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› Find signed collectible books: 'Act One: An Autobiography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre'
Simone de Beauvoirs account of the last ten years of Jean-Paul Sartres life provides a focus for understanding one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. But the book, consisting of both a year-by-year account of Sartres last decade and a conversation between him and de Beauvoir about his life and work, is more than just a philosophical examination. It is also a personal dialogue of astonishing frankness that illuminates one of the most famous and complex relationships of the twentieth century.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ake: The Years of Childhood'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'As They Were'
"Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is a national treasure. For nearly 50 years she has been writing rare, fine prose about so many things that she is nearly impossible to define....In As They Were she has collected a number of essays -- she calls them 'reports' -- into an informal autobiography that wanders from Whittier, California, to the south of France." -- Newsweek
"She deserves the widest possible audience....The restaurants, hotels and markets she visits are aswarm with people and things, all of which she describes in fine detail, making the reader taste and hear and smell and see as few other writers can....Wherever she is, wherever she goes, she is grand company."
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"A breath of poetry wraps us as she relives for us a lifetime....She is the attentive spectator of her own life as well as its narrator." -- Philadelphia Inquirer
"To my mind, As They Were contains some of the best writing M.F.K. Fisher has ever done."
-- James Beard, Boston Globe
"Here are the voluptuous meals recalled by a woman who savored not only the food and wine but every detail of setting and nuance of conversation. Here, too, are meditations on travel by freighter....And here are the vivid evocations of places." [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'At Seventy: A Journal'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography, and Other Writings'
Franklin's writings span a long and distinguished career of literary, scientific, and political inquiry--the work of a man whose life lasted for nearly all of the 18th century, and whose achievements ranged from inventing the lightning rod to publishing Poor Richard's Almanac to signing the Declaration of Independence. In his own lifetime, Franklin knew prominence not only in America but also in Britain and France. Here was a cosmopolitan statesman, public servant, inventor, and editor with a distinctly Yankee sensibility; here was a moral philosopher who divided his faith between the natural sciences and the American experiment.
This volume includes Franklin's reflections on such diverse issues as reason and religion, social status, electricity, America's national character and characters, war, and the societal status of women. Also included is a new transcription of his 1726 journal, and several pieces that have only recently been identified as Franklin's work.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best Defense'
The author presents his most famous, and infamous, cases and clients, and in the process, takes a critical, informed look at a legal system that he regards as deeply corrupt. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Like Me: Library Edition'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Closing the Ring'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Dakota: A Spiritual Geography'
Dakota - A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris Softcover book published by Ticknor & Fields, copyright 1993, 8th printing [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Darkness Visible : A Memoir of Madness'
In 1985 William Styron fell victim to a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the lives of Randall Jarrell, Primo Levi and Virginia Woolf. That Styron survived his descent into madness is something of a miracle. That he manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with such candor and precision makes Darkness Visible a rare feat of literature, a book that will arouse a shock of recognition even in those readers who have been spared the suffering it describes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death Be Not Proud'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dispatches'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herrs unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Enigma of Arrival'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything We Had'
everything we had by al santoli [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gathering Storm'
Winston Churchill was not only a statesman and leader of historic proportions, he also possessed substantial literary talents. These two factors combine to make The Gathering Storm a unique work. The first volume of Churchill's memoirs, this selection is broken into two parts. The first, "From War to War," consists of Churchill's critical observations on the settlement of World War I and its place in the causes of the Second World War. The second volume contains letters and memoranda from the British government--of which Churchill was part--as the country plunged unprepared into war. This stands as the best of history: written as it was made, by the man who made it. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Geisha'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'George Kennan Memoirs 1925-1950'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gift from the Sea'
I found a 1955 printing of this book in an old waterfront cabin and was struck by the care with which the previous owner had read it. Eve (the name inscribed inside the front cover and then again above the heading for chapter 3) made pencil marks on nearly every paragraph of the book, underlining a phrase, highlighting many passages with strong vertical marks, scratching out some words that she seems to have found superfluous and even x-ing out whole sections that apparently missed their mark with her altogether. Two rusting paper clips isolate several pages, absent any marking at all. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's lyrical words are still relevant and presage so many of the themes of today's most popular books: simplicity, peaceful solitude, caring for the soul, a woman finding her place in society and life. I heard that the woman who had lived in the cabin had actually passed away some time before. Thank you, Eve, for your gift... from the sea. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Grand Alliance'
Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Grand Alliance recounts the momentous events of 1941 surrounding America's entry into the War and Hitler's march on Russia the continuing onslaught on British civilians during the Blitz, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the alliance between Britain and America that shaped the outcome of the War. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Green Shadows, White Whale'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heart of a Woman'
Millions have read Maya Angelou's national bestseller The Heart of a Woman, and now you can hear her fascinating story in the author's own voice. Angelou exposes a turbulent period of her life as she struggles to raise a child, fulfill her goals as a writer, and fight for civil rights in an age of social injustice; Angelou's rich and resonating voice draws the listener into the unexpected details of her life. Working as a nightclub singer in Los Angeles, Angelou decides to move to New York with her son Guy in hopes of building stronger ties with the black art community. In an attempt to find stability for Guy and make a name for herself, her love life takes wild turns. Should she marry the bail bondsman who's as dry as stale bread or run away with the African freedom fighter? Her heart takes her to Africa, where her writing career blossoms but her marriage sours. The Heart of a Woman is filled with beautiful prose and songs; Angelou displays her music talent in several vignettes, most memorably in a scene with Billie Holiday: Angelou is performing at a nightclub when Holiday shrieks, "Stop her, stop her... she sounds like my mama!" [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herculin Barbin'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hinge of Fate'

› Find signed collectible books: 'House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'House by the Sea'
In 1973, May Sarton moved to a house on the seacoast of Maine. It was a place that was alone in all but a few months in the summer, with the sea and the woods, and a wide sky ever present. She discovered that what she has to give does not depend on others. This is her journal of that time. Photos. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The House by the Sea: A Journal'
This is the first journal Sarton wrote after she moved in 1973 from New Hampshire to the seacoast of Maine.
Here she found the peace and aloneness she soughtand partly feared. The journal records the renewing of her life and work in this place. [via]More editions of The House by the Sea: A Journal:
› Find signed collectible books: 'An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Italian Days'
This book is a journey down the Italian peninsula that will make even the most experienced traveler relive its splendor anew. Harrison offers a fascinating mixture of Italian history, politics, folklore, food, architecture, art, and literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Journals of Lewis and Clark'
[Traditional paperback edition of this title is 680 pages.]
The journals of Lewis and Clark have been called a national treasure. The Corps of Discovery helped to open the Louisiana Purchase to hundreds of thousands of pioneering settlers.
We're proud to bring this recreation of those handwritten texts to a new generation of readers, learners, and historians.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery as a scientific and military expedition to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. The expedition's goal was stated by Jefferson in a letter dated June 20, 1803, to Lewis: "to explore the Missouri River and such principal stream of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river that may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce".[6] In addition, the expedition was to learn more about the Northwest's natural resources, inhabitants and possibilities for settlement;[7] as well as evaluating the potential interference of British and French Canadian hunters and trappers who were already well established in the area.
Jefferson selected U.S. Army Captain Meriwether Lewishis aide and personal friendto lead the Corps of Discovery. Lewis selected William Clark as his partner. Because of bureaucratic delays in the U.S. Army, Clark officially only held the rank of Second Lieutenant at the time, but Lewis concealed this from the men and shared the leadership of the expedition, always referring to Clark as "Captain".
They began their historic journey on May 14, 1804. They soon met up with Lewis in Saint Charles, Missouri, and the corps followed the Missouri River westward. Soon they passed La Charrette, the last caucasian settlement on the Missouri River. The expedition followed the Missouri through what is now Kansas City, Missouri, and Omaha, Nebraska. On August 20, 1804, the Corps of Discovery suffered its only death when Sergeant Charles Floyd died, apparently from acute appendicitis. He was buried at Floyd's Bluff, in what is now Sioux City, Iowa. During the final week of August, Lewis and Clark had reached the edge of the Great Plains, a place abounding with elk, deer, bison, and beavers.
The expedition continued to follow the Missouri to its headwaters and over the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass via horses. In canoes, they descended the mountains by the Clearwater River, the Snake River, and the Columbia River, past Celilo Falls and past what is now Portland, Oregon. At this point,[clarification needed] Lewis spotted Mount Hood, a mountain known to be very close to the ocean. On a big pine, Clark carved
Clark had written in his journal, "Ocean in view! O! The Joy!". One journal entry is captioned "Cape Disappointment at the Entrance of the Columbia River into the Great South Sea or Pacific Ocean". By that time the expedition faced its second bitter winter during the trip, so the group decided to vote on whether to camp on the north or south side of the Columbia River. The party agreed to camp on the south side of the river (modern Astoria, Oregon), building Fort Clatsop as their winter quarters. While wintering at the fort, the men prepared for the trip home by boiling salt from the ocean, hunting elk and other wildlife, and interacting with the native tribes.
The explorers began their journey home on March 23, 1806. Lewis and Clark used four dugout canoes they bought from the Native Americans, plus one that they stole in "retaliation" for a previous theft.
Lewis and Clark separated until they reached the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers on August 11. Clark's team had floated down the rivers in bull boats. Once reunited, the Corps was able to return home quickly via the Missouri River. They reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Journals of Lewis and Clark'
The Journals of Lewis and Clark are "the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future (Bernard DeVoto).
In 1803, the great expanse of the Louisiana Purchase was an empty canvas. Keenly aware that the course of the nation's destiny lay westwardand that a Voyage of Discovery would be necessary to determine the nature of the frontierPresident Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to 1806, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men, Lewis mapped rivers, traced the principal waterways to the sea, and established the American claim to the territories of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Together the captains kept this journal: a richly detailed record of the flora and fauna they sighted, the native tribes they encountered, and the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed, from their base camp near present-day St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River, that has become an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration and the writing of natural history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath'
Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing. Plath once called her journal her Sargasso, her repository of imagination, a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives, and in fact these pages contain the germs of most of her work. Plaths ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat, a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journal with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. Written in electrifying prose, The Journals of Sylvia Plath provide unique insight, and are essential reading for all those who have been moved and fascinated by Plaths life and work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh'
Charlotte Mosley's careful collection of Nancy Mitford's and Evelyn Waugh's delightfully careless letters immerses one in a lost whirl. The two writers met in London in the late 1920s, but their correspondence didn't take off until mid-World War II, when it quickly became an exaggeration-fest. Mitford, for example, matches Waugh's surreal reports from Europe with one about an M.P. swelling up before his fellow politicians' eyes: "Well, it took 2 ambulances to get him away & now he lies on 4 beds with his trunk hanging out the window. Let nobody say that war time London lacks fantasy."
For the next 21 years, these gifted gossips would render the ridiculous sublime and vice versa, turning (and then only mildly) serious in discussions of reading and writing, preferring to glide over the problematic and emotional. Throughout, Mitford likes to play the euphoric, lazy pupil, Waugh the master grammarian, theologian, and meanie. The exchanges on their own works in progress--particularly on Brideshead Revisited and The Pursuit of Love--are an important addition to literary history, but the book's true exhilaration lies in Mitford and Waugh's knowing--and knowingly vile--comic timing. Irresistibly offensive. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Life in Our Times'
memoirs [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life of My Choice'
Wilfred Thesiger is the last of the great British eccentric explorers, renowned for his travels through some of the most inaccessible places on earth. As a child in Abyssinia he watched the glorious armies of Ras Tafari returning from hand-to-hand battle, their prisoners in chains; at the age of 23 he made his first expedition into the country of the Danakil, a murderous race among whom a man's status in the tribe depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. His books, "Arabian Sands" and "The Marsh Arabs", tell of his two sojourns in the Empty Quarter and the Marshes of Southern Iraq. In this autobiography, Wilfred Thesiger highlights the people who most profoundly influenced him and the events which enabled him to lead the life of his choice. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Britches'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Manhattan, When I Was Young'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Midwife's Tale : The Life of Martha Ballard Based O'
Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Father's Son: Memories of War and Peace'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Losing Season : The Point Guard's Way to Knowledge'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals, 1969-1985'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Now'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Once a Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Work'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass'
Out of Africa is Karin Blixen's love letter to the country she called home for nearly 20 years. Arriving in British East Africa (now Kenya) from Denmark in 1914, Blixen--Isak Dinesen was her pen name--was immediately seduced by the landscape of the Ngong hill country, not to mention the animals and people who inhabited it. Her descriptions bring this wonderland alive for readers: out on safari, she recalls the movements of a group of giraffes, "in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing." Blixen laces into her reverie the account of her coffee plantation--which ultimately succumbed to high altitude, droughts, and tumbling international coffee prices--and tales of her friendships with other colonials in Nairobi. But one should read her memoir for the stories she tells of cooking with her Kikuyu chef (who almost never ate any of the European delicacies he so expertly created), adopting an abandoned infant antelope, flying over the countryside in her lover's plane--"the greatest, most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm"--and watching the children of her tenant farmers collect at her house each day at noon for the spectacle of her cuckoo clock.
Though some of her references to native Africans will likely make today's readers uncomfortable, Blixen can also be perceptive, particularly in her articulation of the differences between European and African culture and her excitement over what she learns from "her" Africans. It is not long before she is attuned to the rhythms of nature: she can foresee when the rains will come, can spot the new moon before anyone else on the farm, and knows exactly what the silence of night should sound like. Though her sorrow is almost unbearably palpable when at last--after the collapse of the farm, the loss of her lover, and the war looming--Blixen leaves Africa, the reader will close the book richer for her sojourn. --Jordana Moskowitz [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Period Piece'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plant Dreaming Deep'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir'

› Find signed collectible books: 'A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second World War: The Gathering Storm'
"After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world. This heart's desire of all the peoples could easily have been gained by steadfastness in righteous convictions, and by reasonable common sense and prudence."But we all know that's not what happened. As Britain's prime minister for most of the Second World War, Winston Churchill--whose career had to that point already encompassed the roles of military historian and civil servant with a proficiency in both that few others could claim--had a unique perspective on the conflict, and as soon as he left office in 1945, he began to set that perspective down on paper. To measure the importance of The Second World War, it is worth remembering that there are no parallel accounts from either of the other Allied leaders, Roosevelt and Stalin. We have in this multivolume work an account that contains both comprehensive sweep and intimate detail. Almost anybody who compiles a list of such works ranks it highly among the nonfiction books of the 20th century.
In the opening volume, The Gathering Storm, Churchill tracks the erosion of the shaky peace brokered at the end of the First World War, followed by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and their gradual spread from beyond Germany's borders to most of the European continent. Churchill foresaw the coming crisis and made his opinion known quite clearly throughout the latter '30s, and this book concludes on a vindicating note, with his appointment in May 1940 as prime minister, after which he recalls that "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."
Their Finest Hour concerns itself with 1940. France falls, and England is left to face the German menace alone. Soon London is under siege from the air--and Churchill has a few stories of his own experiences during the Blitz to share--but they persevere to the end of what Churchill calls "the most splendid, as it was the most deadly, year in our long English and British history." They press on in The Grand Alliance, liberating Ethiopia from the Italians and lending support to Greece. Then, when Hitler reneges on his non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union (the very signing of which had proved Stalin and his commissars "the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War"), the Allied team begins to coalesce. The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese makes the participation of the United States in the war official, and this is of "the greatest joy" to Churchill: "How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at that moment care. Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious."
But as the fourth volume, The Hinge of Fate, reveals, success would not happen overnight. The Japanese military still held strong positions in the Pacific theater, and Rommel's tank corps were on the offensive in Africa. After a string of military defeats, Churchill's opponents in Parliament introduced a motion for a censure vote; this was handily defeated, and victory secured in Africa, then Italy. By this time, Churchill had met separately with both Roosevelt and Stalin; the second half of volume 5, Closing the Ring, brings the three of them together for the first time at the November 1943 conference in Teheran. This book closes on the eve of D-day: "All the ships were at sea. We had the mastery of the oceans and of the air. The Hitler tyranny was doomed."
And so, in the concluding volume, Triumph and Tragedy, the Allies push across Europe and take the fight to Berlin. President Roosevelt's death shortly before final victory against Germany affected Churchill deeply, "as if I had been struck a physical blow," and he would later regret not attending the funeral and meeting Harry Truman then, instead of at the Potsdam conference after Germany's defeat. Churchill himself would not be there for the conclusion to the war against Japan; in July of 1945, a general election in Britain brought in a Labor government (or, as he refers to them, "Socialists"), and he resigned immediately, for "the verdict of the electors had been so overwhelmingly expressed that I did not wish to remain even for an hour responsible for their affairs." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church'
Like many Christians, Philip Yancey has often felt kicked around, abused, and damaged by the institutional church. And like many Christians, he has found solace in reading about and getting to know some extraordinary individual believers. He profiles 13 of those believers in Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. "I became a writer, I now believe, to sort out words used and misused by the church of my youth," Yancey writes in the book's first chapter. The church of his youth, which described itself as "New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillennial, Dispensational, fundamental," Yancey now describes as a frightening place where racism and bigotry were regularly preached from the pulpit. After graduating from Bible college, Yancey became a writer and chose to direct his attention to "people I could learn from, people I might want to emulate," such as C. Everett Koop and Robert Coles. He also read widely and passionately--Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Annie Dillard, to name a few. Soul Survivor offers probing, honest profiles of 13 individuals who have "helped restore to me the mislaid treasures of God." For most readers, these profiles will serve as starting points to explore the lives and minds of the individuals who have inspired Yancey. --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Soul Survivor : Why I Am Still a Christian'
Philip Yancey, whose explorations of faith have made him a guide for millions of readers, feels no need to defend the church. "When someone tells me yet another horror story about the church, I respond, 'Oh, it's even worse than that. Let me tell you my story.'I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church." Yancey acknowledges that many spiritual seekers find few answers and little solace in the institutional church. "I have met many people, and heard from many more, who have gone through a similar process of mining truth from their religious past: Roman Catholics who flinch whenever they see a nun or priest, former Seventh Day Adventists who cannot drink a cup of coffee without a stab of guilt, Mennonites who worry whether wedding rings give evidence of worldliness." How did Yancey manage to survive spiritually despite early encounters with a racist, legalistic church that he now views as almost cultic? In this, his most soul-searching book yet, he probes that very question. He tells the story of his own struggle to reclaim belief, interwoven with inspiring portraits of notable people from all walks of life, whom he calls his spiritual directors. Soul Survivor is his tribute to thirteen remarkable individuals, mentors who transformed his life and work. Besides recalling their effect on him, Yancey also provides fresh glimpses of the lives and faith journeys of each one. From the scatterbrained journalist G. K. Chesterton to the tortured novelists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to contemporaries such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Annie Dillard, and Robert Coles, Yancey gives inspiring portraits of those who modeled for him a life-enhancing rather than a life-constricting faith. "I became a writer, I now believe, to sort out and reclaim words used and misused by the Christians of my youth," Yancey says. "These are the people who ushered me into the Kingdom. In many ways they are why I remain a Christian today, and I want to introduce them to other spiritual se [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Souls of Black Folk'
When it was published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk revolutionized thinking about the experience of African Americans in the United States.This collection of essays on African American history, culture, and society probes fundamental issues of race and justice and documents Du Bois's conviction that the "soul" of the black community must be preserved and revered. The text reprinted here is that of the first book edition (1903). "Contexts" presents a fascinating collection of political and biographical documents related to the text. Also included are eighteen photographs that accompanied Du Bois's 1901 article "The Negro As He Really Is." "Criticism" offers thirteen contemporary and recent assessments of Du Bois and Souls, rounding out the picture of this enduring work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness'
In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness-diagnosed only years later as epilepsy-marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories'
Chuck Palahniuks world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people perform public sex acts on an outdoor stage. In a mansion once occupied by The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson reads his own Tarot cards and talks sweetly to his beautiful actress girlfriend. Across the country, men build their own full-size castles and rocketships that will send them into space. Palahniuk himself experiments with steroids, works on an assembly line by day and as a hospice volunteer by night, and experiences the brutal murder of his father by a white supremacist. With this new direction, Chuck Palahniuk has proven he can do anything. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Summer Book'
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summerits sunlight and stormsinto twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophias grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. On an island, thinks the grandmother, everything is complete. In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.
Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.
The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Their Finest Hour'
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Great book. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Triumph and Tragedy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Triumph and Tragedy'
The end of World War II, the crushing of Germany and the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki..and the entrance into an uneasy and clouded peace as Churchill is dismissed from his office and the Allies embark upon a tragic, misguided and atomic-haunted Cold War. The concluding volume of Churchill's great chronicle of the War which was responsible for his winning the Noble Prize in Literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Up from Slavery: An Autobiography'
Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like "cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Vietcong Memoir'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walden'
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Henry David Thoreau was a sturdy individualist and a lover of nature. In March, 1845, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreaus autobiograophical account of his Robinson Crusoe existence, bare of creature comforts but rich in contemplation of the wonders of nature and the ways of man. On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience is the classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty, and is considered one of the most famous essays ever written. This newly repackaged edition also includes a selection of Thoreau's poetry. [via]
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On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, thus beginning the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. On the 150th anniversary of that event, Houghton Mifflin, successor to Thoreau's original publisher, is proud to publish a new edition of Walden, annotated by the distinguished Thoreau scholar Walter Harding and illustrated with Thoreau's own drawings. Even those who have read Walden many times will find much that is new in this edition, and those reading the book for the first time will discover why it has changed the lives of generations of readers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The War : A Memoir'
Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important writers, was a member of the French Resistance movement throughout the Second World War. Written in 1944 but not published until 1985, this is her compelling personal story of living in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing a Woman's Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The War : A Memoir'
Marguerite Duras, one of France's most important writers, was a member of the French Resistance movement throughout the Second World War. Written in 1944 but not published until 1985, this is her compelling personal story of living in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation. [via]
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