The author recounts his meetings with numerous people during his sixty-year career, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jelly Roll Morton, and Erma Bombeck, and explains why each of them left the world a better or more interesting place

Product Description: A revelatory biography of three glamorous, complex, modern womenEsther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement...read more

Product Description: @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } This annual collector's item is packed with bold, vivid photographs coupled with lively commentary...read more

Product Description: One hundred legendary encounters with the man who has met everyone—Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Bette Davis, Woody Allen, John Lennon, Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Sammy Davis Jr., Jane Fonda, and many more Through his perceptive onscreen interviews over the past five decades, Michael Parkinson has introduced millions of people to the personalities of major international figures in sport, show business, politics, the arts, and journalism...read more

Product Description: Churchill Sizes Up the Giants of His Age, Offers Wisdom for Our OwnWinston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the strength of “his mastery of historical and biographical description.” Nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Great Contemporaries(1937), which features Churchill’s brief lives of those he called “Great Men of our age...read more

The first half of the 20th century was perhaps the most turbulent in history. Two world wars and numerous smaller conflicts significantly changed the geopolitical map, resulting in an unprecedented number of changes throughout the world. Some of the leaders in the period made an indelible mark on their nation and, in some cases, the world; others are scarcely remembered even in their own homeland. Nearly 1,200 emperors, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, premiers, emirs, and other heads of state or government served from 1900 through 1945, and all are included in this comprehensive reference work. Each biographical profile first gives birth and death dates, then gives an account of how the leader came to power and an overview of his or her term in office. The profiles are packed with data.

Product Description: When we read about famous historical events, we may wonder about the firsthand experiences of the people directly involved. What insights could be gained if we could talk to someone who remembered the Civil War, or the battle to win the vote for women, or Thomas Edison's struggles to create the first electric light bulb? Amazingly, many of these experiences are still preserved in living memory by the final survivors of important, world-changing events...read more

Product Description: The transnationalism of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography. This book takes mobility, not nation, as its frame, and captures a rich array of lives, from the elite to the subaltern, that have crossed national, racial and cartographic boundaries...read more

Product Description: This collection of obituaries tells the life stories of two hundred of the world's most captivating people as judged by writers Ann Wroe and Keith Colquhoun and as published in The Economist from 1994 to 2008.Each stylishly written story and accompanying photograph surprises, entertains, and stimulates...read more

Product Description: For the first time, living legends and popular heroes tell teens how they survived their adolescence When they were 11 and 14, respectively, brothers Robert and William Hatch embarked on an ambitious project: to discover how many of their heroes dealt with the challenges of early adolescence...read more

From the pages of People magazine comes a collection of vivid commentary and more than two hundred photographs that profile the most interesting people of 2007, including romantic couples, celebrities, and newsmakers, as well as listings of the Best & Worst Dressed, Most Beautiful, and Most Intriguing individuals of the year. 25,000 first printing.

The Times obituaries have given readers throughout the world an instant picture of a life for over 150 years. For many it is the first port of call in the newspaper. The Times Great Lives is a selection of over 100 of these pieces, reproduced in their entirety, by the current obituaries editor of The Times, Ian Brunskill.

Product Description: A Leader Becomes a Leader opens with a window on history: Henry David Thoreau riding a borrowed horse and wagon into the woods around Concord, Massachusetts to Walden Pond in 1845. There, he writes a classic work that has a powerful effect on the lives and philosophies of seminal leaders in the next century as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Dr...read more

Product Description: "Don't be surprised, Pussycat," said Helen Gurley Brown, still flirtatious at eighty-four, "We're all survivors and proud of it. We want to talk about it."And they do. Eighty of America's most famous eighty year-olds reflect on their journeys to the big 8-0 and describe the passions that keep them young...read more

Product Description: Most of the people in this book will die before the fifth paragraph. You probably haven't heard of any of them. That doesn't mean it s a book about nobodies. That doesn't mean it s a book about death. The obituaries collected here are at times humorous and at times heartbreaking...read more

Product Description: Visionaries brings together the lives and works of 100 great men and women who offered inspiration, hope and healing.The 20th century was marked by wars, dictatorships and environmental destruction, yet many individuals kept alive the hope of a sane and sustainable future through their example, ideas and vision...read more

Product Description: This volume of collected essays intends to highlight the interaction of people and ideas. The grouping of essays focuses on the relationship of people and events. Considered altogether, this collection regards lives observed as a source of historical insight...read more