortal in Coleridge's poem "Xanadu." This is a gripping look at a legendary place and time. Two-color illustrations.

ISBN: 0131166158

ListPrice: $54.00

Edition: Collector's Edition

Summary:

ISBN: 1599869985

ListPrice: $54.00

Edition: Collector's Edition

Translator: Harry Zohn

Summary: This book is the original zionist classic by Theodor Herzl. The book is about the start of a Jewish state, and played a big role in Israel becoming a state. It is an important text for those studying the history of Israel and Theodor Herzl is undoubtedly the most important author modern Jewish studies. This is also an interesting read for those studying other religions, as Israel plays such a central role to most of the major religions of the world.

ISBN: 1598188992

ListPrice: 450.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Known as the "savior of the Union" during the Civil War, General Grant went on to serve as the 18th president of the United States from 1869-1877. This second volume of his memoirs was completed just days prior to his death from throat cancer in 1885.

ISBN: 1598188992

ListPrice: 450.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Known as the "savior of the Union" during the Civil War, General Grant went on to serve as the 18th president of the United States from 1869-1877. This second volume of his memoirs was completed just days prior to his death from throat cancer in 1885.

ISBN: B000IXTRW6

ListPrice: 165.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Fine copy. Tight binding. no rubbing or apparant wear.

ISBN: 0686172256

ListPrice: $500.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary:

ISBN: B000FLR82W

ListPrice: 35.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary:

ISBN:

ListPrice: 20.00

Edition: Pocket

Summary: This small pocket sized edition has no ISBN nor any search for it in ABE or other biblio resources turns anything up. There is slight wear on teh spine with slight chipping on teh top and bottom of teh spine. There is a two inch long crease on teh front cover. On the fy leaf there is a Name James Clayton written in pen.and "How are you anyway" in pencil.

ISBN: 0691047421

ListPrice: $95.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: This massive collection includes all important letters, speeches, interviews, press conferences, and public papers on Woodrow Wilson. The volumes make available as never before the materials essential to understanding Wilson's personality, his intellectual, religious, and political development, and his careers as educator, writer, orator, and statesman. The Papers not only reveal the private and public man, but also the era in which he lived, making the series additionally valuable to scholars in various fields of history between the 1870's and the 1920's.

ISBN: 155970795X

ListPrice: $24.00

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Born to wealth and privilege, Ned OGorman, a gifted poet, dreamed of becoming a priest. After he had spent a year at the Catholic seminary, the father superior decided poetry and the priesthood could not mix. Wandering in Harlem one day, Ned saw an abandoned storefront and there he met his calling and future: he would start a tuition-free school for the underprivileged. My life has been a trek to discover the other side of loneliness, writes the author. For over 30 years, single-handedly, without fanfare, and on a shoestring, Ned OGorman has opened his doors to the children of the streets of Harlem, taking their already bent or broken lives and giving them hope for the first time. Offering them an education, he has squired most of them into the school system and often to universities. New York is still a terrible city for children of the oppressed, and no matter how gentrification and upscale shops and public places might brighten the darkness of racism, children remain victims. My schools will continue, I hope, to do a job of service to the children who come to them. For arent children the music out of which poems are made? This is the story of a beautiful life, as moving as it is enlightening.

ISBN: 1401352227

ListPrice: $23.95

Edition: Reprint

Summary: Cheryl Ladd is best known from her many years on television, starring in Charlie's Angels and currently appearing in the hit NBC-TV show Las Vegas. But what many people don't know is that she's an avid golfer who regularly plays on the celebrity pro-am circuit. In fact, she is one of the most sought-after players worldwide, and for over twenty years has partnered with many of the world's best golfers from the PGA and LPGA tours. When playing side by side with these top golfers, Cheryl feels like the 'ultimate hacker in heaven.' Golf has become her passion.

ISBN: 0805063897

ListPrice: $13.00

Edition: Reprint

Summary: Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet. As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test. So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. "--Lesley Reed"

ISBN: 0670855456

ListPrice: $34.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: The name of Albert Einstein has become synonymous with supreme wisdom and benignity. Not only was he responsible for the fundamental remapping of our understanding of the physical cosmos, he also left a legacy of outspokenness on the crucial moral, political, and religious issues of the twentieth century. Drawing on an unprecedented number of sources, Albrecht F|lsing throws into fresh relief the remarkable life of Einstein, approaching the man through the science and situating him in the creatively charged times in which he thrived. Albert Einstein is both an engaging portrait of a genius and a distillation of scientific thought. F|lsing sheds light on Einstein's development and the complexity of his being: his childhood idiosyncrasies, his views on war and peace, his stimulating friendships with colleagues, and his intense relationships with women. This is a serious yet highly readable and intimate account of the genius who expanded our understanding of nature and of the singular man who played such an exceptional role in the cultural growth of this century.

ISBN: 0486225445

ListPrice: $15.95

Edition: Reprint

Summary: Forget all those New Left memoirs: for readers who want to know what it is to be a revolutionary in America, this is the book to read. At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was probably the most hated woman in her adopted country. (She emigrated from Russia at age 17.) It was bad enough that she was an anarchist, accused of complicity in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. But her vehement espousal of women's rights--including birth control--really enraged upright citizens. Goldman's marvelously militant autobiography gives ample evidence of her gift for bearing a grudge and inability to mince words--she decries fellow leftists at least as often as the bourgeoisie, especially after she is deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 and discovers that the Bolshevik Revolution is not what she hoped for. But Goldman's blazing honesty and unflinching commitment to unpopular causes make her a larger-than-life heroine. She does display the occasional human weakness, including a lengthy romance with a man whose infidelities torment this advocate of free love, but they're less interesting than her heroic challenge to America to live up to its ideals. Whether or not she was literally a bomb thrower remains a matter of debate. For posterity, her words are incendiary enough. "--Wendy Smith"

ISBN: 0822954648

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: Revised

Summary: This book is one of the best books ever writen on the topic. I found this book to be a master pice, if their is just one book that could provied more info one one man this is it. Every one needs to owne a copy of this book. The book inspiered me to grow a my owne welth to alsost a net. of a million dollars! Buy this book Now!

ISBN: 0252011481

ListPrice: $21.00

Edition: Reprint

Summary: Eugene Victor Debs was one of the most prominent labor activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was, perhaps, the most admired openly radical public figure in America's history, running for president on the Socialist ticket in five separate elections, including a 1920 campaign conducted from prison. In the 1912 election, he earned 6 percent of the popular vote (and probably would have gotten more were it not for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign, which was also running on reform sentiments). Yet today he is largely forgotten, at best a footnote in history texts. This biography by Professor Nick Salvatore does much to remedy the situation. It is a richly detailed recounting of Debs's life which demonstrates that Debs fit within a historical tradition of dissent in American politics. Although a professed socialist, he never gave up his commitment to democratic ideals; instead, he added to them an awareness of class and the effects of corporate capitalism that has continued relevance today.

ISBN: 0486225437

ListPrice: $15.95

Edition: Second Edition

Summary: Forget all those New Left memoirs: for readers who want to know what it is to be a revolutionary in America, this is the book to read. At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was probably the most hated woman in her adopted country. (She emigrated from Russia at age 17.) It was bad enough that she was an anarchist, accused of complicity in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. But her vehement espousal of women's rights--including birth control--really enraged upright citizens. Goldman's marvelously militant autobiography gives ample evidence of her gift for bearing a grudge and inability to mince words--she decries fellow leftists at least as often as the bourgeoisie, especially after she is deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 and discovers that the Bolshevik Revolution is not what she hoped for. But Goldman's blazing honesty and unflinching commitment to unpopular causes make her a larger-than-life heroine. She does display the occasional human weakness, including a lengthy romance with a man whose infidelities torment this advocate of free love, but they're less interesting than her heroic challenge to America to live up to its ideals. Whether or not she was literally a bomb thrower remains a matter of debate. For posterity, her words are incendiary enough. "--Wendy Smith"

ISBN: 1741146011

ListPrice: $29.69

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes claims "There is magic in misery." While it would be easy to write off his habit of running for 100 miles at a time—or longer—as mere masochism, it's impossible to not admire his tenacity in pushing his body to reach one extreme goal after another. Sure, it's gory to read about how he lost one of his big toenails from shoe friction during the Western States Endurance Run. But what registers more is that here's a guy competing in an event that includes 38,000 feet of elevation change--the equivalent of scaling the Empire State Building 30 times. Despite his considerable athleticism, "Karno" argues that the first half of any race is run with one's body, and the second half with the mind. Without delving into excessively touchy-feely territory, he explores "the possibilities of self" as he completes an ultra-marathon in 120-degree heat in Death Valley, and later the first-ever marathon at the South Pole. It's an odd combination: a California surfer dude contemplating how, as Socrates said, "Suffering leads to wisdom." But Karnazes's self-motivation is utterly intriguing, and it's impossible to read this memoir without wanting to go out and run a marathon yourself.--"Erica Jorgensen"

ISBN: 0312205287

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary:

ISBN: 0671024256

ListPrice: $14.95

Edition: Reprint

Summary: Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's "On Writing" really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from "Attack of the Giant Leeches", not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with "Carrie". King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in "Misery", the mind-possessing monsters in "The Tommyknockers", and the haunting of the blocked writer in "The Shining" symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, "Cujo", that I barely remember writing." King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why "Hart's War" is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's "Be Cool" could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. "--Tim Appelo"

ISBN: 0312291450

ListPrice: $13.95

Edition: Reprint

Summary: If Chins Could Kill is a delightfully irreverent, yet oddly touching epic of ambition and disappointment, fame and anonymity, and lots of fake blood. Told in Bruces wry, sarcastic voice, it is a Hollywood from the bleacher seats look at his experiences in film and TV and at his status as a cult horror and sci-fi movie god. This man with the face of a matinee idol and the heart of a Stooge first attracted what has grown into an enormous cult following as the star of Sam Raimis legendary Evil Dead trilogy of thriller-comedies. With tireless good humor and biting wit, Bruce acted, produced, and directed his way through a bakers dozen of B horror films and space operas before finally enjoying mainstream stardom on prime-time TV. Deeply earnest and fiercely funny, this book tells the story of an unlikely star who continues to lead a unique double life as cult movie icon and regular Joe.

ISBN: 0131343041

ListPrice: $24.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave--not a stream of corpuscles as Newton proclaimed. In any book on the eye and vision, Young is the London physician who showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-color theory of vision confirmed only in 1959. In any book on ancient Egypt, Young is credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much he knew. Invited to contribute to a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Young offered the following subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focus, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound, Strength, Tides, Waves, and anything of a medical nature. He asked that all his contributions be kept anonymous. While not yet thirty he gave a course of lectures at the Royal Institution covering virtually all of known science. But polymathy made him unpopular in the academy. An early attack on his wave theory of light was so scathing that English physicists buried it for nearly two decades until it was rediscovered in France. But slowly, after his death, great scientists recognized his genius. Today, in an age of professional specialization unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this kind of curiosity selfish, even irresponsible? Here is the story of a driven yet modest hero, the last man who knew everything.

ISBN: 0767924703

ListPrice: $23.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: This gripping and triumphant memoir follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But" No Shortcuts to the Top" is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air. "In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, "No Shortcuts to the Top "is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It is more than the first full account of one of the staggering accomplishments of our time; it is a portrait of a brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.

ISBN: 0060570121

ListPrice: $21.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: In this concise portrait of the great empire builder of the ancient world, the author focuses on Alexander's personal life as well as his military conquests. The result is a shrewd psychological and cultural study of a great figure of the ancient world.

ISBN: 0060590157

ListPrice: $19.95

Summary: One of the first two volumes in Harper’s Eminent Lives series, Korda brings his acclaimed storytelling talents to the life of Ulysses S. Grant - a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of grace, serve two terms as president, write one of the most successful military memoirs in American literature, and is today remembered as a brilliant general but a failed president. Ulysses S. Grant was the first officer since George Washington to become a four-star general in the United States Army, and the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve eight consecutive years in the White House. In this succinct and vivid biography, Michael Korda considers Grant’s character and reconciles the conflicting evaluations of his leadership abilities. Grant’s life played out as a true Horatio Alger story. Despite his humble background as the son of a tanner in Ohio, his lack of early success in the army, and assorted failed business ventures, his unwavering determination propelled him through the ranks of military leadership and into the presidency. But while the general’s tenacity and steadfastness contributed to his success on the battlefield, it both aided and crippled his effectiveness in the White House. Assessing Grant both within the context of his time and in contrast to more recent American leaders, Korda casts a benevolent eye on Grant’s presidency while at the same time conceding his weaknesses. He suggests that though the general’s second term ended in financial and political scandals, the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a horrendous civil war. Ulysses S. Grant is an even-handed and stirring portrait of a man who guided America through a pivotal juncture in its history.

ISBN: 006082333X

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: Francis Crick, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 2004, will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things -- the genetic code. His own discoveries -- though he always worked with one other partner and did much of his thinking in conversation -- include not only the double helix but the whole mechanism of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of the code itself. Matt Ridley's biography traces Crick's life from middle-class mediocrity in the English Midlands, through a lackluster education and six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy, to his leap into biology at the age of thirty-one. While at Cambridge, he suddenly began to display the unique visual imagination and intense tenacity of thought that would allow him to see the solutions to several great scientific conundrums -- and to see them long before most biologists had even conceived of the problems. Having set out to determine what makes living creatures alive and having succeeded, he immigrated at age sixty to California and turned his attention to the second question that had fascinated him since his youth: What makes conscious creatures conscious? Time ran out before he could find the answer.

ISBN: 006075365X

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: George Washington is by far the most important figure in the history of the United States. Against all military odds, he liberated the thirteen colonies from the superior forces of the British Empire and presided over the process to produce and ratify a Constitution that (suitably amended) has lasted for more than two hundred years. In two terms as president, he set that Constitution to work with such success that, by the time he finally retired, America was well on its way to becoming the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Despite his importance, Washington remains today a distant figure to many Americans. Previous books about him are immensely long, multivolume, and complicated. Paul Johnson has now produced a brief life that presents a vivid portrait of the great man as young warrior, masterly commander-in-chief, patient Constitution maker, and exceptionally wise president. He also shows Washington as a farmer of unusual skill and an entrepreneur of foresight, patriarch of an extended family, and proprietor of one of the most beautiful homes in America, which he largely built and adorned. Trenchant and original as ever, Johnson has given us a brilliant, sharply etched portrait of this iconic figure -- both as a hero and as a man.

ISBN: 0060598964

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father. Situating Jefferson within the context of America's evolution and tracing his legacy over the past two hundred years, Hitchens brings the character of Jefferson to life as a man of his time and also as a symbolic figure beyond it. Conflicted by power, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as Minister to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery would shape the future of America's development, this professed proponent of emancipation elided the issue in the Declaration and continued to own human property. An eloquent writer, he was an awkward public speaker; a reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy. Jefferson's statesmanship enabled him to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with France, doubling the size of the nation, and he authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition, opening up the American frontier for exploration and settlement. Hitchens also analyzes Jefferson's handling of the Barbary War, a lesser-known chapter of his political career, when his attempt to end the kidnapping and bribery of Americans by the Barbary states, and the subsequent war with Tripoli, led to the building of the U.S. navy and the fortification of America's reputation regarding national defense. In the background of this sophisticated analysis is a large historical drama: the fledgling nation's struggle for independence, formed in the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, the deformation of that struggle in the excesses of the French Revolution. This artful portrait of a formative figure and a turbulent era poses a challenge to anyone interested in American history -- or in the ambiguities of human nature.