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Biography Books
| Kaplan, Fred: Gore Vidal: A Biography
Book Number: 35683
Bloomsbury Pub Ltd 2000 8vo softcover 850pp index, b/w illus. very good+. From Publishers Weekly: Kaplan has written esteemed lives of Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle and is a professor of English at Queens College. He candidly admits, in a "prelude" that opens the book, "I prefer my subjects dead," and perhaps having a subject not yet dead has made it more difficult for Kaplan to synthesize the life and work, to put Vidal into context and to pinpoint the telling details of his subject's productive life. For this extremely long biography showcases erudition at the expense of selection, and the book drowns in encyclopedic detail. Much of the detail, drawn from Kaplan's access to Vidal's papers, is enlightening. Kaplan is especially good on Vidal's relationships with his editors at publishing companies and magazines and his friendships and feuds with Joanne Woodward, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, William Buckley and others. His analysis of Vidal's multifarious work (novels, essays, plays, screenplays) is often elucidating. His accounts of Vidal's various runs for office are also useful. Yet it is annoying to read long-winded prose with a disappointing lack of immediacy. (Compare, for instance, Gerald Clarke's scintillating biography of Truman Capote, also about a contemporary writer known for his wit and style, and also written with the cooperation of its subject.) Kaplan, falling far short of that standard, convinces the reader that Vidal's unusually vast involvement with the political and literary life of his times is impressive, without seeming to draw much inspiration from Vidal's own biting prose, which, though cited dutifully, fails to spark in this context. Rather than coming to life, Vidal seems entombed within the pages of this book. 12 pages b&w photos. (Nov.) nCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Keywords: Biographies Memoirs General Gore Vidal A Biography Kaplan Fred
Price: $18.00 |
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| D'arcy Cresswell: Margaret McMillan A Memoir
Book Number: 35800
Hutchinson & Co. Publishers. 1948 8vo. Red cloth. faded. Signed by author on ffl, with inscription to (Poet) John Schroder. The Memoirs of Margaret McMillian Founder of the Open Air Nursery School Movement, who with her sister - The Rachel McMillian Training College for Nursery School Teachers, reformed the Nursery School, for the health and wellbeing of generations. Includes Newspaper clipping and flyer promoting a National Appeal to continue the work of Margaret McMillian. The idea of the nursery school, school medical services, the school meals service, and much of the new education which sees the development of the child as the main objective, not merely how much learning can be crammed into one head, all stem from Margaret McMillan.
Keywords: Nursery School, London, Bradford, Deptford,
Price: $55.00 |
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| Rounding, Virginia: Les Grandes Horizontales The lives and legends of four ninteenth-century courtesans
Book Number: 35824
Bloomsbury Pub Ltd 2003 8vo hardcover 337pp index, colour & b/w illus. very good+ / very good+ d/w.
Keywords: Biographies Memoirs ninteenth century courtesans Historical Les Grandes Horizontales Rounding Virginia
Price: $18.00 |
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| Nasar, Sylvia: A Beautiful Mind
Book Number: 35943
Faber 1999 8vo softcover 459pp index, b/w illus. very good. Amazon.comnStories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.nnEconomist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." --Mary Ellen Curtin--This text refers to the nnnnHardcovernedition.nnFrom Publishers WeeklynNasar has written a notable biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash (b. 1928), a founder of game theory, a RAND Cold War strategist and winner of a 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. She charts his plunge into paranoid schizophrenia beginning at age 30 and his spontaneous recovery in the early 1990s after decades of torment. He attributes his remission to will power; he stopped taking antipsychotic drugs in 1970 but underwent a half-dozen involuntary hospitalizations. Born in West Virginia, the flamboyant mathematical wizard rubbed elbows at Princeton and MIT with Einstein, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. He compartmentalized his secret personal life, shows Nasar, hiding his homosexual affairs with colleagues from his mistress, a nurse who bore him a son out of wedlock, while he also courted Alicia Larde, an MIT physics student whom he married in 1957. Their son, John, born in 1959, became a mathematician and suffers from episodic schizophrenia. Alicia divorced Nash in 1963, but they began living together again as a couple around 1970. Today Nash, whose mathematical contributions span cosmology, geometry, computer architecture and international trade, devotes himself to caring for his son. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, is equally adept at probing the puzzle of schizophrenia and giving a nontechnical context for Nash's mathematical and scientific ideas. nCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the nnnnHardcovernedition.
Keywords: Biographies Memoirs General A Beautiful Mind Nasar Sylvia
Price: $15.00 |
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| Parkin, Molly: Moll: the Making of Molly Parkin
Book Number: 36137
Victor Gollancz 1993 8vo hardcover 272pp index, b/w illus. very good / very good d/w. SynopsisnMolly Parkin's background was poor. Her parents were ill-suited and fought constantly, and both later became alcoholics. Her father was alternately physically abusive and very affectionate, thereby setting up a pattern of highly-charged sexual violence that she sought in her future relationships with men. She studied fine art at college and painted throughout her first marriage. After years of violence and betrayals she left her husband, taking her two daughters, and found herself unable to paint - a block which it took her 20 years to overcome. Turning her talents to the fashion world, she became an arbiter of style at the height of the "Swinging Sixties", as fashion editor of "Nova", "Harper's" and "The Sunday Times". Her second marriage - to a younger man, the painter Patrick Hughes - took her down to Cornwall, where she wrote her best-selling comic-erotic novels. Outwardly it seemed she could do no wrong, but she was already drinking to excess and the marriage was failing. They moved to New York, staying at the notorious Chelsea Hotel and mixing with the famous and infamous, indulging in sex, drugs and drink. Just before she left for England to see her ailing mother, her husband tried to kill her, and back home - alone - she embarked on a career as a cabaret artiste, but the day she blacked out on stage in an alcoholic stupor was her lowest point. She contemplated suicide, but slowly fought back, seeking and eventually finding a spiritual centre to her life. This is Molly Parkin's autobiography.
Keywords: Biographies australian authors Memoirs Moll the Making of Molly Parkin Parkin Molly
Price: $15.00 |
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| Lord, Mary: Hal Porter: Man of many parts
Book Number: 36179
Milsons Point, NSW ; New York Random House Australia 1993 8vo hardcover 330pp index, b/w illus. very good / very good d/w.
Keywords: Literature Fiction World Literature British Hal Porter Man of many parts Lord Mary
Price: $15.00 |
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| Rowley, Hazel.: Christina Stead : a biography
Book Number: 36243
Port Melbourne Minerva Australia 1993 large 8vo softcover 646pp index, b/w illus. very good.
Keywords: Stead Christina 1902 1983 Biography Authors Australian 20th century Biography Women authors Australian 20th century Bi Christina Stead a biography Rowley Hazel
Price: $15.00 |
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| Green, Dorothy: Ulysses bound; Henry Handel Richardson and her fiction
Book Number: 36334
Canberra Australian National University Press 1973 8vo hardcover 582pp index, b/w illus. very good / good+ d/w with a few small tears.
Keywords: Literature Fiction World Literature British Ulysses bound Henry Handel Richardson and her fiction Green Dorothy
Price: $18.00 |
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| Mortimer, John Clifford: In character
Book Number: 36318
London Allen Lane 1983 8vo hardcover 206pp. very good, owner's anme on fep. / very good d/w. The novelist, scriptwriter, and creator of "Rumpole of the Bailey" chats with some of the interesting characters of our times.
Keywords: Biographies Memoirs In character Mortimer John Clifford
Price: $15.00 |
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| Slovo, Gillian: Every Secret Thing
Book Number: 36324
London Little, Brown 1997 8vo hardcover 282pp. very good+ / very good+ d/w. The New York Times Book Review, H. Jack Geigern... while it contributes many new domestic and political details of the lives of her parents, Every Secret Thing is mostly about Gillian herself--and what it means to be the child of parents totally committed to a cause at whatever cost in danger, imprisonment, exile and family disruption.
Keywords: Biographies Memoirs General Every Secret Thing Slovo Gillian
Price: $15.00 |
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