Selvbiografier

The classic biography of Debs, one of the most important thinkers and activists in US.

The full, definitive life stories of ice-skating legends Torvill & Dean

Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B B King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, this work offers a portrait of this great guitarist.

In Britannia's Daughters, bestselling novelist Joanna Trollope examines the contribution of women in building and sustaining the British Empire. They people this book as they peopled the Empire - their astonishing courage and endurance, their remarkable personal stories vividly and enthrallingly recaptured.

Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. This is a biography of Andrew Carnegie who is one of the America's famous and successful businessmen and philanthropists.

Harvey Cushing was the leading figure in the creation of modern neurosurgery. This biography traces his medical school education; his hospital-based surgical career; and his career as a battlefield surgeon during World War I. He has an enduring place in the field of medicine and his name has become part of medical lexicography.

Michael Powell lived intimately, and abundantly, with the movies - entering the business at the end of the silent era, growing up in the industry, becoming one of Britain's most respected and influential directors.

In this life of the master diplomat, David Lawday follows Talleyrand's remarkable career through the most turbulent age Europe has known and explores - for the first time - in intimate detail his extraordinarily perverse relationship with Napoleon.

Winston and Clementine Churchill wrote to each other constantly throughout the 57 years of their life together. Written solely for each others eyes, their letters serve as a revealing portrait of their characters and their relationship, and as a unique political and social history, as international affairs were rarely absent from their thoughts.

A passionate, critically incisive biography of one of the most influential rappers of all time, Tupac Shakur, and how he came to dominate hip-hop in the 1990s

The SUNDAY TIMES number 1 bestseller -- the extraordinary life story of the greatest footballer ever to play the game.

"e;The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied."e; Soren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "e;Christendom."e; Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancee Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come.

In the Shadow of the Bomb narrates how two charismatic, exceptionally talented physicists--J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans A. Bethe--came to terms with the nuclear weapons they helped to create. In 1945, the United States dropped the bomb, and physicists were forced to contemplate disquieting questions about their roles and responsibilities. When the Cold War followed, they were confronted with political demands for their loyalty and McCarthyism's threats to academic freedom. By examining how Oppenheimer and Bethe--two men with similar backgrounds but divergent aspirations and characters--struggled with these moral dilemmas, one of our foremost historians of physics tells the story of modern physics, the development of atomic weapons, and the Cold War. Oppenheimer and Bethe led parallel lives. Both received liberal educations that emphasized moral as well as intellectual growth. Both were outstanding theoreticians who worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Both advised the government on nuclear issues, and both resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb. Both were, in their youth, sympathetic to liberal causes, and both were later called to defend the United States against Soviet communism and colleagues against anti-Communist crusaders. Finally, both prized scientific community as a salve to the apparent failure of Enlightenment values. Yet, their responses to the use of the atom bomb, the testing of the hydrogen bomb, and the treachery of domestic politics differed markedly. Bethe, who drew confidence from scientific achievement and integration into the physics community, preserved a deep integrity. By accepting a modest role, he continued to influence policy and contributed to the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. In contrast, Oppenheimer first embodied a new scientific persona--the scientist who creates knowledge and technology affecting all humanity and boldly addresses their impact--and then could not carry its burden. His desire to retain insider status, combined with his isolation from creative work and collegial scientific community, led him to compromise principles and, ironically, to lose prestige and fall victim to other insiders. Schweber draws on his vast knowledge of science and its history--in addition to his unique access to the personalities involved--to tell a tale of two men that will enthrall readers interested in science, history, and the lives and minds of great thinkers.

* A side-splitting story of growing up different in the Old South.

Soon to be a major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie PittUntil the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official.

The fascinating recollections of one of the most controversial scientists of the nuclear age

Shows how the author faces his growing alienation from the game he was born into, as he revisits key periods in his father's career to build up a picture of his football life and through him a whole era. This book recaptures a lost world and the way it changed, blending the personal and the historical into a soccer story.

The classic biography which explores the shocking drama of Kurt Cobain's troubled life

"Arnold Rothstein (1882--1928) was described in the newspapers of the 1920s as "a sportsman," "a gambler," and "the man who fixed the 1919 World Series." But he was much more than that. A bootlegger and"

Written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, Hernan Cortes's letters provide a narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525. The two introductions set the letters in context.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), one of the original thinkers of the nineteenth century, wrote on religious, psychological, and literary themes. This book shows how Kierkegaard developed his views in emphatic opposition to prevailing opinions. It provides an introduction by showing how Kiekegaard has influenced contemporary thought.

From his emergence in the 1950s - when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeared in the West Coast and became, seemingly overnight, the prince of 'cool' jazz - until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth.

'The first of all soldier books in the world...' Conan Doyle

The publication of Feel: Robbie Williams by Chris Heath in September 2004 caused shockwaves of controversy and delight. Written by Chris Heath, who spent nearly two years working with Robbie on this book, every word is imbued with Robbie's humour, charisma, talent, memories and complexity.

During the author's travels, he meets Menalcas, a caricature of Oscar Wilde, who relates his fantastic life story. But for all his brilliance, Menalcas is only Gide's yesterday self, a discarded wraith who leaves Gide free to stop exalting the ego and embrace bodily and spiritual joy.

At the age of sixteen, Andy Cave followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps and became a miner - one of the last recruits into a dying world. Every day he would descend 3,000 feet into Grimethorpe pit. But at weekends Andy escaped from the pithead to a very different world - testing his nerve on the cliffs and mountains around Britain.

Comic riffs and diatribes on the America of G.W. Bush from the author of Slaughterhouse 5

Through Adam Von Trott, for whom she worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, she became involved in the Resistance and the diaries vividly describe her part in the drama of July 1944 and its appalling aftermath.

That Gad Beck, a gay Jew in the Berlin of Nazi Germany, lived through the Holocaust at all is amazing. His determination to keep loving, living and believing in every human possibility - even in the face of the unthinkably monstrous - makes this quite a different story of the Holocaust.

A magnificent, harrowing testimony to the voiceless victims of North Korea.