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› Find signed collectible books: 'Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Act Now, Apologize Later'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alexander Hamilton: A Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Almost a Revolution: The Story of a Chinese Student's Journey from Boyhood to Leadership in Tiananmen'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The American Dream'
Despite years of reporting on tragedies around the world, Dan Rather is clearly an optimist. His take on the American dream, as personified by more than 30 Americans, is an inspiring reminder that the ideals the nation was founded upon are still alive and well. Rather first looked at how Americans pursued the American dream in a yearlong feature for his CBS Evening News show. His book takes off where the series ended, with more in-depth stories of those successfully pursuing their version of the dream.
Nosrat Scott came to the U.S. in search of freedom of religion. She was so persecuted for her Bah'ai faith in Iran that she was moved to tears when she realized she could speak openly of her religion in her English-as-a-second-language class. For many, of course, the American dream is all about making it rich. Some traveled long distances only to be surprised by fortune, such as Trung Dung, who escaped Vietnam at the age of 17 and became a multimillionaire with his Internet start-up company. There are those who covet the pursuit of happiness as an end in itself, such as the couple who gave up their high-paying jobs in Southern California to move to a small town in Oregon in order to meet their "not rich criteria"--that is, time for family and community. And there are those who have to swallow their pride to get there, like the chef from Georgia who learned to read at age 26. Other dreams are organized under the headings of fame, family, innovation, and service, which could just as easily have been titled the pursuit of justice.
There are few recognizable names here, but the stories of these everyday heroes are a spirited antidote to a creeping national cynicism and a vigorous challenge to seize on the opportunities--and responsibilities--that the dream implies. --Lesley Reed [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Artist'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bell Jar'
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Biology As Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth'
With an introduction by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming off age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.
"Superb...The Library of America has insured that most of Wright's major texts are now available as he wanted them to be tread...Most important of all is the opportunity we now have to hear a great American writer speak with his own voice about matters that still resonate at the center of our lives."[via]
--Alfred Kazin, New York Time Book Review"The publication of this new edition is not just an editorial innovation, it is a major event in American literary history."
--Andrew Delbanco, New Republic
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Hundred'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Power : A Record of Reactions in a World of Pathos'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'
Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Country Between Us'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Deschooling Society'
In this bold and provocative book, the author of Tools For Conviviality urges a radical examination of our modern schooling institutions which have failed to meet individual human needs in the name of "progress," and offers exciting suggestions for reform. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Doublespeak: From Revenue Enhancement to Terminal Living How Government, Business, Advertisers, and Others Use Language to Deceive You'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eamon De Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland'
Publishing to coincide with St. Patrick's Day and the 75th anniversary of Irish Independence, this thorough, incisive, and wryly eloquent biography gives a sweeping portrait of Eamon de Valera, who was a part of Ireland and Irish politics for 50 years. of illustrations. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne'
The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess; Elizabeth I holds a unique place in the English imagination as one of the nation's most powerful, charismatic, and successful monarchs. Elizabeth usually is imagined as the icy, untouchable figure, re-created memorably on screen by Bette Davis and Dame Judi Dench, but that vision of Elizabeth ignores the turbulent years of her early life, from her birth as the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533 until her accession to the throne in 1558 after the death of her sister Mary. It is these early years that are the subject of David Starkey's fascinating Elizabeth, which was written to accompany the television series about her life.
Starkey argues that Elizabeth, in her first 25 years, "had experienced every vicissitude of fortune and every extreme of condition. She had been Princess and inheritrix of England, and bastard and disinherited; the nominated successor to the throne and an accused traitor on the verge of execution; showered with lands and houses, and a prisoner in the Tower". He draws on his skills as a respected Tudor historian to produce a deft account of the religious, political, and dynastic maelstrom of mid-16th-century England that reads "like a historical thriller." The book carefully picks its way through the finer points of contemporary religious conflict and the peculiarities of Tudor court ceremony, while exploring also the formation of Elizabeth's character in relation to a murdered mother, a charismatic father, a tortured sister, and a predatory guardian. Highly readable, and written with verve and pace, this is a fascinating account of the young Elizabeth. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Europe: A History'
Here is a masterpiece of historical narrative that stretches from the Ice Age to the Atomic Age, as it tells the story of Europe, East and West. Norman Davies captures it all-the rise and fall of Rome, the sweeping invasions of Alaric and Atilla, the Norman Conquests, the Papal struggles for power, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe's rise to become the powerhouse of the world, and its eclipse in our own century, following two devastating World Wars. This is the first major history of Europe to give equal weight to both East and West, and it shines light on fascinating minority communities, from heretics and lepers to Gypsies, Jews, and Muslims. It also takes an innovative approach, combining traditional narrative with unique features that help bring history alive: 299 time capsules scattered through the narrative capture telling aspects of an era. 12 -snapshots offer a panoramic look at all of Europe at a particular moment in history. Full coverage of Eastern Europe100 maps and diagrams, 72 black-and-white plates.All told, Davies's Europe represents one of the most important and illuminating histories to be published in recent years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class'
A brilliant and insightful work that examines the insecurities of the middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the past two decades, Fear of Falling traces the myths about the middle class to their roots in the ambitions and anxieties that torment the group and that have led to its retreat from a responsible leadership role. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers'
Written in the present tense, First They Killed My Father will put you right in the midst of the action--action you'll wish had never happened. It's a tough read, but definitely a worthwhile one, and the author's personality and strength shine through on every page. Covering the years from 1975 to 1979, the story moves from the deaths of multiple family members to the forced separation of the survivors, leading ultimately to the reuniting of much of the family, followed by marriages and immigrations. The brutality seems unending--beatings, starvation, attempted rape, mental cruelty--and yet the narrator (a young girl) never stops fighting for escape and survival. Sad and courageous, her life and the lives of her young siblings provide quite a powerful example of how war can so deeply affect children--especially a war in which they are trained to be an integral part of the armed forces. For anyone interested in Cambodia's recent history, this book shares a valuable personal view of events. --Jill Lightner [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Free the Children'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Freedom Just Around The Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828'
A powerful reinterpretation of the founding of America by a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian.
The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years," states Walter McDougall in his preface to Freedom Just Around the Corner. With this statement begins McDougall's most ambitious, original, and uncompromising of histories. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent with passion, pathos, and humour in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants.
With an insightful approach to the nearly 250 years spanning America's beginnings, McDougall offers his readers an understanding of the uniqueness of the "American character" and how this character has shaped the wide ranging course of historical events. McDougall explains that Americans have always been in a unique position of enjoying "more opportunity to pursue their ambitionsèan any other people in history." Throughout Freedom Just Around the Corner the character of the American people shines, a character built out of a freedom to indulge in the whole panoply of human behaviour. The genius behind the success of the United States is founded on the complex, irrepressible American spirit.
A grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history, Freedom Just Around the Corner is the first instalment of a trilogy that will eventually bring the story of America up to the present day, a story epic, bemusing, and brooding.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'George Washington's Expense Account'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Golden Notebook'
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of the American People'
"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures," begins Paul Johnson's remarkable new American history. "No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind." Johnson's history is a reinterpretation of American history from the first settlements to the Clinton administration. It covers every aspect of U.S. history--politics; business and economics; art, literature and science; society and customs; complex traditions and religious beliefs. The story is told in terms of the men and women who shaped and led the nation and the ordinary people who collectively created its unique character. Wherever possible, letters, diaries, and recorded conversations are used to ensure a sense of actuality. "The book has new and often trenchant things to say about every aspect and period of America's past," says Johnson, "and I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions." Johnson's history presents John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Franklin, Tom Paine, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison from a fresh perspective. It emphasizes the role of religion in American history and how early America was linked to England's history and culture and includes incisive portraits of Andrew Jackson, Chief Justice Marshall, Clay, Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis. Johnson shows how Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt ushered in the age of big business and industry and how Woodrow Wilson revolutionized the government's role. He offers new views of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover and of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and his role as commander in chief during World War II. An examination of the unforeseen greatness of Harry Truman and reassessments of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush follow. "Compulsively readable," said Foreign Affairs of Johnson's unique narrative skills and sharp profiles of people. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Am Roe: My Life, Roe V. Wade, and Freedom of Choice'
No job, no home, no money and pregnant. Fleeing from the horror of a back alley abortion clinic, one woman became embroiled in one of the biggest court battles in US history. The final decision came three years too late for her though it changed the lives of many other women. Nearly 20 years later, Norma McCorvey stepped from the shadows and revealed herself as Jane Roe. This is her story. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Defense of Animals'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change/30830'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Siberia'
In Siberia explores a region of astonishments, where "white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers." Colin Thubron's latest chronicle also delivers its subject from rumor into reality. An expanse larger than the entire United States, Siberia is undoubtedly a country of contrasts, which elicits from the author both awe and melancholy. Here on one hand is a northern wilderness "shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams," and on the other a "black detritus of factories and ruins." No less memorable than the landscape are the people that Thubron encounters. He gathers their stories like rough jewels, showing us a self-proclaimed descendant of Rasputin, an isolated Jewish community, and a parade of "indestructible babushkas."
Woven among the often bitter and eroding memories of a Siberian past is a sense of new freedom. After all, this is the first time in Russia's history when foreigners can travel freely throughout the region--and its inhabitants can comment openly about their government without fear of reprisal. Thubron coaxes an institute official at the Akademgorodok Praesidium to speak his mind:
His face was heavy with anger. "We have one overriding problem here. Money. We receive no money for new equipment, hardly enough for our salaries. There are people who haven't been paid for six months." Then his anger overflowed. He was barking like a drill sergeant. "This year we requested funds for six or seven different programmes! And not one has been accepted by the government! Not one!"
Thubron's portrait is as elegant as it is evocative. But just as notably, his journey to the east manages to break the long and destructive Siberian silence. --Byron Ricks [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Intellectuals'
Conservative historian Paul Johnson wears his ideology proudly on his sleeve in this often ruthless dissection of the thinkers and artists who (in his view) have shaped modern Western culture, having replaced some 200 years ago "the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind." Taking on the likes of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Lillian Hellman, and Noam Chomsky in turn, Johnson examines one idol after another and finds them all to have feet of clay. In his account, for instance, Ernest Hemingway emerges as an artistic hero who labored endlessly to forge a literary style unmistakably his own, but also as a deeply flawed man whose concern for the perfect phrase did not carry over to a concern for the women who loved him. Gossipy and sharply opinionated, Johnson's essay in cultural history spares no one.
Does it really matter that Henrik Ibsen was vain and arrogant, that Jean-Paul Sartre was incontinent? In Johnson's view, it does: these all-too-human foibles disqualify them, and other thinkers, from presuming to criticize the shortcomings of society. "Beware intellectuals," he concludes (though, given the subjects of his book, it seems he means intellectuals only of the left). "Not only should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice." Whether one agrees or not, Johnson's profiles are frequently amusing and illuminating, as when he suggests that the only proletarian Karl Marx ever knew in person was the poor maid who worked for him for decades and was never paid, except in room and board, for her labors. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kinky Friedman's Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Language of Nuclear War: An Intelligent Citizen's Dictionary'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leaves of Grass'
Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, contained twelve long untitled poems, but Whitman continued to expand it throughout his life.Whitman's poetry was unprecedented in its unapologetic joy in the physical and its inextricable link to the spiritual. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to him: "I am very happy in reading [Leaves of Grass], as great power makes us happy ... I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters from the Earth'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life of Mahatma Gandhi'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life Outside : The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Limits of the City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945-1990 An Oral History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Male Couple's Guide to Living Together: What Gay Men Should Know about Living with Each Other and Coping in a Straight World'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Medieval Family: The Pastons of Fifteenth-Century England'
In the early 1400s, a lawyer and judge named William Paston expanded his family's holdings by imprisoning a neighbor and seizing her property. This afforded his children a handsome inheritance, which they used to advantage, some becoming courtiers in the service of the king. During the bloody Wars of the Roses, the Pastons were fortunate to pick the winning side--not an easy task, given the constantly changing fortunes of the Lancastrians and Yorkists--and their power and influence grew. Had they sided with their long-time ally, the Earl of Oxford, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the Pastons would have been ruined.
But glory is transitory, and ruin eventually did come. Succeeding generations of Pastons spent their fortune more quickly than they could replenish it. In 1736, facing bankruptcy, middle-aged merchant Edward Paston sold off the family home outside London, including furniture, works of art, and a trove of documents that chronicled his family's rise to influence hundreds of years earlier. Those documents--letters, wills, and household inventories among them--inform this imaginative and well-written reconstruction by the popular medieval historians Frances and Joseph Gies, whose biography of the Paston family is also an absorbing history of English society as it emerged from the Middle Ages into the early-modern period. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Men Are Not Cost-Effective: Male Crime in America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mocking of the President: A History of Campaign Humor from Ike to Bush'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Morgan: American Financier'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mortal Danger'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Native Son'
Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the walls of poverty and racism that surround him, and after he murders a young white woman in a moment of panic, these walls begin to close in. There is no help for him--not from his hapless family; not from liberal do-gooders or from his well-meaning yet naive friend Jan; certainly not from the police, prosecutors, or judges. Bigger is debased, aggressive, dangerous, and a violent criminal. As such, he has no claim upon our compassion or sympathy. And yet...
A more compelling story than Native Son has not been written in the 20th century by an American writer. That is not to say that Richard Wright created a novel free of flaws, but that he wrote the first novel that successfully told the most painful and unvarnished truth about American social and class relations. As Irving Howe asserted in 1963, "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture."
Other books had focused on the experience of growing up black in America--including Wright's own highly successful Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of five stories that focused on the victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with human sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's compassion:
"I didn't want to kill," Bigger shouted. "But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder.... What I killed for must've been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. "It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something... I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em. It's the truth..."Wright's genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for Bigger, he forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and injustice of the society that gave birth to him. --Andrew Himes [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The News From Paraguay'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope'
Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. In his most personal and optimistic book to date, Jonathan returns to the South Bronx to spend another four years with the children who have come to be his friends at P.S. 30 and St. Ann's. A fascinating narrative of daily urban life seem through the eyes of children, Ordinary Resurrections gives the human face to Northern segregation and provides a stirring testimony to the courage and resilience of the young. Yet another classic of unblinking social observation from one of the finest writers ever to work in the genre, Ordinary Resurrections is a piercing discernment of right and wrong, of hope and despair -- from our nations's corridors of power to its poorest city streets. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Our Long National Daydream: A Political Pageant of the Reagan Era'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody'
Reffernce Book; Miscellanea [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paula'
"Listen, Paula. I am going to tell you a story so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost." So says Chilean writer Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits) in the opening lines of the luminous, heart-rending memoir she wrote while her 28-year-old daughter Paula lay in a coma. In its pages, she ushers an assortment of outrageous relatives into the light: her stepfather, an amiable liar and tireless debater; grandmother Meme, blessed with second sight; and delinquent uncles who exultantly torment Allende and her brothers. Irony and marvelous flights of fantasy mix with the icy reality of Paula's deathly illness as Allende sketches childhood scenes in Chile and Lebanon; her uncle Salvatore Allende's reign and ruin as Chilean president; her struggles to shake off or find love; and her metamorphosis into a writer. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15Th-18th Century'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Public Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, And The Trafficking In Human Souls'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rise of the Counter Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Road to Hell: A Cartoon Book'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Running Critical: The Silent War, Rickover, and General Dynamics'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Science and Human Values'
Thought-provoking essays on science as an integral part of the culture of our age from a leader in the scientific humanism movement. "A profoundly moving, brilliantly perceptive essay by a truly civilized man."--Scientific American [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond'
Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping it, anything at all is possible.
Whether traveling through war-ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.
With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson's path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson's profoundly moving pilgrimage.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Since Yesterday: The 1930's in America, September 3, 1929 to September 3, 1939'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Slowness'
After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: it is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, with, as the author himself says, "not a single serious word in it."
Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, sperated by more than two-hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic, finally culminating in poignant cross-century encounter sure to linger in the reader's mind
Despite Kundera's disclaimer about the novel's seriousness, Slowness resonates with a profound meditation on contemporary life, the secret bond between slowness and memory, the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Society Without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Soul Mountain'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'There to Here: Ideas of Political Society John Locke and His Influence on 300 Years of Political Theory'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Third Child'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Without Reservation: How a Controversial Indian Tribe Rose to Power and Built the World's Largest Casino'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921'
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